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Take the identities of the initiative's authors. They presented themselves as independent Israeli and Palestinian public figures, intellectuals and writers. Not so. On the Israeli side this was true — the initiating group included some prominent opposition politicians, intellectuals and writers. On the Palestinian side, however, the picture is very different: The chief Palestinian initiator, Yasser Abed-Rabbo, is a former Palestinian Authority minister of information and culture. Moreover, at the Geneva unveiling of the proposal last month, a letter from Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, generally supporting the initiative, was read, and a number of Palestinian ministers also attended the ceremony. In truth, the Geneva Accord is a document endorsed by part of the Israeli opposition and most of the Palestinian governing establishment. This is not a document originating in both "civil societies."
The initiators present the document as signaling an explicit Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. There is nothing of the sort in the document. There is a vague reference in the preamble to the Jewish right to a state, but nowhere does it say that this state will be in Israel; it could be in Uganda. Since the root cause of the conflict lies in the unwillingness of Arabs to accept Israel as a Jewish state, many Israelis feel that the initiators were far from candid.
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To this unease is added the fact that the Geneva document stipulates that not only would Palestinian refugees of 1948 be entitled to compensation, which seems reasonable to most Israelis, but Arab countries in the region would also receive compensation from Israel for the years they have "hosted" the refugees. Given the cynical use many Arab countries made of the Palestinian refugees in the decades of the conflict, this seems to many a bit too much — especially as it was never mentioned in the PR campaign preceding the final publication of the initiative.
One can understand why the Palestinian leadership, in which Abed-Rabbo has played a central role, feels that it has to dig itself out of the hole in which it found itself after years of involvement in terrorism and suicide bombing. It should not come as a surprise, however, that many Israelis — including those ready to make considerable concessions — feel that with the Geneva initiative, they have been taken for a ride by the Palestinian propaganda machine and some willful — or naive — Israeli accomplices.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-avineri4jan04,1,837442.story
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