Questions and Answers about the Geneva Accord

These questions may arise when you take this to your local city council or seek to put it on the ballot or seek endorsement by community groups .

1. Who Negotiated the Accord?

Answer: The Accord is NOT a governmental agreement—for that reason some prefer to call it the Geneva Initiative. The key negotiators, however, were representatives of their respective governments who had come close to agreement at Taba in January of 2001. After the election of Ariel Sharon, the negotiations did not resume on an official basis. But the negotiators from both sides decided to continue to negotiate even without official authorization to do so, and the Geneva Accord is what they agreed upon in the Fall of 2003. The key negotiators were Yossi Beilin (the former Minister of Justice in the Ehud Barak cabinet, who is also credited with major responsibility for negotiating the Oslo Accord) and Yasser Abed Rabbo (former Minister of Information of the Palestinian Authority).

Israelis involved in negotiating and promoting this initiative include: former Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak; Brigadier General (res.) Giora Inbar, a former division commander in Lebanon; Brigadier General (res.) Gideon Sheffer, former director of the IDF Personnel Branch and deputy director of the National Security Council; Brigadier General (res.) Shlomo Brom, former head of the strategy staff; Colonel (res.) Shaul Arieli; former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin; Member of Knesset (Labor) Amram Mitzna; Member of Knesset (Labor) and former Speaker of the Knesset Avraham Burg; Former Minister of Immigrant Absorption and Member of Knesset (Labor) Yuli Tamir; Member of Knesset (Meretz) and former Minister of Agriculture Haim Oron; Member of Knesset (Meretz) and former Minister of Education Yossi Sarid; Professor Aryeh Arnon (a leader of Peace Now); former Member of Knesset (Likud) Nehama Ronen; authors Amoz Oz, David Grossman, and Zvia Greenfield; Jerusalem expert Dr. Menachem Klein; and economist Yoram Gabay.

Palestinians involved in negotiating and promoting this initiative include: former Minister of Information and Culture Yasser Abed Rabbo; former Minister of Tourism Nabeel Kassis; Palestinian Legislative Council members Qadoura Fares and Mohamed Horani (associated with the Fatah/Tanzim); Samih al-Abed; Bashar Jum'a; Dr. Nazmi Shuabi; Gheith al-Omri (from the Negotiations Support Unit); Jamal Zakut; Prisoners Affairs Minister Hisham Abdel Raziq; Ghadi Jarei (member of the Prisoners Committee and Fatah); Nazmi Jub'a; and General Zoheir Manasra (former governor of Jenin and head of Preventative Security in the West Bank).

2. If it is not signed by the respective governments, why is it so significant?

Answer: The Accord represents the agreement of leaders who were previously, and may again be, in the position of representing their respective states. The Accord shows that an agreement is in fact possible between the two sides, and that both sides are willing to make major concessions for peace. Any talk of there being "no-one to talk to" or "Palestinians always missing the opportunity" or "Israelis being more interested in expanding territory than in peace" can be put to rest—the Accord shows that significant forces in both societies are ready for peace, and only now need the help of the international community to get the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to sign on. Supporters of this agreement in both Palestine and Israel have asked us to do what we can to get our own communities and governments mobilized to support the Accord.

3. Why hasn't the Palestinian Authority publicly embraced and endorsed this agreement?

Answer: Unofficially they have made it known that these are the terms that would be acceptable. Officially, they have not because they say that they fear that should they do so, the Sharon government would seek to make these Accords the starting point for negotiations, whereas the Palestinians have accepted them as the final agreement, not a starting point.

4. Why hasn't the Israeli government publicly embraced and endorsed this agreement?

Answer: A significant section of the current Sharon government is more interested in protecting and expanding existing settlements than in achieving peace. Some have explicitly said that peace is not their highest priority nor the goal of the version of Zionism they support. Many believe that a withdrawal of Israel to the pre-67 borders would either be a betrayal of Israeli security interests or a betrayal of God's promise to the Jewish people to give all of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. They are wrong on both counts. Most military experts agree that the price of holding on to the territories has been to weaken Israeli security. The Accord presents adequate terms for preserving security, including early warning posts in the West Bank, and a Multinational Force to protect both countries from outside attack. As to God's promise, it is in the context of a Torah which demands of the Jews that they "love the stranger" and pursue justice, and repeated warnings that all claims to the Land of Israel are totally contingent upon the Jewish people living a life according to Torah and its message of love and justice—and there is not a word about "sovereignty" in Torah. There is no Torah prohibition against giving the Land of Israel to another people to build its society and exercise political sovereignty, while retaining for the Jews the claim to the Land on religious grounds, which claim is being exercised precisely in sharing the land the way that the Accord calls for.

5. What is the point of trying to get Congress, or state legislators, or city councils to endorse a resolution that has no chance of ever getting passed in a conservative, pro-Ariel Sharon dominated Congress and with a very right-wing White House?

Answer: Our goal is not to get a particular piece of legislation passed, but to change the public discourse about the Middle East. By introducing the Geneva Accord into the public conversation, we hope to strengthen those forces in the U.S., Israel and Palestine who would want a peace settlement but who have felt increasingly depressed and despairing as the public conversation has been dominated by the war-makers and haters and those who put forward demands that are guaranteed to enflame the anger or fear of the other side of the conflict.

