by Naama Ben-Yaakov
The Ariel University Center hosted a revolutionary conference on “Best Plans for a Peaceful Israel/Palestine” Monday afternoon.
The event featured three Israeli and three Palestinian speakers, each of whom made his case for an alternative formula to the Western-imposed Oslo Accords that has led to nearly two decades of bloodshed and severe injustices for both peoples.
The conference was scheduled as a follow-up to last month’s original “Best Plans” conference at Jerusalem’s Ambassador Hotel.
The Ariel University Center, located in Israel’s disputed Samaria region, was founded in 1982 as a branch of Ramat Gan’s Bar-Ilan University.
Since then it has grown into Israel’s largest public college, with an enrollment of 14,000 students. In 2004 it broke with Bar-Ilan in an attempt to obtain certification as an independent university. Although its initial accreditation by the Council of Higher Education was later overturned, the issue remains unresolved.
AUC has also become the subject of controversy due to protests organized by Israeli political movements funded by the European Union. Early this year, close to 150 academics associated with EU-funded groups announced they were boycotting the college, whose very existence they described as an impediment to peace due to its location in territory the international community demands Israel surrender to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
Most attendees at Monday’s event were AUC students, both Jewish and Arab, as well as Israeli and Palestinian activists seeking a new way forward together following 20 years of failure by Israel’s government and the PA.
“Some of our visitors were surprised to see we have hundreds of Arab students here from both sides of the Green Line,” said AUC Chancellor Yigal Cohen-Orgad. “We hope to have many more.”
One of the presenters at Monday’s event was Kamal Nawash, a Jerusalem-born, New Orleans-raised attorney who outline a plan to forgo partitioning the country in favor of an Israel-Palestine confederation as two provinces within a single state.
Nawash said Israelis and Palestinians need to be honest with one another if they ever hope to achieve peace.
“For many of you, Israel includes not only the lands of 1948, but what you call Judea and Samaria and we call the West Bank,” he said. “For the vast majority of Palestinians, Palestine includes all the lands of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.”
Nawash expressed understanding for the historical, spiritual and emotional connection felt by ethnic Jews to their historic homeland.
“I can understand you love this place,” he said. “But you have to accept my right to live anywhere in Israel-Palestine just like I accept yours.”
Nawash said his plan is predicated on the free movement of labor and people.
“All ‘settlements’ stay where they are,” he said, employing a word for local Jewish communities generally used to discredit their existence. “And Jews can even build more of them.”
“Palestinians will be able to do the same,” he added. “Jerusalem becomes no big deal because its the capital of the country. Jews would be able to build anywhere in the city. Same with Palestinians.”
“Most people see us as natural enemies, but I see Palestinians and ‘settlers’ in the West Bank as potentially the best allies,”
Nawash later told journalists on the conference sidelines that although most people view Jewish residents of the Samaria and Judea regions as natural enemies of the Palestinians, he views the populations as being potential close allies.
Benny Katz of the Semitic Action movement concurred with Nawash’s statement, adding that the two populations have both been exploited by Western imperialism in the Middle East and should now unite in opposition to further foreign intervention in the region. Katz blamed the Oslo process specifically for forcibly segregating the two peoples and creating a system in which both populations have suffered collective traumas.
“Both peoples have seen thousands kiled in the last two decades,” Katz told Indy News Israel. “Palestinian Arabs suffer from walls, checkpoints and restrictions on freedom of movement. Israeli Jews suffer from house demolitions, forced expulsions and global negation of our legitimate national rights.”
“This was all forced on us by Western governments,” Katz added. “The people need to move forward without the United States or the European Union or their local puppets in the Palestinian Authority.”
Yishai Fleisher, a popular Jerusalem radio host, told Indy News Israel how excited he was that the two populations are finally coming together to chart their collective futures without adhering to the two-state paradigm or other dictates of foreign powers.
“We see that a lot of people’s minds are finally being opened to alternatives to a two-state solution,” said Fleisher following the event. “We’re still a long way away from practical solutions but at least we’re coming together to have the discussion.”
“We see the Palestinian Authority freaking out and desperately trying to ban events like this one because they realize we’re a threat to their oppressive rule,” he added. “If our two people’s can achieve normalization, the PA will become irrelevant and lose its grip on power. That frightens them so they’re doing everything they can to keep Jews and Arabs apart.”
Fleisher was referring to recent attempts by the Fatah-led PA to prevent grassroots peace initiatives by Palestinians with their Jewish neighbors.
Tsvi Misinai, an Israeli researcher who promotes the view that most Palestinian Arabs are actually descendants of ethnic Jews, told the crowd that Palestinians should be educated on their own Jewish history and assimilated into the Jewish nation-state.
At the end of the event a vote was held to select which of the proposals the audience deemed most practicable.
Two plans, one offered by progressive activist David Ish-Shalom and another by architect Yosef Harel Na’im, appeared to win a majority of support among both Israelis and Palestinians.
Ish-Shalom, a prominent peace activist in the 1970s and ’80s, argued for a Jewish state from the Jordan River to Mediterranean Sea in which Arabs professing loyalty would be granted full citizenship after an unspecified length of time.
Na’im’s plan envisioned a two-state confederation of Israel and Palestine with Jerusalem as a shared capital.
