December 18, 2003

The Geneva Accord: Recycling a Failed Plan
by Monica Hill for the Freedom Socialist

The much-heralded Geneva Accord is being marketed as a “breakthrough” peace plan for Palestine and Israel. It is no such thing.

The negotiators of this “symbolic peace treaty” were a few Israeli politicians whose party is not in power at the moment and a few former Palestinian Authority ministers who had the blessing of Arafat to participate in the secret meetings held in Geneva, Switzerland. There wasn't a Palestinian refugee among them.

Maybe that's why the group negotiated away the right of Palestinians to return to the land from which they were violently expelled in 1948. The accord also agrees to an Israel consisting of 78 percent of historic Palestine, leaving 22 percent to become a Palestinian state.

But the designation of this small, precarious potential new entity as a state is hollow. Palestine would be demilitarized, but not Israel. Palestine would have responsibility for social services and internal security, but Israel would control the airspace, laws, water, imports and exports, and foreign policy.

The Geneva pact also stipulates that Palestine would recognize Israel as an exclusively Jewish state to which only Jews can immigrate. Both states would agree to an “End of Conflict” clause, thus overriding all previous agreements and UN resolutions, most of which recognized Palestinian rights and condemned Israeli policies.

In short, the Geneva Accord is a retread of unfair, and unsuccessful, peace plans of the past.

One good thing has come out of the campaign for the accord, however. It is spurring more and more people to conclude that a “separate but equal” two-state solution is no solution at all. And it has propelled serious discussion about the merits of a one-state solution — an integrated not segregated state, a secular not religious state. As we in the Freedom Socialist Party see it, socialism is the glue that would hold such a state together.

For more information about the accord, visit www.palestinemonitor.org/Analysis/palestinians_outraged_by_geneva.htm , http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2249.shtml , and http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article2110.shtml.