In an op-ed for the Financial Times, Robin Shepherd says just about everything I’ve been saying about the prisoner’s document, but then points out something I didn’t:
But taking a broader view, what is in the document to be set before the Palestinian people on July 26 is far less worrying than what is left out. The point is this: nearly six decades since the Jewish leadership accepted the United Nations’ decision to establish two states, we are still dealing with a Palestinian leadership that will not offer its people a document for popular ratification that explicitly recognises Israel’s legitimate right to exist as a Jewish state. In the context of all that has gone before, “implicit” recognition is, at best, meaningless. At worst, it is yet another subterfuge along the lines of the famous letter sent by the Palestine Liberation Organisation to Yitzhak Rabin, the then Israeli prime minister, on September 9, 1993. In this letter, the PLO said it recognised the right of Israel to exist in peace and security – a promise whose emptiness was revealed by Yassir Arafat’s subsequent rejection of the Bill Clinton-brokered Camp David accords and the bloody intifada he launched after it.
Outside the region, it is perhaps understandable that many in Europe and the US have chosen not to delve too deeply into what Mr Abbas is, and is not, proposing. The referendum gets them out of a hole. It would allow the west to participate in a polite fiction, letting them restore aid to the Palestinians and thus regain some much sought after moral authority in the greater Middle East.
But inside the region, there is no substantive reason to doubt the assertion of Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, that, as far as peace prospects are concerned, the referendum is basically pointless. That conclusion is bolstered by the fact that, even as some polls show it would be passed by the Palestinian people, two other recent polls published by the Palestinian Wafa news agency’s website show more than 60 per cent of them opposed to the proposition that Hamas should recognise Israel in return for the resumption of foreign aid. In other words, most Palestinians will not even recognise Israel if they are paid to.
Of course, the FT put this in its op-ed page, a day after passing along the lies in a news article about the document.
But Shepherd is right. The world thinks it’s just fine that palestinians refuse to explicitly acknowledge Israel, and constantly ignore voices to the contrary. And now we learn that our own State Department knew that Arafat murdered American diplomats, and covered up that knowledge for decades.
I hold out little hope that anyone will see this document for what it is: An internal agreement that stops a potential civil war, while not recognizing Israel’s existent at all—neither implicitly nor explicitly.