Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [3]
I have been highly critical at times of Israel’s behavior and intransigence, but it goes without saying that there is plenty of blame to go around on both sides for the failure of the peace process. Arabs and Israelis need to recognize each other’s respective needs. A two-state solution is predicated on the recognition by Israelis of the rights of the Palestinians to freedom and statehood and the recognition by Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim world of Israel’s right to security. We have no choice but to live together. Both sides have a moral responsibility to strive for peace. They also have a very compelling pragmatic imperative to do so: the alternative is more conflict and violence.
Geography, history, and international law all dictate that Jordan should be involved in the process of finding a solution to the conflict. We are home to over 1.9 million Palestinian refugees, the most of any country, and have friendly relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors and the United States. We are also one of only two Arab countries to have a peace treaty with Israel.
Resolution of the Palestinian conflict is the key to normalizing relations between Israel and the entire Muslim world. My father, in the last years of his reign, developed a proposal offering Israel a comprehensive peace with all twenty-two Arab countries in return for full Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Unfortunately, his proposal did not gain momentum, and it stalled with his death. On becoming king, I revived my father’s plan and had our government discuss it with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Eventually the Saudis developed the idea and took it one step further, when Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud presented it to the Arab League Summit in Beirut in 2002. The summit collectively adopted the Saudi proposal, which came to be known as the Arab Peace Initiative.
The initiative called for full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied since 1967, a negotiated settlement of the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. In return, all twenty-two Arab countries said they would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region.” In addition, they stated, they would “establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.” I was surprised that the Israelis, and even some members of the American administration, shot down the initiative out of hand. My later discussions with many of them showed that they had not even read it. On the issues of refugees, for example, the initiative proposed “the achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 194.” The operative words here are “agreed upon”; when I would mention that to the Israelis, they would say “oh,” and some would admit they had never bothered to look at the text. The Arab Peace Initiative was subsequently approved by all fifty-seven member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Unfortunately, Israel never took it seriously and never acknowledged it for the unprecedented opportunity it represented. We are still stuck in the old ways, negotiating lower-priority issues and putting off the difficult decisions. Israel seems to feel it has all the time in the world. But its delays, reversals, and stalling tactics have come at a price.
The events of the last eleven