by Rabbi Alan Silverstein

May 21, 2009

As part of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy review, the president met on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and next week will host Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen. The media were filled with the challenges to be put to Netanyahu, including his attitude toward a two-state solution to the conflict, halting the construction of existing settlements, dismantling West Bank checkpoints and roadblocks, and jumping directly into final-stage peace negotiations as mandated by the Annapolis Conference in 2007.

Less in evidence have been reports detailing issues relevant to Abbas’ views about peace. The following are four areas that need to be addressed:

Condemning Holocaust denial. A final peace cannot succeed in an atmosphere of animosity. At the core of virulent anti-Semitism in the Arab world is the libel that Jews “fabricated ” the death of six million to galvanize support for the creation of Israel. Holocaust denial has been featured in “scholarly” conferences organized by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pseudo-academic gatherings showcase Abbas’ 1982 doctoral thesis in which he “documents” that fewer than one million Jewish fatalities actually took place during the Shoa. Furthermore, he alleges that the Zionists were “culpable” for these deaths, cynically forcing European Jews to flee to Palestine. Is it not time for Abbas to retract and repudiate his venomous thesis?

Rebuking Temple denial. The Palestinians seek to undermine Jewish claims to the Land of Israel. They deny the existence of a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem or of Jewish settlement in the Land prior to the modern-day “Zionist incursion.” Echoing Yasser Arafat’s similar words to President Bill Clinton in 2000, Abbas has asserted that while “the Jews claim that 2,000 years ago they had a temple [in Jerusalem], I challenge the claim that this is so.” Arab denial of the existence of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem seeks to sever Judaism’s link to any holy places in the Old City. At Annapolis, Abbas and his negotiating team continued to insist that all Jerusalem holy places — Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — return to Islamic sovereignty, recalling an era, before Israel gained control of the Old City, when only limited religious access was offered to non-Muslims. Ought not Abbas reject this “deal-breaker”?

Limiting the “return” of refugees to the Palestinian territories: Arab leaders demand that Palestinian refugees and their descendants be relocated into pre-1967 Israel rather than into a Palestinian state formed in the West Bank and Gaza. Such a “right of return” would transform Israel from a Jewish to an Arab-majority state. In the words of Abbas, “The Palestinians do not accept…that the State of Israel is a Jewish state…. We say that Israel exists and in Israel there are Jews and there are those who are not Jews.” Yet the formula of “two states for two peoples,” Arab and Jew, requires Abbas to affirm the Jews as “a people” worthy of statehood. He must commit to the idea that the Arab refugees of 1948 be repatriated inside the new state of Palestine just as Jewish refugees from Arab lands were absorbed into Israel.

Bilateral negotiating of final borders: The Arab League Peace Plan is a take-it-or-leave-it call for Israel to withdraw to the armistice lines that preceded the Six-Day War in June 1967. As Abbas said at the Annapolis conference: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine — the June 4, 1967, borders — without detracting a single inch.” This, too, is a deal-breaker. Over 200,000 residents within Jewish eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods built since 1967 will not be relocated. The Jewish Quarter and the Kotel in the Old City will not be handed over to Arab control.

The 1949 cease-fire lines between Israel and Syria added to the Golan Heights the Syrian conquest of 400 meters of land abutting the Sea of Galilee. For full peace, Israel might offer the return of the Golan to the international border of 1923. But no Israeli leader will relinquish control over the Jewish state’s most vital water source to Syria. Viable peace with Jordan required border adjustments on both sides. Abbas should submit borders to bilateral negotiations instead of issuing an ultimatum.

After the failure of the Clinton peace process, Dennis Ross expressed frustration with Abbas. “While pleasant as always in our meeting” — at the end of the process in 2000 — “Abu Mazen was…unyielding on substance, saying that the Palestinians had made their concessions.”

After eight years, it is not clear that Abbas’ intransigent position has changed. Observers speculated, ahead of Obama’s talks with Netanyahu, whether the Israeli premier is a partner for peace talks. They must apply the same scrutiny to the president of the Palestinian Authority.

Rabbi Alan Silverstein is religious leader of Congregation Agudath Israel of West Essex in Caldwell and past president of the World Council of Conservative/Masorti Synagogues.

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