[Peace-discuss] Moral vs. pragmatic justifications for peace

[David Green]

While I'm no fan of Fatah apparatchiks, the following conclusion to a longer article by a Palestinian "negotiator" perhaps better articulates what I tried to express on Air AWARE Tuesday. With all of the emphasis on truth, apology, compensation, and reconciliation that has been engendered most notably by the Holocaust and South African aparthied, these principles are applied only selectively in peacemaking. 
   
  Recent NYT comments by Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg, and others in the mainstream media take the pragmatic approach that a two-state solution (such as it is) is necessary for the perpetuation of a Jewish state, not for justice and Palestinian rights, which are grudgingly acknowledged if at all. In fact, Friedman argues that the rationale for peace in Israel-Palestine is a "strong America," while Goldberg argues that a two-state solution is needed to combat the "existential threat from within" of a growing population of Palestinian citizens of Israel. In other words, peace is necessary to promote religious and racial purity (so flickers the light among nations). Insofar as motives limit actions, a just peace will not be promoted, and no settlement will be achieved. Naturally, the Palestinians will be blamed.
   
  DG
   
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  http://www.palestin e-pmc.com/ details.asp? cat=1&id= 1769

"Peace could not hang on forever and it could not anymore accept the idea of the Israeli evasion and prevarication. There is no doubt that finishing off that spirit of violence cannot be done without adhering to peace itself as the principle and the acceptance by each side of the other. Similarly negotiations cannot go on forever vis-à-vis a dead end.

The horrible alternative option could not but be the total collapse of the dreams of coexistence and the resumption of the bloody struggle, which kills both the human spirit as well as the spirit of civilization and brings back the ideology and practice of ethnic cleansing to be the eternal shame of its perpetrators at all times.

Agreement on the historic narrative of what happened in 1948, the adoption of the culture of confession by those who committed the massacres, to apologize for what happened, and to uphold the responsibility for all that happened seems a necessary first step that would pave the way to achieve a just and lasting peace, which makes room for all on the land."

* This article was first published in Arabic by the Jerusalem-based Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, on May 15, 2008.

** Ahmad Qurei is the chief Palestinian negotiator, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and a member of the Central Committee of Fatah.

       
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