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On Dismantling Gaza Settlements

(Access/Middle East) Shlomo Avineri - The Israeli public debate over the last decades has been characterized by two varieties of how to bring Palestinians to negotiations. The doves say that "if you make the Palestinians a decent offer, this is the end of the conflict, they will accept it." And the hawks thought, "if you hit them hard enough on the head, they'll cave in." Both have proven to be wrong. The fact that the Palestinians are violently against unilateral disengagement suggests who is going to be the winner. Israel is going to be the winner, not the Palestinians. For the Roadmap you need a partner. It's pretty obvious that we don't have a partner. If you look at similar conflicts that have characterized the last decade - Cyprus, Kosovo, Bosnia - in none of them is there an attempt to have a Roadmap to a final-status solution. What you have in those cases are stop-gap measures. The Roadmap was dead on arrival. The Roadmap was a wish-list. It suggested what the U.S, and many people in the West and Israel, would have liked to see. The only place where people think you can find a final solution in two months or two years is the Middle East. This is totally unrealistic, totally utopian. One has to lower one's sight from conflict resolution to conflict management. This is what the international community has done with relative success in Bosnia, Kosovo - and this means stabilization. The writer is professor of political science at the Hebrew University, and former director-general of the Israel Foreign Ministry.
2004-02-04 00:00:00
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