The Geneva Accords Are A Waste Of Time

09 Dec, 2003 by John Hawkins

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I wish I could say that I was surprised by all the attention that the utterly pointless Geneva Accords have been getting, but there’s absolutely no reed too thin for people to grasp at when it comes to making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But people are just fooling themselves again. Let me show an actual instant messenger conversation I had with an Israeli I met online that’ll show you what I mean…

Israeli: What do you think of the Geneva Accord?

John Hawkins: It’s meaningless crap put together by a bunch of people who are out of power — it’s hardly even worth paying attention to.

Israeli: Really? Even Powell complemented it.

John Hawkins: The people involved on both sides are out of power and have zero pull with the people in power. It’s like you and me making an agreement between the US and Israel. It doesn’t mean anything.

Israeli: It means that our people can achieve an agreement if they want which is a lot by itself. You know, they mailed the full agreement to every house in Israeli people are talking more and more about it.

John Hawkins: I don’t know that it means that at all. I mean if you take a bunch of people who have no power to implement anything on either side and have them make an agreement that isn’t binding in the least, I don’t know that it accomplishes anything.

Israeli: What started as a “virtual” agreement is not so virtual anymore.

John Hawkins: That’s the tragic part because it’s getting people’s hopes up just to be smashed again.

Israeli: And if it does accomplish something?

John Hawkins: Well super, but like I said, how can it possibly accomplish anything? There are no people involved with the power to accomplish anything.

Israeli: Forget about the people, what about the content? It can be the basis of a future “real” agreement.

John Hawkins: There’s nothing innovative or new in it, nothing that hasn’t been on the table before.

Israeli: Depends on what you do with it now. If you get more and more people talk about it (which is currently what’s going on here and in the pals side), it might influence the government into the right direction eventually. Sharon always said that we have nobody to make peace with. This agreement proves otherwise.

John Hawkins: If you think so, cool. But the Pal leadership has zero and I mean zero interest in doing anything like this.

Israeli: It must have some effect, if even just to kick the leaders into starting to work on the real thing 🙂 Anyway, just trying to be a bit optimistic here 🙂

John Hawkins: It’s a waste of time working on the real thing until conditions change with the Palestinians. Until Arafat is gone and they start fighting terrorism, no plan is going to matter. It’s not the plan, it’s that there are too many Pals who don’t want Israel to exist. There have been like a bazillion new plans and everyone gets excited about them and they never accomplish anything because the basic underlying reality never changes.

Israeli: Although that makes sense, what is your suggestion, that we just sit tight and wait for it to happen, while they slaughter our people and we do theirs?

Here are most of the possibilities that are open to the Israelis…

1) They can kill all the Palestinians. That’s not morally acceptable to me, the overwhelming majority of Israelis, or to much of anyone else.

2) The Israelis can respond with excessive and overwhelming force to every attack, killing hundreds of Palestinians for every Israeli killed in an attack. Again, That’s not morally acceptable to me, the overwhelming majority of Israelis, or to much of anyone else.

3) They can transfer all the Palestinians. In my opinion, this is the only solution to the problem that provides any “short term” hope of success. However, it would be universally condemned, the Israelis don’t have the popular support to do it…yet, and it could lead to a regional war.

4) The Israelis can agree to all Palestinian demands and give the Pals a State. This would lead to genocide as Israelis were demographically swamped with hostile Palestinians.

5) The US or UN can move troops into the area to act as a buffer between the Palestinians and Israelis. This would help the Palestinians who could sneak terrorists into Israel while Israel couldn’t retaliate properly because the peace keepers would be in the way. Incessant terrorist attacks would probably lead to the peacekeepers being eventually withdrawn, leaving the situation as it was before.

6) The US and the Europe could team up to force Israel to give the Palestinians a State. However, this would accomplish nothing because Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups that are determined to drive the Israelis out of the Middle-East would keep on attacking and Israel would be forced to respond just as they’re doing now. The Palestinian “State” would be in name only.

7) The Israelis can AGAIN ease up on the Palestinians and attempt to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian State. This will fail because groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad will kill Israelis at every opportunity to stop a peace that would surely require — at least on paper — them to disband. Even if they were to somehow succeed and come an agreement, since the Palestinians refuse to disarm the terrorist groups, the Israelis will have gained nothing by giving the Palestinians a State.

8) The Israelis can simply abandon the undefendable settlements, wall off the Palestinians at a border of their choosing, and leave the Palestinians with a de facto state. This wouldn’t work because if the Israelis completely pulled out of the territories, the Palestinian terrorist groups would rearm and find a way to get back into Israel or alternately would just launch rockets over the walls. That would require the Israelis to go back in again, bringing them back to square 1.

9) The Israelis can simply keep doing what they doing until Arafat is gone and the Palestinians crack down on terrorism. This will continue to increase resentment, and will likely mean we’ll go years without any progress, although terrorist attacks should be limited. The danger here is that if you go long enough, the Palestinians will get their hands on dirty bombs, biological, or nuclear weapons and end up slaughtering massive numbers of Israelis at some point.

I’m sure there are probably other solutions that people could come up with, but none of them are going to be any better than what is being offered here. The sad truth is that we’re probably AT LEAST a full decade away from peace in the Middle-East, if not longer. I am an optimistic person, but I see little reason for optimism in this situation, and absolutely no reason to be optimistic about the Geneva Accords.