I thank the Chairman for hosting me in this committee meeting and I thank members for their attendance. Many of us in the world today are wondering how best Middle East peace can be advanced, what are the current stumbling blocks and why we have not yet concluded a final peace there. I wish to try to address that question in the time available.
I identify four problems that have been hovering over Palestinian-Israeli-Arab contacts. If we address them we might be able to move things forward. There is great confusion about what is the source of the conflict between Israel and its Palestinian neighbours. The tendency has been to say this is territorial conflict and if the Palestinians get a state and Israel withdraws then we have more or less provided the basis for resolving the differences in the region. Unfortunately, I do not think that is the case. The situation is far more complicated. To illustrate my point I wish to share with the committee an observation about what happened in the Gaza Strip in 2005. Israel proposed, prior to September 2005 when it pulled out of Gaza, to unilaterally leave the area.
The Gaza Strip, along with the West Bank, are two disputed territories which came under Israeli control in the 1967 Six Day War and since then have been the subject of negotiations and discussions in various international meetings. In the case of the unilateral pull-out from Gaza in 2005 many people in Israel expected that this would trigger a positive reaction. If indeed the complaint on the Palestinian side had been that Israel was sitting on land that the Palestinians claimed was part of their future state then one would expect Israel removing itself from that territory would result in a reduction in the level of hostility between the Palestinians and Israel. That should have translated itself in terms of a reduction, for example, in the levels of military operations against the State of Israel from the Gaza Strip.
Moreover, one might have expected in Israel in 2005 if Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip that the Palestinians would have the opportunity to create the foundations of part of a Palestinian state. They also have ambitions to have a state in the West Bank. That might have expressed itself in a couple of ways. First, most people in the west do not know it but there are huge natural gas resources in the Mediterranean offshore from Gaza. Prime Minister Ehud Barak turned those resources over to Yasser Arafat as a gesture prior to the Camp David summit in 2000. Had they been developed, those resources would have provided the basis for a huge amount of cash inflow into a future Palestinian economy. Israeli settlers, 9,000 of whom had left the Gaza Strip as part of a unilateral withdrawal, had already established a substantial agribusiness in northern Gaza which was turned over to the Palestinians and could have provided the possibility of creating agriculture for export to Europe and other parts of the world.
The Israeli pull-out could have been followed up by different types of development in the Gaza Strip and certainly greater moderation. Unfortunately, after Israel pulled out, what occurred were two things. First, rather than Fatah winning the Palestinian elections, Hamas won. Hamas is a militant group and a terrorist organisation according to the European Union, the United States and Israel. The Hamas victory in the January 2006 election was later followed in 2007 by a Hamas coup against the residual elements of power of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip. The direction of developments in Gaza went in an extremely negative direction.
The second development that occurred was that the military situation deteriorated dramatically. If one addresses a political grievance one would expect that the level of militancy, the flames of rage, would drop. However, what happened was the opposite. There were 179 rocket attacks in 2005 from the Gaza Strip into Israel. The rocket attacks began in 2001. After Israel left Gaza, rather than the number of attacks dropping, they shot up. They did not double or triple, they increased by 500%. Since Israel removed itself from that sensitive Philadelphia route, as it is called, between the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian Sinai, the number of smuggling tunnels increased dramatically and the opportunities for moving in higher quality rocketry into the Gaza Strip increased. It was only after Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip that Grad rockets manufactured in either China or Iran began appearing in the Hamas arsenal. That increased the number of Israeli cities that were affected by Hamas rocket attacks. It was not just Sderot and the kibbutzim in Moshavim in the area around the Gaza Strip but now the threat extended to Ashkelon and Ashdod in the north and outwards to Beersheva eventually in the east. Therefore, the situation became far more critical.
I mentioned that in the context of the cause of hostility if Israel removed itself from the territory of Gaza perhaps someone would wage guerrilla warfare against Israel on the West Bank but Gaza should be quiet. It should not get worse. The reason it is getting worse, and this is part of the diagnosis I wish to share with the committee, is because the sources of conflict are not related necessarily to the territorial issue but they are related to Hamas's principal allies, the Muslim Brotherhood, an international organisation based originally in Egypt of which Hamas is only the Palestinian branch. More significantly it is related to Iran because Iran is now seeking hegemony across the Middle East.
Iran is threatening Arab states such as Bahrain and sending cells of Hizbollah with the revolutionary guards to Egypt. It is threatening Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. It is active in the civil war in Yemen and it became active in the Gaza Strip. Rather than see that the solution to the conflict is necessarily just what Israel does, one cannot divorce the solution to the conflict from what external actors are doing.
I am not an expert on the history of Northern Ireland. I barely have newspaper knowledge of what goes on in this part of the world. However, one thing I can say is that the conflict that people endured for many years here was not caused by some European country, other than of course the British issue, such as France or Germany sending forces or money into the conflict and heating it up. It had to be resolved with the British but that was a separate issue. What I am trying to say is that this conflict is exacerbated and has often escalated directly as a result of Iranian involvement. I wish to point out that it is a very different situation. If Iran's involvement in our conflict and its quest for hegemony are not addressed then it becomes very hard to set down the foundations for a complete solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The second reason I think we have had difficulties in resolving the conflict relates to the fact that we are not getting a response to initiatives we take. The current Israeli Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke a lot of new ground. He announced his readiness to accept Palestinian statehood, which for him was a new and changed position on the Middle East. There was no reciprocal move. A second development that occurred was when Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Government accepted a ten-month settlement freeze. Many people in the west perhaps take for granted the freezing of settlement construction. I do not talk about new settlements, I refer to construction in an existing settlement which does not change the geographic situation on the ground so that Israelis living in the West Bank can have a place for their families. That was not a stipulation in the Oslo agreements. When Yitzhak Rabin signed the agreements with Yasser Arafat in 1993 there was no settlement freeze, no limitation on Palestinian or Israeli construction on the West Bank contained in them. It was not an issue.
