2014 year of sinking hopes for peace

In rewinding the year just ended, 2014 will go down in history as one in which prospects for lasting Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East sank to distressingly new lows. It was capped Dec. 29 when the U.N. Security Council narrowly rejected a Palestinian resolution calling for peace with Israel within a year and an end to Israel’s occupation by 2017 through the creation of two independent states: Israel and Palestine.

Pessimists therefore will see 2015 as another year of further erosion and additional threats to the security and stability of the region. Optimists, like us, however, can view the tragedies of 2014 as strong incentives to change course to move seriously to negotiated settlement to end decades and centuries of animosities and bloodshed.

To be sure, despair, dashed hopes, tragedies and intransigence characterized much of 2014. To wit:

In April, U.S.-brokered talks led by Secretary of State John Kerry collapsed after failure to reach any settlement before a self-imposed deadline.

In the summer, rockets fired from Gaza into Israel led to a 50-day conflict — Operation Protective Edge — in which 72 Israelis and more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed and large swaths of the Gaza Strip were reduced to rubble.

In November, Palestinian terrorists used guns, meat axes and knives to kill a group of worshippers at a Jerusalem mosque. It was the most deadly terror attack in the Israeli capital in about seven years.

Then, earlier this week two days before the start of 2015, the U.N. Security Council narrowly rejected the resolution from Jordan that called for occupied East Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine, an end to Israeli settlements and resolution of the prickly issue of Palestinian prisoner releases.

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD

Clearly, the effort to move forward after so many setbacks will neither be easy nor speedy. It must start with both sides understanding and learning from several realities.

First, passage of the Jordanian resolution would have steamrolled over pledges in signed agreements between Israelis and Palestinians to settle their conflicts solely through mutual negotiations, not through third-party fiat. Had it passed, the resolution would have served as a lightning rod for even heightened conflict as both Israel and its intimate ally, the United States, both vigorously opposed it.

Another reality that Israel and, by extension, the U.S. can ill afford to ignore is the growing international momentum behind sovereign Palestinian statehood.

In recent months, several European parliaments have adopted nonbinding motions calling for the formal recognition of Palestine. In this week’s U.N. vote on the statehood resolution, such long-standing and staunch U.S. allies as the United Kingdom and France snubbed America by not opposing the resolution.

Those nations and many others have come to realize, as we pointed out last month on this page, that demographics within Israel necessitate some strong geopolitical soul-searching.

With the number of Arabs living in Israel soon to eclipse the number of Jews living there, the democratic Jewish state will become one in name only if it continues to deny a majority of its residents equal protections under the law.

A critical turning point in the drama will play out in March, when Israeli voters go to the polls to elect a prime minister. We would hope that candidates shape their campaigns on viable means to reignite the peace process with a commitment toward strengthening the Jewish state while providing Palestinians a stronger sense of legitimacy and autonomy in their homelands.