Henry Siegman: Can Kerry Rescue a Two-State Peace Accord?
▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-siegman/can-kerry-rescue-a-twosta_b_2999701.html
John Kerry must bear in mind that the only painful compromise that was ever made by either party was Arafat’s decision not to seek the return of Palestinian territory that was lost to Israel in the war of 1948 when Arab armies invaded the newborn state.
It was not an apologist for the Palestinians but Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, who when recently challenged to defend his claims for the importance of the Oslo Accords (for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) said the following: “Before Oslo, the Palestinian state’s size should have been according to the 1947 ... UN map [about 44 percent of Palestine]. In Oslo, Arafat moved from the 1947 map to the 1967 one. He gave up on 22 percent of the West Bank. I don’t know any Arab leader [does he know an Israeli leader?] who would give up 2 or 3 percent. He gave up 22 percent.”
Peres was mistaken. Arafat did not give up 22 percent of the West Bank but much more: 22 percent of Palestine—fully 50 percent of the territories recognized in the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 as the legitimate patrimony of the Palestinian people. And instead of acknowledging that this concession was a gut-wrenching one-sided Palestinian contribution to peace, Peres described it as “our [i.e., Peres’s] greatest achievement.”
..if the UN’s Partition Resolution of 1947 lost its legal standing when Arab countries rejected it, as Likud ideologues claim, then the State of Israel, whose Declaration of Independence cites the UN Partition Plan as the source of its legitimacy, is also left without international legitimacy.