TheAltWorld The Olmert-Kidwa plan
Reviving normalisation in the guise of ‘peace’
We Palestinians have become accustomed to a recurring phenomenon: the emergence of joint so-called ‘peace initiatives’ authored by Palestinian and Israeli figures. They spread like wildfire, causing much confusion and delusion and deepening rifts within Palestinian ranks, and invariably appear at times when the occupation state is going through an existential crisis and the Palestinian resistance achieving successes on the ground.
The latest example of this phenomenon is the joint peace proposal signed by Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, and Nasser al-Kidwa, whose served for many years as the Palestinians Authority’s foreign minister and UN ambassador, and was on the Central Committee of the Fateh movement from which he was later expelled.
Before discussing the substance of this document, which was immediately welcomed by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borel and several Arab governments, it is worth recalling some of its predecessors, such as the Geneva Document issued in December 2003 by Yaser Abed-Rabbo, former rapporteur of the PLO Executive Committee, and Israeli ex-minister Yossi Beilin, with the tacit support of Mahmoud Abbas, architect of the Oslo Accords.
We must also not forget the various European, American, and international initiatives aimed at quelling the armed uprising that broke out in the West Bank after the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian Camp David talks hosted by US president Bill Clinton in 2000.
They ended up producing the Roadmap and the international Quartet (comprising the US, Russia, UN, and EU), which repeatedly promised that a Palestinian state would be established as soon as acts of armed resistance were halted. We all know how that ended up.
Now — after the failure of eleven months of US-sponsored talks to dupe the resistance in Gaza into a cease-fire on Israel’s terms, and with Netanyahu’s dreams of triumph shattered and armed insurrection spreading to the West Bank — the Olmert-Kidwa document materialises as a compromise solution to supposedly end the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war on Gaza.
There are many troubling things about this brief document, which was signed by Kidwa and Olmert on 17 July and has been widely circulated in Arabic and English. They include:
— To begin with, it subscribes to the two-state solution as the basis of any resolution of the conflict as ‘cover’ for other provisions.
— The return of refugees is deferred until a later stage: meaning buried forever. The same applies to the issue of settlements.
— 4.4% of the West Bank to be annexed by Israel as part of an exchange of territory that also provides for a corridor linking the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
— It endorses the annexation of all current West Bank settlements to the occupier state, meaning legitimation of their presence and their 850,000 settlers.
— It recognises Israel’s full control of West Jerusalem and all the Jewish settlements and neighbourhoods it established after the 1967 occupation, effectively swallowing up East Jerusalem too.
— The Palestinians are bound to address all Israeli security concerns through security cooperation to protect the occupation and its settlers.
— The establishment of a Trusteeship to run the Old City of Jerusalem and its holy places, to be composed of five states including Israel and Palestine and three others (Jordan is not explicitly named as one of them). There is no reference to how this squares with East Jerusalem being the capital of the anticipated Palestinian state.
— Creating a Council of Commissioners to administer Gaza after an Israel withdrawal composed solely of technocrats, with no place for Hamas in it.
— Formation of a Temporary Arab Security Presence (TASP) to coordinate with Israeli forces that will be mandated in particular to prevent attacks against Israel from Gaza.
— The stationing of a force along the Jordanian-Palestinian border, as in the case of the Philadelphi corridor, but an ‘international’ rather than an Israeli one to avoid being rejected by Jordan.
— Ending Hamas’ rule in Gaza for good, weakening and eliminating it politically and militarily, and excluding it from any future arrangements for the Strip (while requiring it to release all Israeli captives).
According to various sources, Kidwa gave a copy of the document to Josep Borel and asked him to promote it and discuss it with the Arab officials he meets during his current Middle East tour (Israeli refused to receive him), and also conveyed it to several Arab states.
One senior Palestinian source described it as “completely worthless… a mere diversionary trial balloon or even a bubble.” They recalled that when he was in office Olmert was a hardline Likudnik who committed war crimes against the Palestinians and killed thousands of people in his devastating 2006 war on Lebanon.
The document’s declared support for President Joe Biden’s plan for Gaza which Netanyahu rejected suggests the US stands behind it. It may even have authored it itself in whole or part in conjunction with Israel. But that does not bestow any legitimacy on it or improve its prospects of succeeding.
It amounts to an attempt to revive Arab-Israeli normalisation, divert attention from Israel’s setbacks on all fronts, and stoke internal Palestinian divisions. The Palestinian BDS movement was right to condemn it as a normalisation ploy and urge people to reject and thwart it.
It is an outrage to be talking now about peace and coexistence with an Israeli enemy that is waging a war of annihilation against the Palestinian people and has slaughtered more than 40,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children. This initiative serves to reward and exonerate the criminal occupier, wipe clean all its atrocities and massacres, and extricate it from its current multitude of crises — whether domestic, international, or on the battlefronts.
The two-state solution is a lie and deception. Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli Knesset have passed legislation prohibiting the establishment of a Palestinian state. The expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip legitimised by the Jewish Nation Law has begun, and the ‘alternative homeland’ is being readied in Jordan.
I join the BDS movement in opposing this plan. Any Arab or other state that supports or promotes it would be normalising with the occupation and colluding with it against the Palestinian people, their resistance, and their legitimate aspirations, above all to liberate their land and eject the occupiers.
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