Myths, Rhetoric and Hidden Agendas:
A History of Failed Peace Processes between Palestinians and Israelis Dr Maria Holt ABSTRACT Why have all the peace initiatives since 1967 failed to bring any real and lasting peace to Palestinians and Israeli’s? The current dangerous and apparently hopeless stalemate has been reached due to various failures. Maria Holt takes a look at the deeper issues that have led to Middle East peace initiatives failing and the consequences of these failures for all those concerned and for future peace prospects. Dr Maria Holt is a lecturer in the Democracy and Islam programme at the University of Westminster. She was educated at the Universities of Toronto, Exeter and York. She completed her PhD in 2004. Her research areas include Palestinian refugee women in Lebanon; the impact of Islamic resistance movements on women in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Muslim communities in the UK; and political Islamist movements in the Middle East. Besides her academic research, Dr Holt has also worked for many years as a political lobbyist on Middle East issues.
Introduction
W
hen Israel invaded the Gaza Strip in December 2008, to many Palestinians watching aghast from afar or cowering in the rubble of their destroyed homes in Gaza, it felt like their situation had never been worse. Had the peace process been, in Abu Nimah’s words, an exercise in ‘chasing mirages’?1 In the 41 years since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began, there have been numerous attempts to make peace but, far from moving closer towards a just settlement of this long-running conflict, it now seemed, to Palestinians and Israelis alike, that an acceptable solution was unattainable. This raises the question of why all initiatives since 1967 to end the conflict have failed. Are there perhaps deeper, more complex reasons for the endless procession of failures? I would like to suggest, in this article, that there are reasons on both sides to account for the current dangerous and apparently hopeless stalemate and that the myths, rhetoric and hidden agendas of both need to be examined more closely. Middle East peace-making, as Siegman
notes, ‘has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms’2 and, in this article, by trying to understand the points of divergence between the competing narratives and their accompanying claims to justice, I will examine failed peace processes since the Six Day War of 1967. I will argue that, on the one hand, the unassailable moral position of the Palestinians as victims of dispossession in 1948 and violent occupation since 1967 has been undermined by an inept political and military leadership, the superior strength and rhetoric of their enemy and the reluctance of the international community to take a stand; and, on the other hand, the apparent unwillingness of Israel to compromise, preferring instead to impose solutions by force, both moral and military. Peace-making between 1967 and 1990 Before 1990, there was very little formal peace-making between Palestinians and Israelis. On the contrary, while Israel pursued a policy of negating Palestinian identity and thwarting national aspirations, the Palestinians sought to recover their land by military AQSA JOURNAL
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