Syria: “There Is No Place for Israel in Our Natural Future”

Hundreds of Palestinian residents of Syria tried to storm Israel’s border for the second time in three weeks yesterday to mark “Naksa Day,” the Arabic term for Israel’s 1967 victory over the Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies. The Syrian government’s interest in allowing them to reach the border, normally a closed military zone, is obvious. Bashar al-Assad hoped to distract attention from his ongoing massacre of pro-democracy protesters. But what were the Palestinians themselves trying to achieve?

To Western journalists and diplomats, the answer is equally obvious. The goal was to increase pressure on Israel to accede to a Palestinian state in the 1967 lines. But according to Dr. Sabri Saidam, a former Palestinian communications minister and self-described Internet guru, that isn’t what Palestinians themselves are saying.

Young Palestinians, he asserted in an interview with Haaretz last week, are more committed than ever before, but most of them “are not talking about the peace process or the Arab [peace] initiative or the 1967 borders.” So if they have no interest in the peace process or the 1967 borders, what exactly are they committed to?

Their commitment, Saidam enthusiastically declared, is epitomized by the young Syrian-Palestinian–one of hundreds who successfully breached Israel’s borders on May 15–who triumphantly made it all the way to Jaffa. In short, young Palestinians aren’t committed to a state in the 1967 lines; what they are seeking is a “return” to pre-1967 Israel–towns like Jaffa and Haifa and Safed. And as everyone knows, allowing 4.8 million Palestinians to “return” to pre-1967 Israel would spell the demise of the Jewish state.

That, of course, is also the official position of Israel’s Palestinian “peace partner,” as I detailed here. But even if you assume, as Western journalists and diplomats blithely do, that this is a mere bargaining chip which the Palestinian leadership plans to sacrifice for a state in the 1967 lines, how do they imagine any Palestinian leader will be able to do so when his public views “returning” to pre-1967 Israel not as a bargaining chip, but as the primary goal?

In a recent column on Naksa Day in the Syrian government newspaper Al-Baath, columnist Ahmad Hassan summarized the goal bluntly:

This is not the “Middle East conflict”; it is the Israeli-Arab conflict. It is not a border conflict . . . it is a struggle for survival. . . . Neither we nor the entire region has a natural future in the shadow of Israeli existence, and there is no place for Israel in our natural future or that of the region.

Indeed, this point is inherent in the very name “Naksa Day.” The word naksa means “setback.” And what goal was set back when the Arabs failed to defeat Israel in 1967, at a time when it controlled none of what are now termed the “occupied territories”? Clearly, the goal of eradicating pre-1967 Israel.

Not all Arabs still want to turn the clock back to the days before Israel existed. But a great many do. And that’s precisely why Palestinians have said “no” to every offer of statehood since 1947.