What 'painful concessions' are left for Palestinians to make?
http://972mag.com/what-painful-concessions-are-left-for-palestinians-to-make/87981/
From accepting a state on 22 percent of Mandate Palestine to Israel’s facts-on-the-ground in the West bank and the loss of rights for refugees, Palestinians have already made significant, historic compromises.
Despite the U.S.’s optimism, recent comments and statements coming from Israel and Palestine indicate that the U.S.-led Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are not progressing well. This is not only due to the relative complexity of the subject matter at hand, but first and foremost, due to the fact that the Palestinians and Israel differ greatly in power and position: one being the occupied, the other the occupier that maintains an “unbreakable bond” with the world’s only military superpower. Americans and Europeans do not tire of insisting that only “painful concessions” by both sides can make a just and lasting agreement possible. The central question is; what additional concessions can, or should the Palestinians still make without undermining the very idea of a two-state solution?
The territory of Israel already covers 78 percent of the former Palestine Mandate: this is almost 50 percent more than what the 1947 UN partition resolution recommended, which allocated 55 percent of the land to the Jews. Even under the most optimistic scenarios nowadays, a Palestinian state will never comprise more than 22 percent of Mandate Palestine. Accepting this unequal distribution is by far the greatest Palestinian concession, made by late PLO-leader Yasser Arafat when he formally agreed to a two-state solution in 1988.
Read +972?s full coverage of the peace process
As a condition for admission to the UN in 1949, Israel accepted UN Resolution 194, which stipulates that Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the Jewish-Arab hostilities of 1947-49, have the right of return. Israel has not respected this obligation. On the contrary, after its unilateral declaration of independence in 1948 Israel began destroying hundreds of deserted Palestinian villages in order to prevent the refugees from returning and confiscated the land they left behind, without compensation. The chance that large numbers of Palestinians will be allowed to return under a future two-state deal is nil. That is the second – forced – “concession” from the Palestinian side.
The Nakba never seems to end, yet some continue to try and point attention away from this gross Israeli violation of human rights.
End Israeli Apartheid!
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