It’s time for Arab states to drop another bombshell on Israel - Middle East News - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-it-s-time-for-arab-states-to-drop-another-bombshell-on-israel-1.91
Par Yossi Beilin, ex-ministre de la Justice en Israël, très lié aux accords d’Oslo...
The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 was a kind of a bombshell: it was launched in the heat of the second intifada, against the background of ongoing violence between Palestinians and Israelis. That violence erupted a day after the provocative “visit” to the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa compound of the then-leader of the opposition, Ariel Sharon, and a thousand supporters.
The initiative declared the readiness of all members of the Arab League to make peace with Israel and to normalize relations with it, if it made peace with the Palestinians, based on the two state solution, and with Syria (since ousted from the Arab League).
The Arab Peace Initiative was very surprising, and it gave a crushing answer to the main claim of the Right in Israel: that the heart of the Middle East conflict is the absolute refusal Arab states to recognize Israel, and not the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. Suddenly, out of the blue, came the Arab world and declared, as a collective, a conditional readiness to recognize Israel.