JUSTICE, NO PEACE
by Michael Lame, posted July 10, 2009
In his fascinating autobiography, Once upon a Country, Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari Nusseibeh writes of a heated exchange he once had with Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas):
“You have to level with us,” I demanded. “What is it you want, a state or the right of return?”
Now he began to lose his self-composure. “Why do you say that? What do you mean by ‘either/or’?”
“Because that’s what it boils down to. Either you want an independent state or a policy aimed at returning all the refugees to Israel. You can’t have it both ways.” [p. 466]
Earlier this year, a poll commissioned by an organization committed to a two-state solution revealed that for 92% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza their first choice for dealing with the refugee problem was the “right of return AND compensation”. 77% of Israelis considered this option “unacceptable”. Even the more moderate option of “an Israeli recognition of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, while most refugees return to the West Bank or Gaza and some return to Israel” garnered a 60% “unacceptable” response from Israelis. (http://onevoicemovement.org/programs/polling_contents.php)
As the Israeli pollster, Mina Zemach, acknowledged in an appearance on Capitol Hill last month, these numbers reflect a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum in firm opposition to recognizing a Palestinian refugee “right of return” or to any sizeable number of Palestinians moving (back) to what is now Israel.
So what is to be done? Either the Palestinians demand justice as they see it – and fight for it – or they settle for peace with Israel. As Nusseibeh wrote, it is an either/or proposition.
In March, two occurrences caused me to revisit my own views of justice in the Middle East.
At the beginning of March, three months before President Obama’s trip to Egypt, I received a copy of an interesting article written by Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Alterman, a Middle East expert formerly a member of the policy planning staff at the State Department, entitled his piece “Justice is a Virtue”. (http://csis.org/publication/middle-east-notes-and-comment-justice-virtue)
“Justice is one of the most prominent themes in Islam,” Alterman asserts. “To Muslim audiences, the core aspect of justice is not that it is redistributive or even-handed, but that it is ethical.” He goes on to recommend that Obama use the occasion of his upcoming speech to promote a U.S. alignment with the world’s Muslim community in the search for justice.
I have now reached the opposite conclusion about the usefulness of justice as a principle for addressing Middle East conflict. What is, after all, the real relationship between justice and conflict? Is injustice the source of conflict or its result, or both? Martin Luther King reportedly said that “without justice there can be no peace.” Whether that statement is true or not, it sounds good; it sounds right. At demonstrations, many of us have heard if not also uttered the repeated refrain “no justice, no peace.”
But I’ve come to believe that, at least with regards to Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “a just peace” is an oxymoron. In a perfect world, justice and peace would reinforce each other, but in our world, when conflict rages, justice and peace pull in opposite directions.
Everyone I’ve ever met in the Middle East wants peace . . . on their own terms. Peace is certainly valued by Arabs and Jews, but it is not necessarily their senior-most value. I believe that a primary reason why efforts over the last two decades to resolve Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed is that Arabs tend to place a higher value on justice than on peace. (One could also say that peace-making has failed because Israel has never made proposals to the Syrians and Palestinians that they viewed as just.) If a choice has to be made between peace without justice or justice without peace, the Arab world (and perhaps, more broadly, the Muslim world), will opt for the latter. Israelis, despite the long Jewish tradition of seeking justice, tend to put a premium on peace, but they place an even higher premium on preserving their national existence.
Both of these preferences or principled stands, for peace and for justice, are also explainable on a material level. When you already have what you want – e.g., land or power – making peace can lock-in your gains. The Israelis already possess the entire land of Israel/Palestine as well as the Golan Heights. Holding on to as much of that land as possible while achieving peace makes perfect sense to Israelis, and if their offers are rejected, it must be because “the other side doesn’t really want peace”. The Palestinians, in contrast, control nothing. The cause of justice, as Palestinians see it, is consistent with their interests in that it requires them to regain at least some part, if not all, of what they lost.
A real question, then, is whether justice in Arab terms must be ALL-OR-NOTHING. For the Syrian regime, justice necessitates the return of ALL the land conquered by Israel, right up to the June 4, 1967 line. ALL might be defined by Hamas as the entire land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, which includes the state of Israel. Fatah might define ALL as 100% of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem (or a land swap with Israel that would equal 100%).
But what if the Israelis are not willing to part with 100% of the lands captured in 1967 or their equivalent? Must the conflict go on until and unless the Israelis concede the point? Does the offered return of less than 100% constitute such an injustice that no peace on those terms could be accepted by any Palestinian patriot?
In the middle of March I attended an event in Washington which featured Ziad Abbas, a Palestinian born and raised in the Dheisheh camp near Bethlehem. He spoke from his personal experience about the life and aspirations of refugees, and he claimed that “the only possibility of justice is the right of return.”
That phrase, “right of return”, speaks volumes to Palestinians. It speaks of justice and homecoming, of wiping away a humiliation and righting a wrong. That phrase says something completely different to Israelis, as we saw earlier in reviewing the polling data. Israelis hear it as an existential threat to their state and an indirect way of undoing the outcomes of the UN vote in favor of partition in 1947 and of the ensuing war.
What possible justice can there be for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes in 1947-1949? Regardless of how they came to be refugees, monetary compensation does not make up for the destruction of a way of life, a community, or a centuries-old relationship to the land. Dollars cannot substitute for having a place of one’s own in which to raise a family. Most of the pre-1948 Palestinian villages in what became Israel are long gone. Many previously Palestinian-owned houses in Jaffa and Haifa and Acre, if they remain intact, are now occupied by Israeli families. Many formerly Arab-owned orange groves have been plowed under.
Palestinians can’t return to the world they knew before ’48. It no longer exists. There really is no possibility of justice for them. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, but I doubt that what can be done could be called justice.
Alterman concludes his article by claiming that “[t]he moral ground is occupied by those who strive for justice, not those who kill in the name of it.” But seeking justice is not necessarily a bloodless affair. The figure in history who I most closely associate with an absolute commitment to justice – a passion for justice – is Robespierre. And we all know how his efforts turned out. The Middle East has already seen too many wars and reigns of terror. Perhaps a new conversation is called for to examine what justice looks like in the 21st century.