The good thing, though, is that in seeking a peaceful resolution to this perennial conflict, the post-1967 Arab-Israeli War conversation became broader. For ethical and legal reasons, the international community has reemphasized the “two-state solution” as a proposal to permanently end the Arab-Israeli conflict. This proposal is to be based on Israel’s compliance to Resolution 242, which calls for the unconditional territorial withdrawal from the occupied territories by Israel after the Six-Day War. To be sure, the early period of this conversation was reportedly frustrated by another military campaign under the supreme command of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, in their attempt to reclaim Sinai Peninsula/Gaza Strip and Golan Height, respectively, from Israeli military occupation. Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the “Day of Atonement” on October 6, 1973, which marked the Fourth Arab-Israeli War that is commonly known as the “Yom Kippur War.” The War lasted for 20 days after mounting pressure from international community, and a UN adopted Resolution 338 that seemingly ensured a ceasefire by both sides. In view of this pressure from the international community, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel formally signed a ceasefire agreement with Egypt on November 11, 1973, and another with Syria on May 31, 1974.
The post-war conversion was henceforth marred by series of conspiracy theories of espionage operations and betrayal of national interest among these warring sides. In fact, this political anachronism that became associated with war and peace in Middle East was thus elaborated in the identification of Ashraf Marwan, who was the political and security advisor to the late President Anwar Sadat, as a suspected double agent for Egypt and Israel. Some analysts perceived Marwan as spying for Israel, precisely on the imminent attack in the 1970s by Egyptian Forces. On the other hand, Israeli intelligence officers accused him of misinforming them on the planned day of the attack. In a mysterious circumstance, Marwan was found dead in the lawn of his London apartment on June 27, 2007. In addition, eight years after Yom Kippur War, President Anwar Sadat, who has been described as “the hero of war and peace,” was assassinated during the annual victory parade in Cairo on October 6, 1981 by renegade Egyptian Islamists. The Islamist movement in Egypt had felt President Sadat betrayed Arab interest against Israeli occupation in the Middle East by participating in the March 26, 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty in Camp David, US. On Israeli side, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was also assassinated on November 4, 1995 by Yigal Amir, a Jewish ultra-nationalist extremist who confessed to killing Rabin for ratifying the 1993 “Oslo Peace Accord” in Norway. The Oslo Peace Accord necessitates the total implementation of the 1993 Washington “Declaration of Principle,” which recognizes Palestinian autonomous government as important for negotiating side by side peaceful coexistence of both Israelis and Palestinians. Inadvertently, mutual misunderstandings and disappointments, frustrations, anguish, and catastrophic loss of lives have thus trailed the history of peace making in Middle East, specifically between the Arabs and the Israelis, which have been termed as “Cold Peace” by Fareed Zakaria of Cable News Network (CNN).
So, honestly, the conversation for accomplishing a permanent solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict continues unabated. However, this conversation has undoubtedly been affected by inadequate information about the true state of things in Israel and the OPT. This is especially for some of us who are heavy consumers of news, who feel that information about the suppression of vulnerable Palestinians are heavily censored by Western news media for a combination of political and monetary reasons that seem to revolve around a very small number of people with great wealth and power. Mainly, this concern has to do with indirectly putting tight controls on everything that has to do with Palestinians in Israel and the OPT, by surreptitiously using maximum force to reenact the Jewish evolution in the Middle-East since 3,500 years ago, as explicated by Israelis crossing the threshold to apartheid and persecution of Palestinians.
For instance, an investigative article that was published by Human Right Watch (HRW) on April 27, 2021, entitled “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” states that “for the past 54 years, Israeli authorities have facilitated the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the OPT and granted them a superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory when it comes to civil rights, access to land, and freedom to move, build, and confer residency rights to close relatives. While Palestinians have a limited degree of self-rule in parts of the OPT, Israel retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, which in turn dictates such matters as legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards.” This, in practical term, means that Israeli authorities have tended towards apartheid as a crime against humanity under the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This also means that the Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have not been invoked by the international political system to evaluate Israeli criminality against humanity in the OPT, as a first step to enforcing the long-awaited “two-state solution” in resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict.
