As long ago as 1998 the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said reminded the world that acting as if Palestinians were equally responsible with Israelis for the continuing struggle of the two peoples was not only misleading but also exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of the true reality facing the two peoples. “The major task of the American or Palestinian intellectual of the left is to reveal the disparity between the so-called two sides, which appears to be in perfect balance, but are not in fact. To reveal that this is an oppressed and an oppressor, a victim and a victimiser, and unless we recognise that, we're nowhere,” he said. I would rephrase Said's statement by substituting “any engaged citizen and morally sensitive intellectual” for his “American or Palestinian intellectual of the left.” We do not need to be on the left to expose the cruel hypocrisy of suppressing gross disparities of circumstances, or, more to the point, blocking out the multiple diplomatic, military, material and psychological advantages enjoyed by Israel as compared to Palestine. “It's elementary, my dear Watson,” as Sherlock Holmes so often exclaimed, or at least it should be. Unfortunately, a principal instrument of the mind-numbing diplomacy of the United States in the Middle East is precisely aimed at avoiding any acknowledgement of the disparity that is at the core of the encounter. As a result, the American public is confused as to what it is reasonable to expect from the two sides, and how to interpret the failure of negotiations to get anywhere time and again. This failure is far from neutral. It is rather the disparity that has done the most damage to peace prospects ever since 1967. This pattern of delay has kept the Palestinians in bondage while allowing the Israelis to build and create armed communities on occupied Palestinian land that was supposedly put aside for the future Palestinian state. Beyond this appeal to intellectuals, Said's message should be understood by everyone everywhere and not just by Americans and Israelis, although these are the two populations most responsible for the prolonged failure to produce a peace based on justice. Elsewhere, except possibly in parts of western Europe, such a discourse as to the shared responsibility for the ongoing struggle is not so relevant because the ugly forms of Israeli exploitation of the Palestinian ordeal have become increasingly transparent in recent years. Only in America and Canada have the combined manipulations of hasbara and the Israel lobby kept the public from sensing the extremities of Palestinian suffering. For decades the Europeans gave Israel the benefit of the doubt, partly reflecting empathy for the Jewish people as victims of the Holocaust, without giving much attention to the attendant displacement of the indigenous Arab population in Palestine. Such an outlook, although still influential at governmental level, loses its tenability with each passing year. Beyond this, there are increasing expressions of grassroots solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by most peoples in the world. It is a misfortune of the Palestinians that most political leaders in the world are rarely moved to act to overcome injustice and are far more responsive to hegemonic structures that control world politics and their perception of narrowly conceived national interests. This pattern has become most vividly apparent in the Arab world where the people scream when Israel periodically launches its attacks on Gazan civilian society while their governments smile quietly or avert their eyes as the bombs drop and the hospitals fill up. In Israel, the argument as to balance also has little resonance as Israelis, if they pause to wonder at all, tend to blame the Palestinians for failing to accept past Israeli conflict-resolving initiatives made over the years. Israelis mostly believe that the proposals made by former prime minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon's “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 demonstrated Tel Aviv's good faith. Even the present prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, at least when he is not seeking reelection and is speaking for the benefit of an American audience, disingenuously claims Israel's continuing dedication to a peace process based on seeking a two-state solution. He explains the diplomatic gridlock by contending that Israel lacks a Palestinian partner in the search for peace, and never deigns to mention the settlement archipelago on the West Bank as an obstacle. Looked at objectively and by assessing behaviour and apparent motivation, it is the Palestinians that have no partner for genuine peace negotiations, and they should have stopped long ago acting as if Israel were such a partner. That is, Israel inverts Said's disparity, contending that the public should point the finger of blame at Palestine, not Israel. Of course, this is hasbara in its purest form. Israel has never made a peace proposal that offered the Palestinians a solution based on national and sovereign equality and was sensitive to Palestinian rights under international law. As for Sharon's purported disengagement from Gaza, it was justified at the time in Israel as a way to deflect international pressures building to pursue a diplomatic solution and was managed as a withdrawal that did not loosen the grip of effective control, leaving Gaza as more vulnerable than it was when Israeli soldiers patrolled its streets. Since 2005, the people of Gaza have suffered far more from Israel's military domination than in all the years following 1967 when the occupation commenced, and it should be clear that this outcome has not been a reaction to Hamas and rockets. Hamas has repeatedly sought and upheld ceasefires that Israel has consistently violated, and it has offered long-term arrangements for peaceful coexistence that Israel and the United States have refused even to acknowledge. UNEQUAL EQUIVALENCE: Where the equivalence argument is most influential is with the Obama administration and among liberal Zionists, including such NGOs as J Street and Peace Now that are critical of Israel for blocking progress toward a two-state solution. It is a blindfold that obscures the structural reality of the relationship between the two sides and believes that were Israel to make some small adjustments in its occupation policy, especially in relation to the settlements, and were the Palestinians to do the same with respect to the refugees and accepting Israel as a Jewish state, then a negotiated peace would follow as naturally as day follows night. In effect, Israel is expected to curtail unlawful settlement activity in exchange for Palestine suspending its rights under international law and affecting the situation of several million Palestinian refugees. As is widely known, Jews from anywhere in the world have an unconditional right to immigrate to