Uncorking the bottled peace

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Editorial: By Jawed Naqvi, Copy Edited By Adam Rizvi, The India Observer, TIO: OF the many proposals made over the years to give this much or that much of occupied Palestine back to the Palestinians, two remain noteworthy. The 1981 Saudi-led Fahd Plan came at the height of the Cold War, but it actually masked a panic response by the West to Ayatollah Khomeini’s militant fulminations on Palestine. The Oslo Accords on the other hand were a post-Cold War offering by a victorious West layered with dubious intent.

Six days after the victory of the Iranian Revolution, Yasser Arafat was meeting Khomeini on Feb 18, 1979. “Iran and Imam Khomeini showed that our ummah will never give up. The Iranians broke the chains tied around the Palestinians. This great revolution of yours is the guarantee of our victory,” Arafat told journalists at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. The remarks made the Fez summit an urgent necessity.

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Arab opponents of the plan were led by the self-styled “steadfast coalition” comprising secular Libya, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen (at the time a Marxist state). Their leaders boycotted the summit, which explains how, as soon as the USSR collapsed, they would be overthrown one by one. Oslo experienced a similar fate but with a different set of triggers.

Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, fatefully endorsed the Oslo offer to return to the Arabs some of the territory Israel captured in 1967. It also backed the Palestinians’ right to return but only in dribs and drabs, to use a current expression. For accepting the plan, Rabin was assassinated. Even the semblance of a moth-eaten autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank for Arabs was anathema to the Zionist extremist who put two bullets through Rabin’s lungs at a large rally.

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The Fahd Plan presented possibly the most agreeable resolution of the conflict yet, but with a caveat.

Similarities between Rabin’s murder by a Zionist and the assassination of India’s Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindutva bigot deserve mention. Gandhi, a critic of Israeli eviction of Palestinians from their homes — the Nakba — had reluctantly endorsed the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. His killer pumped three bullets into Gandhi’s frail body at a prayer meeting in Delhi. Nathuram Godse was inspired and even possibly supported by V.D. Savarkar, founder of the racist Hindutva ideology.

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Likewise, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by an Arab-hating extremist who was widely believed to have been influenced by Benjamin Netanyahu’s violent opposition to Rabin’s peace moves. With Savarkar and Netanyahu nursing identical hatred of Muslims (and Christians, too), there should be no surprise then in seeing Hindutva and Zionism celebrating the gory bloodletting of their perceived rivals.

The Fahd Plan, so-called after the then crown prince of Saudi Arabia, pushed for the recognition of Israel by Arab states, advocating for the first time a two-state solution. In hindsight, that plan offered far more than any other proposal, except that there were Palestinians and other Arab leaders holding a different view. Leila Khaled, renowned as the woman hijacker who commandeered two planes, belonged to the Marxist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At 80, Ms Khaled remains opposed to Hamas’s quest for a religious state for Muslims in Palestine, while supporting its militant campaign against Israeli occupation. Leila’s comrades favoured a single multicultural state for Jews and Arabs, with equal rights for both.

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Considering the ongoing discourse, the Fahd Plan presented possibly the most agreeable resolution of the conflict yet, but with a caveat. With the Saudis pitchforked into the role of brokers once again, despite reservations from many among those directly involved in the conflict, the Fahd proposal deserves reiteration. The eight-point plan proposed: 1. Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied in 1967, including Arab Jerusalem. 2. Israeli settlements built on Arab land after 1967 to be dismantled, including those in Arab Jerusalem. 3. A guarantee of freedom of worship for all religions in the holy places. 4. An affirmation of the right of the Palestinian Arab people to return to their homes and compensation for those who do not wish to return. 5. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip to have a transitional period under the auspices of the UN for a period not exceeding several months. 6. An independent Palestinian state to be set up with Jerusalem as its capital. 7. All states (the sticky point about Israel) in the region should be able to live in peace in the region. 8. The UN or its member states to guarantee the carrying out of these provisions.

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History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, as one was reminded by veterans of the history faculty at JNU. Instead, it moves somewhat like a corkscrew along a tight spiral. The House of Saud has had a meandering journey from the days of Britain’s Col T.E. Lawrence to the era of America’s Donald Trump, though never straying from the tight spiral. Israel on its part may have its backers in Washington, D.C., but it is wary too of American patronage of Saudi Arabia.

History is smiling at the Saudis again, with suspense. They once led a punishing oil embargo against the West’s support for Israel. And now they are being wooed by a range of mutually jostling forces even as they financially shore up the dictatorship in Egypt to keep a lid on the Muslim Brotherhood. They are being sought by Israel and Iran as a foil to each other, one backed by the West, the other leaning on China and Russia.

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The Saudis are tantalizingly sitting on the fence of the BRICS club, and they are playing host to the most improbable talks in a long time between Russia and the US that could determine the future of Europe. They more than anyone else have the wherewithal as well as the need to uncork the bottle of peace for Palestine. That perhaps can thwart a fateful alliance between Iran and the Arab masses. With the Saudis, the world too is perched on a crucial bend of the spiral.

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Curated and Compiled by Humra Kidwai

First Published in Dawn

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