Last Sunday was both a potent reminder
of the horrific power of ethnic nationalism and the redemptive quality of multi-ethnic
democracies -- lessons that we should be applying to one of the last great moral
sores of our time, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territory and the
Israeli-Arab conflict. On Sunday, in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
world leaders joined 60,000 Bosnians to pay tribute to 775 more Bosnian Muslim
victims of the Srebrenica
massacre fifteen years ago, whose remains have been identified. Those whose nations or institutions shared
responsibility for the massacre were in attendance. The President of Serbia, Boris Tadic, appeared
in a brave act of national repentance and a former and respected colleague of
mine, Andrew Gilmour, was there to represent the United Nations Secretary
General.
Simultaneously, the World Cup's
championship match got under way in the multi-racial democracy that is now
South Africa. Earlier, Nelson Mandela,
the first president of a free South Africa, showed up briefly to be welcomed by
tens of thousands of jubilant fans.
One day later in Jerusalem, in sharp
contrast and mundane by comparison, the Israeli municipal planning committee in
the city approved another 32 settlement units in the Arab eastern half of the
city. As Elisha
Peleg, a member of the committee put it, "[w]e
will continue to plan and build in every neighborhood in this city and we will
not allow external forces to intervene." (Presumably, he was referring to
President Obama.) And today, in an equally symbolic move, Israel also ended its unofficial ban on destroying
Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem.
The paradoxical
scenes over this last weekend had their seeds in actions taken decades ago and reflect
the different directions the three ethnic/territorial conflicts took in the
early 1990s.
From 1990 to
1994, the apartheid regime in South Africa
was negotiating with the former head of the African National Congress's (ANC)
armed wing, Nelson Mandela, over transforming the system of racial segregation
and Bantustans into a single unified democracy
with equality for blacks and whites. The negotiations were ultimately a triumph
for Mr. Mandela, who despite 27 years in prison, continued to demand the same
thing -- a unified South Africa with equal rights for all.
In the same
time, from 1992 to 1995, the Bosnian government was in a battle for the
existence of the state as the then-Yugoslav army and its affiliated Bosnian
Serb militias raced through Bosnia
turning it into hell on earth. Throughout the battle, other European states continued to try to
convince the Bosnian government to accept various forms of ethnic partition
plans that would have destroyed the reality of Bosnia's capital Sarajevo as a
multi-cultural and multi-religious center of tolerance. The Bosnian government both refused to accept
the logic of ethnic partition and refused to resort to terrorism in defending
itself against Serbia. Ultimately, with
the forceful intervention of the United States under President Clinton, but
only after the massacre of some 8,000 boys and men at Srebrenica and countless
victims of concentration and rape camps, the Bosnian government could claim a
partial success with the flawed Dayton Peace Accords.
The
Palestinians, in contrast to the South Africans and the Bosnians, were moving
in a very different direction. After
having spent 24 years since the founding of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) demanding a secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine, Palestinian leaders -- with the support of
leading Palestinian intellectuals in the Diaspora -- accepted the legitimacy of
the partition of Palestine in 1988 and joined negotiations
with Israel
in 1991 as a means of attaining independence.
There were
two ways to view a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The first was to see it much as ethnic
separatists in South Africa and Serbia saw the world. In this view there are races and ethnicities
with inherently different views of the world that cannot share the political
stage. South African whites who
supported apartheid argued that they could only express their
self-determination and have a democracy if they control all the levers of power
and if blacks remain disenfranchised because, after all, there was a
demographic problem with blacks outnumbering whites 10 to 1. In a more extreme version, Serbian ethnic
nationalists argued that Serbs could only be free from the risk of another
World War II level atrocity by physically eliminating non-Serbs from the
territory of the former Yugoslavia. The Serbian forces referred to their
Catholic victims as Ustashe (after Croatian Nazi units in World War II) and to
their Slavic Muslim victims as Turks (in revenge for the Ottoman conquest of
the Balkans).
This
concentration on ethnic populations, demographics, and historic injustices --
whether in the discriminatory form in the old South Africa or in the genocidal
form in the old Serbia -- is the most negative and destructive world-view a
government can endorse and poses distinct risks to international peace and
stability.
There was a
more enlightened way to see partition, and the Palestinian leadership in the
1990s and some of their interlocutors in the Israeli left tried to embrace that
paradigm. Partition was not about ethnic
separatism, but about ensuring that there was an Israeli and a Palestinian
polity. Well into the Taba negotiations
in 2001, Palestinians were still presuming that they would share an economy
with Israel; that they would have similar trade, health, and visa regulations;
that Palestinians would still work in Israel and that Israelis would still
visit and shop in Palestine; that there would be Jewish citizens of the
Palestinian state and Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state; and that the
states of Palestine and Israel would enjoy the kind of interactive relations
that European states enjoy with each other today.
Nine years
later, the physical and political landscape is dramatically different but the
questions remain the same for Israelis and Palestinians: whether to share or to divide the political
and physical space of Israel/Palestine and how.
Today, it is
hard to see which vision is more unrealistic -- partition or integration. On the one hand, Israel has successfully
integrated the West Bank in a de facto annexation and continues to populate it
with settlers every day, no matter who the American president is or what he
says. The creation of a contiguous and viable
Palestinian state on the 1967 borders seems almost impossible. On the other hand, neither the Palestinian
nor Israeli leaderships have yet been willing to advocate a bi-national or
multi-ethnic political model. It is hard
to imagine how South Africa
could have enjoyed the fruits of democracy without the ANC or to imagine a
territorially-unified Bosnia
existing today if not for the leadership of the Bosnian government and its
uncompromising demands for a multi-ethnic democracy in the 1990s.
Continued
conflict is always an option -- but not one that the United States or the
international community should tolerate.
But as the international community, and the United States in particular,
reconsider their own feigned impotence in influencing facts on the ground, we
should remember the example of Bosnia and Herzegovina and South Africa this
past weekend. I remember hearing expert
pundits in the 1990s going on, ad nauseam, about the "ancient ethnic hatreds" of the Balkans and
how ethnic partition was the only way to stop the killing. I remember the anti-communist screeds against
the ANC when it was still viewed as a terrorist organization by American
politicians.
They were
all wrong, thank God, and Bosnia and South Africa still stand today -- Bosnia
remembering in somber silence the atrocities it survived in the presence of the
Serbian president and South Africa celebrating in wild cheers and noisy horns,
not only the World Cup, but also its transformation from pariah apartheid state
to egalitarian democracy.
Few people
in Bosnia today will admit they supported ethnic cleansing and even fewer in
South Africa remember that they supported apartheid at one time. This is fine with me -- perhaps there will
come a time soon when we will forget our support for the indefensible as well,
a time when Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Druze,
Bahais, believers and non-believers, women and men, are sharing the territory
of two states as equals or celebrating their equality in one state.
Amjad Atallah
directs the Middle
East
Task Force at the New America
Foundation and is editor of the Middle East
Channel.
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