Pretoria - There are no prospects for peace between Israel and Palestine as long as Israel feels no pain, Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg, Steven Friedman said on Wednesday.
It was a well-known fact in the study of conflict resolution that there had to be some sort of balance of power between two sides to a conflict before they moved towards peace, he said at a seminar organised by the United Nations, the department of international relations and cooperation and the Swedish government.
There had to be a “mutually-hurting stalemate” to push both sides to negotiate peace, Friedman said.
But he contended that this stalemate did not exist because Israel was enjoying total immunity in the international community for what he said were its violations of international law through its continued occupation of Palestine territory.
He said he was unaware of any other state which enjoyed such impunity, especially among major powers. There was nothing which Israel did that would provoke even the mildest rebuke from some quarters of the international community.
He blasted Western states for violating their own liberal democratic principles of free speech and free association by criminalising the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that calls for isolation of Israel.
Many were doing so on the basis that the BDS movement was anti-Semitic. This was like criticising the anti-apartheid movement as being anti-white, he said.
“This has created an absurd situation where we oppose people for using violent methods, but when they use peaceful methods, we opposed that too,” he said.
Friedman said the only way of changing the balance of power was to end the impunity of the state of Israel for its violations of international law.
As long as Israel suffered no political or economic consequences for its actions, there were no prospects for peace, he said, urging major international powers to become even-handed in dealing with the conflict, rather than supporting one side, Israel.
Because of the impunity of Israel and the imbalance of power between the two sides, “we are probably further from a resolution of the conflict than any time in the last 70 years,” he said.
This was also true because Israeli politics were more conservative now than they had ever been. The old political and military establishment from the early days of the state had been displaced by a new establishment that was not interested in peace with Palestine, he said.
Leila Shahid agreed with Friedman and said she had tried but failed to persuade European powers to be even-handed when she was Palestine’s ambassador to the European Union. She accused them off “complicity and cowardice”.
Shahid said to avoid controversy she had not asked the EU to support the BDS movement, but had rather just asked them to implement their own policies and principles.
Israel is not represented at the seminar.
African News Agency