Israel, whereas Palestinians living abroad with deep roots in the country are almost totally banished from Israel, including if their purpose is to resume residence in order to live with close family members. In Ramallah in March 2013, speaking to a Palestinian gathering, US President Barack Obama did forcefully say that “the Palestinians deserve an end to occupation and the daily indignities that come with it” and that this will require “a state of their own.” Obama even acknowledged “that the status quo isn't really a status quo, because the situation on the ground continues to evolve in a direction that makes it harder to reach a two-state solution.” Such a display of circumlocution (“continues to evolve in a direction”), made in order to avoid mentioning Israel's continuous encroachment on the land set aside by the international consensus, is for a discerning reader all one needs to know. The unwillingness to challenge Israel's unlawful and obstructive behaviour was underscored by Obama's reassurances, given to a separate Israeli audience in Jerusalem on the same day that he spoke guardedly to the Palestinians, with such phrases as “America's unwavering commitment,” “unbreakable bonds,” “our alliance is eternal, it is forever,” “unshakeable support,” and “your greatest friend.” No such language of reassurance was offered to the Palestinians. His two speeches left no doubt that Israel retained the upper hand and could continue to rest easy with the status quo of simmering conflict that had worked so long in its favour. US Secretary of State Secretary John Kerry ploughs the same field, calling on both sides to make “painful concessions.” Obama, in his Jerusalem speech, illustrated what this concretely might mean, assuming that the two sides were equally called upon to act if peace were to be achieved. The Palestinians were called upon to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, while Israel was politely reminded in language so vague as to be irrelevant that “Israelis must recognise that settlement activity is counterproductive.” To ask the Palestinians to recognise Israel is to affirm as legitimate the discriminatory regime under which the 20 per cent Palestinian minority lives, while asking the Israelis to recognise that the counterproductive character of settlement expansion is to misunderstand Israeli intentions. If the goal is to avoid the establishment of a Palestinian state, then being “counterproductive” is exactly the result being sought. Asking the Palestinians to abridge their rights, while requesting Israel to admit that its settlement activity is not helping the diplomatic process, appeals to Israeli self-interest and avoids a demand to cease and reverse an unlawful, and likely criminal, activity. The false equivalence is a metaphor for the deformed framework of diplomacy that has unfolded largely as a result of the United States being accepted as a presiding intermediary, a role that it is totally unsuited to play. This lack of qualification is admitted by its own frequent declarations of a high-profile strategic and ideological partnership with Israel, not to mention the interference of a domestic Israeli lobby that controls the US Congress and shapes the media allocation of blame and praise in relation to the conflict. Kerry expresses the same kind of one-sidedness in the guise of fairness when he calls on the parties to make compromises. “We seek reasonable compromises on tough complicated, emotional, and symbolic issues. I think reasonable compromises have to be a keystone of all of this effort,” he has said. But what kind of compromises are the Palestinians supposed to make, given that they are already confined to less and less of the 22 per cent of the British Mandate territory of Palestine and since 1988 have sought no greater proportion of the land? Kerry's approach overlooks, as well, the defiant refusal of Israel to act in good faith in relation to the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 that called upon Israel to withdraw without claiming territory through use of force or by taking advantage of being the occupying power. In the interim, while being unwilling to do anything concrete to implement its view of decades that Israeli settlement activity is “counterproductive,” the United States proclaims and proves its readiness to oppose any Palestinian attempt to gain access to the UN to express its grievances, an effort which Obama has denigrated as “unilateral attempts to bypass negotiations through the UN.” WAYS FORWARD: The Palestinian Authority has repeatedly made clear that it favours a resumption of direct negotiations with Israel, despite being at a great disadvantage within such a framework, and it insists persuasively that there is no inconsistency between its seeking greater participation in international institutions and its continued readiness to work toward a diplomatic solution of the conflict. If Israel and the United States were sincerely dedicated to a sustainable peace, they would encourage this Palestinian turn away from violent resistance, and the Palestinians' increased effort to push their cause by persuasion rather than missiles and to advance their cause by gaining respectability through joining institutions and adhering to lawmaking treaties instead of being confined in a prolonged lockdown euphemistically disguised as occupation. In the end, we cannot see the situation for what it is without reverting to Said's insistence that the relation between oppressor and oppressed is a paramount precondition for sustainable peace. Unless the structural distortion and illegitimacy is acknowledged, no viable political arrangement will be forthcoming. From this perspective, the Kerry emphasis on “reasonable compromise” is as mind-numbingly irrelevant as it would have been in seeking a peaceful end to racial struggle in apartheid South Africa by demanding that the ANC and Nelson Mandela become amenable to compromise with their racist overlords. Peace will come to Israel and Palestine, and be sustained, if and only if the oppressor becomes ready to dismantle its oppressive regime by withdrawing and not merely by disengaging Gaza-style. At present, such a readiness is not to be found on the Israeli side, and so long as this is so, direct negotiations and the periodic calls issued by Washington to resume direct talks have only one main effect — to free Israel to realise its ambitions to establish a Greater Israel while keeping the Palestinians in chains. This ambition has not yet been explicitly embraced by the Israeli leadership, although only those who refuse to notice what is happening on the ground can fail to notice this expansionist pattern. Israel's new coalition government, which is even more pro-settler than its predecessor, makes Israel's ambition to end the conflict by self-serving unilateral action less and less of a well-kept secret. The writer is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