By the way, the conflict in May 2021 has been interpreted by some Middle East analysts as a resistance to Israeli authorities to Judaize more Palestinian communities; strengthen its institutional discrimination against the Palestinian Bedouins; stimulate restrictive franchise against Palestinians who live outside the borders of Israel as they existed from 1948 to June 1967; harden the enforcement of sea, land and air blockade that stands in the way of providing essential and humanitarian services for Palestinian refugees; intensify the frequent imprisonment of Palestinian minors for throwing stones at Israeli police; disregard the mental anguish suffered by millions of displaced Palestinians in refugee camps; and to consistently maintain Israeli violation of rule of international morality and humanitarian laws. Indeed, this Judaization policy by Israeli government is what Haidar Eid, who wrote on Al Jazeera online article, entitled “Gaza 2021: An Apartheid Dejávù,” described as Israel’s brutal illegal occupation, which has largely been ignored by Western leaders, “despite all the evidence, they reject recognizing that this is an occupation, launched by a settler-colonial power that seeks to ethnically cleanse an entire indigenous population in order to solidify and legitimize its colony.”
Moreover, the concern over Israel’s 73 years of imposition of colonial system of power over Palestinians, sincerely, requires global attention. This concern has also been expressed in what is largely criminal about the long history of Israeli military occupation in the OPT, and the ever-deepening grip over Palestinian life by Israeli authorities, such as the restrictions by Israeli police officers, who prevented several Palestinians from gathering on steps outside Jerusalem¯an unofficial tradition that is practiced by Palestinian Muslims after evening prayers during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which included attack on Al-Aqsa Mosque. These continued violations of the rights of Palestinians have, in turn, resulted in radical approach to Palestinian liberation, which has, so far, in every respect, being the hallmark of Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation in Palestinian territory.
But, even more, it is important to also identify the concern expressed by other Middle East analysts over the behaviour of the international political system in tolerating the ongoing systematic oppression and suppression of Palestinians. Most provocative, perhaps, is the 2018 declaration of “Jewish settlement” in Israeli Parliament (i.e. the Knesset) as Israel’s national value, which further shows the reality of Israeli “iron curtain” in the OPT. Some analysts have also questioned Israel’s separation barriers in the OPT, such as the barrier that entirely encircles more than 55,000 Palestinians in the city of Qalqilya in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. On the contrary, many pro-Israeli groups have also expressed concern over the ever growing anti-Israel standard among several uncompromising Arabs¯the constant proclamation of the destruction of the sovereign state of Israel, which has, significantly, been demonstrated by several guerrilla attacks by the armed wings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. This growing anti-Israel standard among these organized Arab groups has tended to unsettle the leadership of Israel and its sympathizers over Israeli presence and security in the region.
Meanwhile, violations of the rights of Palestinians are not only limited to the Israeli government, as local and international rights groups have also identified serious human rights abuses committed against Palestinians by both Hamas-authority in Gaza and Fatah-dominated authority in West Bank. These two competing authorities in Gaza and West Bank have long been involved in arbitrary arrests of political opponents, tortured detainees, clamped down on freedom of expression and assembly, and violate the process rights enshrined in Palestinian law. Some analysts see this fragmentation of the Palestinian population as deliberately created by the separation policy between Gaza and West Bank, including the restriction of movement from the occupied East Jerusalem to other parts of the OPT by Israeli “realpolitik” to systematically weaken resistance to Israeli military occupation in the region. Nonetheless, Hamas and Fatah have both committed human rights abuses on leaders, activists and supporters of either sides, with failure of these two Palestinian authorities to hold any of their accused security members and commanders accountable for right abuses and violations.
If these accusations and counter-accusations of the violations of the rights of Palestinians become the basis for seeking a peaceful resolution for this perennial Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, conversation on “two-state solution,” if so desired by all parties, should be given a renewed attention. With a disparate ideological coalition government that was newly formed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in July, 2021 in Israel, one wonders if there could be a better plan for peace.
- Sule is a Middle East diplomacy analyst and PhD Student, Dept. of Public Administration, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
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