by Martin Davie, Christian Today
On 9 October a statement was issued by the Bishop of Southwark, Christopher Chessun, the Church of England’s lead bishop for the Middle East, together with the Bishops of Chelmsford, Gloucester and Norwich, about the agreement for a ceasefire in Gaza. In this statement the bishops declared:
‘A credible peace must start with a ceasefire, but it will not last without a fundamental shift in the attitudes and behaviours that, for too long, have maintained Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and thwarted Palestinian self-determination and statehood. The settler violence in the West Bank must cease and the settlement-expansion programme must be reversed.’
It then adds: ‘We continue to hold that the only path to a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, is a two-state solution that provides for a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.’
What is quite astonishing is that the onus for achieving a lasting peace rests wholly with Israel. The only people whose attitudes must change are the Israelis. They must abandon ‘the attitudes and behaviours that, for too long, have maintained Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and thwarted Palestinian self-determination and statehood.’
However, as the historian Ephraim Karsh shows in detail in his book Palestine Betrayed, it has not been the attitudes and behaviour of Israel that have historically prevented the Palestinian Arabs living in peace in a state of their own. They were offered their own state alongside Israel by the British in 1937, by the United Nations in 1947, and by the Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netenyahu in 1993, 2000, 2007, and 2009. In addition, the Palestinian population in Gaza were given the opportunity for complete self-government after Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
However, on each of these occasions the Palestinian leaders, Hajj Amin Husseini, Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the collective leadership of Hamas rejected the opportunity for a lasting peace that was being offered to the Palestinian people.