A few weeks ago, a very important conference took place in London. It was organised by the NGO Middle East Monitor and focused on Latin America's engagement with the cause of Palestine. The most striking feature of the conference was the ease with which several speakers from the continent spoke of Palestine, since they were totally liberated from the inhibitions that obfuscate the discourse on the issue in the West. The most notable inhibition absent from their straightforward support for the human and civil rights of the Palestinians was the fear of being accused of anti-Semitism. Politicians and academics from South and Central America supported these rights as the obvious position of anyone with a modicum of decency and humanity. They were not walking on eggshells, as their Western counterparts would do, when criticising the criminal policies of Israel on the ground. This openness indicates how urgent it is to expand the solidarity movement with the Palestinians beyond the boundaries of the West. A guilt-free basis for discussing Palestine can also be found in South Africa and Southeast Asia. A debate on Israel in these regions cannot be stifle or silenced by intimidating allegations of anti-Semitism. This need to expand the boundaries is important for two additional reasons. It can create an alternative to the failed and destructive notion of the Pax Americana, one that would suit not only Palestine but also the rest of the Arab world. Once away from Washington, the discussion on peace would extend beyond the agenda imposed by the Pax Americana on the people who live in Israel and Palestine and those engaged with their future. Several assumptions feed the American-led conversation on Palestine, none of them related to justice and reconciliation. On the contrary, the powers that be regard these two concepts as anathema to a successful peace process. The first assumption is that the conflict in Palestine began in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip; hence, the peace process involves a discussion about the fate of these two areas only and excludes any other issues such as the right of the refugees to return. The second assumption is that these territories had to be partitioned in order to satisfy Israel's security worries. This assumption is associated with the insistence that if you want to settle a conflict only the interests of the stronger side matter and peace mediation means forcing the weaker party to accept the dictate of the stronger one. This was the guiding logic of the Norwegian mediators of the Oslo Agreement, as they recently admitted. The final assumption is didactic. If the Palestinians reject a “generous” Israeli offer, the next one will justifiably be less generous. The reason for offering less on every curve of this journey to nowhere is not only vindictive, however. With each passing year, Israel creates facts on the ground that force mediators to shrink the future Palestinian state further, both territorially and in its nature. The proposals humiliate and offend even the most collaborative Palestinian leaders who have been willing to go very far indeed in order to end the Israeli occupation. Consequently, even the Palestinian Authority finds it has to admit that the Palestine for which it requests international recognition nowadays is in practice a small Bantustan located in parts of the West Bank. As long as the peace effort is directed from the West and led by the United States these are the basic assumptions according to which everyone operates: the Israeli peace camp, the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government. These assumptions and the process they have produced have fed successful careers and enriched quite a large number of individuals, both locally and abroad. The dividends have been such that even when it was clear that the process had not produced a peaceful reality, it was nonetheless kept alive by these stakeholders and vested interests. The reality on the ground in 2015 clearly shows the outcome of these assumptions. Israel is now slowly but steadily annexing the West Bank, besieging Gaza to death — it will be uninhabitable in a few years, according to a new UN report — and strangling the Palestinian minority in Israel through land expropriations, house demolitions and legislation. The inertia of politics, the timidity of the Western political elites and the horrific events in Syria and Iraq (and their impact on Europe) mean that it will be a while before the West formulates a new approach towards Palestine. Without such a reformulation, however, there is acute existential danger for the Palestinians, wherever they are. Outside the West, there is no such inertia, nor is there a legacy that can blind politicians to the possibility that values such as justice and reconciliation should be an integral part of the peace process. The changing international scene should enable us to elicit support for a new way of thinking about Palestine outside the West. We should be able to talk freely in South America and South Africa about Zionism as colonialism and of Palestinian resistance as being anti-colonialist without immediately being branded as anti-Semites. Moreover, describing Israeli policies inside Israel as apartheid policies, and as ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocidal in the Gaza Strip, will rightly be understood outside the West as stemming from a deep concern for human rights, and not a sinister anti-Semitic ploy. Exceptionalism will not work as a shield for Israeli impunity on the ground. There is one additional advantage that comes from expanding the engagement with Palestine beyond the West. The main lesson from the less appealing aspects of post-apartheid South Africa is the need to tie socio-economic reforms to political change. It is impossible to dissociate the Pax Americana in Palestine from the neoliberal culture of the West. Since 1993, Western donors have given $23 billion to sustain the false peace process, money that has created a worse economic and social reality than the one prevailing before it began. Had they associated social justice with human rights in Israel and Palestine, they could have, with one tenth of the sum, created a thriving democratic and just state instead of the apartheid regime now in power. The lessons from South Africa and the lively and important debate in South and Central America on social justice and the agenda of human and social rights are new and necessary angles for engaging with Palestine. Zionism cannot be defeated by the old notions of nationalism alone, and the West is no longer the key to change. Instead, there is a need for a wider geographical, conceptual and ideological alliance. It is time to seek new allies and to work closely together with them for a free Palestine. The writer is a Palestinian historian and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK.
