'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Geneva Accord-- strengths and weaknesses

The 'Geneva Accord' signed today between non-governmental negotiators from Israel and Palestine was a great achievement, despite its many evident limitations.

Chief among the latter is the fact that neither of the two negotiating teams has any governmental mandate to negotiate. (Though it should be noted that Yasser Abed Rabboo, unlike Yossi Beilin, is a close associate of the two persons wielding leadership in his own society.) There also seem to me to be some weaknesses in the content of the plan. But these are minor compared with its achievements. The main achievements are, in my humble opinion, threefold:

(1) The ability of these two teams to reach agreement in spite of the continuing levels of violence their societies suffer from, and despite the tepidity of support coming from the world's sole superpower, shows that there is some hope, and some good reason to keep hope alive.

(2) On both sides, it shows the doubters that despite all their hopelessness and cynicism it is still not true to say that "There is no-one to talk to on the 'other side'. All that people 'over there' ever understand is the language of force, not reason." Instead, yes, there is someone to talk to; and reasoned discussion can lead toward a sufficiently good--even if still not 'perfect'--outcome.

(3) The single greatest achievement of the accord: to point definitively to the need to define an agreed "final outcome", and then work perhaps incrementally towards it, rather than continuing to toil endlessly and without gain over ever smaller and smaller subsets of the interim.

As the (upcoming in February) report of the International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine Conflict argues, the obsession with incrementalism that has plagued all US efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace for the past 25 years always led to a decrease in confidence between the two peoples rather than the increase in confidence that its advocates always promised. Returning the focus to finding a final outcome that the two peoples can both live with, and then working towards it, is the only possible way out of the current mess.

So thanks, Yasser and Yossi, for achieving those things. The language of negotiation and compromise is the only thing that will bring this conflict and the immense suffering it continues to inflict on both palestinians and Israelis, to an end.