When Ehud Barak went to Camp David in 2000 to negotiate with Yasser Arafat under the auspices of the then US President, Bill Clinton, there was no freeze on Israeli or Palestinian construction. The same was true when the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, sat down with Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 to try to work out a final status arrangement. Again, there was no precondition that the parties must freeze construction on either side.
Nonetheless, even though it was not a legally binding requirement of the State of Israel, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a confidence-building measure, said Israel would freeze construction in the West Bank for ten months. However, there was no reciprocal move on the other side. From what I have read in press reports, the US President, Barack Obama, pointed out to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia that the Israelis were freezing construction, a new move on their part, which they and other Arab states should match. There was a suggestion that Israeli civil aircraft flying east to India or Bangkok could cut across Saudi airspace to save time. The Saudis refused to listen about it. Such a reciprocal move would have helped create a better environment for moving forward.
Another factor affecting the peace discussions is the problem of preconditions and unilateralism. It is no secret that the US Government came to Israel with the idea, first, of freezing construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In recent weeks a request has been added that Israel freeze construction in Jewish neighbourhoods in the eastern side of Jerusalem. This is largely being interpreted as a new precondition for negotiations. If those preconditions never existed before, why should they exist now? How does this help us move to a situation where the parties will sit across from one another?
What also makes the environment more problematic is the suggestion that exists in many official circles, mainly said in private, that there will be an initiative at the UN Security Council, perhaps by the European countries, to suggest a Palestinian state should be created without negotiation. It may involve putting down a draft resolution, for example, saying it is time for the international community to recognise the state of Palestine within the 1967 lines.
I suggest this scenario because this idea came up in a speech in London in 2009 by Javier Solana, the former EU foreign policy czar. It is now a common wisdom that is spreading among people in the Middle East. What incentive is there for the Palestinians to come to the negotiating table if they are hearing that certain international actors are going to give them what they want by adopting a resolution that resolves the very subject of negotiations at the UN Security Council? This third factor has made the negotiating environment and moving a real peace process forward more difficult.
A fourth factor is the issue of mutual recognition. When the Oslo agreements were signed in September 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat had an exchange of letters about mutual recognition between the Palestinian and Israeli people. That became a cardinal underpinning of any peace process. The exchange was not a final recognition of the two parties but the beginning of a movement towards mutual recognition, which we felt was very important to get a peace process going.
On the Palestinian side, unfortunately, there has been the tendency to deny the fundamental right of the Jewish people to their own homeland, a right that has existed in both the League of Nations and the United Nations but one that is very difficult for Palestinian officials to acknowledge. Since the 2000 Camp David summit, statements have been issued denying the historical connection of the Jewish people to their land. During the summit, when the then US President, Bill Clinton, addressed the issue of Jerusalem, Yasser Arafat told him he kept talking about the Temple of Solomon and the connection of the Jews to Jerusalem when in fact the temple never existed. Later Yasser Arafat told the Arabic press that the temple existed elsewhere, in Nablus or Yemen.
I knew Yasser Arafat well as I had negotiated with him previously. Many times he would come with a wild idea to throw off the people on the other side of the table. This was more than a wild idea or more than a cunning use of twisted history. It became an ideology, which I call temple denial in my book, The Fight for Jerusalem. It has spread quickly with statements from Nabil Shaath, Saeb Erekat and Yasser Abed Rabbo all denying the existence of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.
At the summit, Bill Clinton replied to Yasser Arafat that he was a Christian and that in his tradition the apostles all went up to the Temple Mount. He refused to accept the statement. However, every time there is an archaeological discovery connecting the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland, Palestinian spokespersons get upset. In 2008, Salem Fayadh, considered by the West to be a moderate, spoke about Jerusalem and its Muslim and Christian connections at the United Nations General Assembly. He never spoke about the Jewish connection.
That is why Benjamin Netanyahu said that if he is asked to recognise the rights of the Palestinian people to a Palestinian state, he also wants to hear the recognition of the rights of the Jewish people to their own nation-state. Unless that fundamental mutual recognition is achieved, then what is there to do?
These are some of the elements that have obstructed the peace process. On the European level, it is extremely important for European states to tell Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian leadership that they expect the PLO and the Palestinian Authority to sit with Israel and begin negotiations. If the Palestinians believe they will get the solution they want delivered to them on a silver platter, then we will never move from step one to step two.
Negotiations would produce an outcome that would reflect a compromise between the two sides. Many times we are asked if Israel is willing to go back to the 1967 lines. However, this is not written in UN Security Resolution No. 242, the only agreed basis to the peace process. Dividing Jerusalem is also not written into the resolution.
At the negotiations, the Palestinians can bring to the table what they want and we can bring our needs. The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, put it well when she laid out a formula for starting negotiations as the Palestinians wanting a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines; the Israelis wanting secure and recognised boundaries as stated in UN Security Council Resolution No. 242.
We believe it is possible to reconcile these two goals. The only way to achieve this is through reaching a compromise. The only way to reach a compromise is if both parties sit down and negotiate one-to-one. The most important thing Europe can do is encourage the Palestinians to do exactly that. They will not get all they are hoping for, and neither will Israel, but through compromise, reason and the good services of Senator Mitchell, who was very instrumental in this part of the world, we believe we can move forward. However, we need Ireland's support for real compromise and negotiations and not for the current posture we are witnessing today.
