Focus on the peace process

Awakened Arabs need the Palestinians to create a model state

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Focus on the peace process — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11 April 2012 — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · 11 April 2012

Transcribed from the clipping

There is so much going on in the Middle East today, it's impossible to capture it with one opinion. So here are two for the price of one. Opinion One: Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, reported the other day that the imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti “released an unusual statement from his cell.

He called on his people to start a popular uprising against Israel, to stop negotiations and security coordination and to boycott [Israel]. Barghouti recommended that his people choose nonviolent opposition.”

Barghouti, as Haaretz notes, “is the most authentic leader Fatah has produced, and he can lead his people to an agreement. … If Israel had wanted an agreement with the Palestinians it would have released him from prison by now.” I had gotten to know Barghouti before his five life sentences for involvement in killing Israelis.

His call for nonviolent resistance is noteworthy and the latest in a series of appeals to and by Palestinians — coming from all over — to summon their own “Arab Awakening,” but do it nonviolently, with civil disobedience or boycotts of Israel, Israeli settlements or Israeli products.

I can certainly see the efficacy of nonviolent resistance by Palestinians to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — on one condition: They accompany any actions they take with a detailed map of the final two-state settlement they are seeking. Just calling for “an end to occupation” won't cut it.

Palestinians need to accompany every boycott, hunger strike or rock thrown at an Israeli with a map delineating how, for peace, they would accept getting back 95 percent of the West Bank and all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and would swap the other 5 percent for land inside pre-1967 Israel.

Such an arrangement would allow some 75 percent of the Israeli settlers to remain in the West Bank, while still giving Palestinians 100 percent of the land back.

By Palestinians engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience in the West Bank with one hand and carrying a map of a reasonable two-state settlement in the other, they will be adopting the only strategy that will end the Israeli occupation: Making Israelis feel morally insecure but strategically secure.

The Iron Law of the peace process is that whoever makes the Israeli silent majority feel morally insecure about occupation but strategically secure in Israel wins.

Context added by this archive

Syndicated column. The tagline reads: Thomas L. Friedman is a syndicated columnist for The New York Times.

Cite this item

"Focus on the peace process," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 11 April 2012. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2012-008. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2012-008