The Problem is Palestinian Rejectionism - Why the PA Must Recognize a Jewish State
![handle is hein.journals/fora90 and id is 978 raw text is: The Problem Is
Palestinian Rejectionism
Why the PA Must Recognize a Jewish State
Tosef Kupervasser and Shalom Lipner
Nearly two decades of peace negotiations
between Israel and the Palestinians have
failed miserably. The key reason for this
failure is the Palestinians' refusal to recog-
nize Israel as a Jewish state.
The basic paradigm of the Oslo accords,
signed in 1993, held that both the Israelis
and the Palestinians were, at long last,
prepared to recognize the. legitimacy of
each other's national rights and aspirations.
With that essential threshold crossed, it
was thought, all that would remain was
to work out a compromise on core issues:
where to draw borders, whether and how
to divide Jerusalem, and how to resolve the
Palestinian demand that refugees from
the 1948 war be allowed to return to Israel.
That, at least, was the theory. Yet
over the course of the last 18 years, during
which negotiations were conducted along
these lines, the rhetoric and actions of the
Palestinian leadership have proved that
paradigm wrong. The Palestinians have
not in fact recognized the legitimacy of
the national rights of the Jewish people.
Consider, for example, the Palestinians'
refusal to negotiate with Israel over the
past year, a result, they say, of continued
settlement construction in Jerusalem and
beyond the 1967 lines. This is a dubious
claim given that the Palestinians have never
made halting construction a precondition
before. And when Israel did freeze settle-
ment building for ten months in 2009-10,
the Palestinians still refused to talk, only
agreeing to do so at the last moment and
even then only to prevent a crisis in their
relations with the United States.
The true reason for the intransigence
among Palestinian officials has nothing
to do with settlement building; rather, it
is their continued rejection of the Jewish
character of Israel. The Palestinians are
fully aware that once they sit down at
the negotiating table and agreement is
reached on all other outstanding issues,
YOS E F KuPER WA SSER is Director General of Israel's Ministry of Strategic
Affairs and former head of the Analysis and Production Division of the Israel
Defense Forces'Directorate of Military Intelligence. SHALOM LiP N ER has
served in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office since 1990.
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The Problem is Palestinian Rejectionism - Why the PA Must Recognize a Jewish State
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