As public discourse starts to reflect this perspective, those who have a sincere interest in peace will increasingly insist on these specific terms, or some close equivalent. Policy makers who previously feared taking the risks associated with a stance that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine will become more and more open to considering a path to peace that involves these elements, and that could ultimately shape the outcome in the Middle East.

6.  Why should people in the rest of the world have any right to shape what happens in Israel/Palestine? Isn't this a violation of their sovereignty?

Answer: Israel was created by a vote of the United Nations, and as an act of affirmative action which imposed on the Palestinian people a refuge for world Jewry with a principle of "right of return" for Jews that was not granted to non-Jews. Creating Israel as a state for a particular ethnic/religious group, the UN participated in creating a situation which has led to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and their subsequent families now number over three million people, many of them living in some of the worst conditions that exist any place on this planet. The peoples of the world have a right and obligation to rectify the unjust consequences of their previous acts by creating a Palestinian state that encompasses almost all of the West Bank and Gaza. The UN has passed numerous resolutions calling for ways to rectify the injustice done to the Palestinian people. Israel and the U.S. have blocked the implementation of these resolutions.

7. Does the Geneva Accord abrogate the Right of Return for Palestinians?

Answer: The Geneva Accord is meant to support the continued existence of Israel as a state with special responsibilities and "right of return" for Jews, and Palestine as a state with special responsibilities and "right of return" for Palestinians. It is based on the following reading of the political map: any calling for a Right of Return for Palestinians to the State of Israel at this point would be perceived by Israelis as essentially calling for an end to the Jewish character of the State of Israel, and would doom all the other points of an agreement, and hence would guarantee continuation of the Occupation indefinitely. Those who claim to care about the fate of the Palestinian people, we believe, must be willing to bite the bullet and accept a two state solution, or else condemn the Palestinian people to many more decades of suffering. We in the Tikkun Community are motivated to support this agreement both because it is a way for Israel to achieve lasting security and because it will end the suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people.

We believe that the Jewish people's historical experience as a minority within states of the world and the oppression it faced in those circumstances (not to mention genocide and anti-Jewish racism) has given the Jews a good reason to want to have a state where they remain the majority for at least some (time-limited) period into the future (say, until anti-Jewish racism has been wiped out of the collective consciousness of the human race). Similarly, a Palestinian state would be giving special considerations and rights to Palestinians all around the world who wanted to return to it. While we believe that minorities in the State of Israel should be given full democratic rights and that all forms of discrimination should end, and similarly that Jewish citizens of Palestine should have full rights of citizens, the Geneva Accord is clearly an alternative approach not in agreement with those who  support a bi-national state.

In an interview with Tikkun, Yossi Beilin explained that he believed that the State of Israel would eventually take in tens of thousands of Palestinians, but not hundreds of thousands, and that this decision would be made by the State of Israel and would not be coerced by this agreement. His explanation for why the Israeli public would never support a massive Right of Return for Palestinians to Israel: this agreement is meant to have as its outcome that there will be a state with a majority of Palestinians and another state with a majority of Jews, and that Jews would not accept as an outcome that there would be two states with a Palestinian majority and no state with a Jewish majority.

To understand the logic here, imagine what Palestinians would say if the Jews of the world decided that they wanted to retain the Land of Israel in a different way: by getting 3 million Jews from the Diaspora to move to the new Palestinian state and ensure that there would be a Jewish majority in both Israel and Palestine. Reasonably, we believe, Palestinians would object and seek to have one state that was identified with Palestinian culture and history. For that reason, we support a special Right of Return for Palestinians to the Palestinian state, even though that might discriminate against non-Palestinians seeking to become citizens of this state, just as we support the special right of Jews to a Right of Return to Israel.

8. Should principled people compromise on a Right of Return?

Answer: There is a humanitarian reason to compromise, described in our previous answer. As to the principled point, the discussion about whether there is in fact a Right of Return for all peoples who have been unfairly removed from their lands, and how long it lasts, is in considerable dispute. People in the Tikkun Community have a wide variety of different perspectives on that as a philosophical issue. Here are some of the questions about which there does not yet exist any consensus:

a. From whence do we deduce a "Right" of Return, or is it based on the United Nations resolution called the Declaration of Universal Human Rights? Does that resolution have a higher status than other UN resolutions, say that which created the State of Israel? What is the nature of this higher status?  Is that declaration something that every human being knows to be true independently, because of our moral intuition, or is it positive law, and who is subject to it?   What is the nature of this right exactly?

b. Is there a time limit on the Right of Return? Do Jews whose families remember their previous lives in Spain have a right to return? in Roman-conquered Palestine? or does it only apply to people who were themselves living in a given place? to their children who were born elsewhere? to whom? If there is a time limit, when do the Palestinian people lose that right?

c. Is there a right of return to a home that no longer exists? For example, do people who have been forced out of a given neighborhood because the government decided to "URBAN RENEWAL" that neighborhood have a right of return? If not, why not? If so, what is the nature of the right? Do they have the right to the piece of land on which their house once stood if now there is an apartment building? What exactly do they have a right to? What is the nature of the right of those who are now living on the place where someone previously was expelled, if the person now living there was not personally involved in the original expulsion—does that person have an obligation to the one who was expelled, and what exactly is the obligation?

d. Is there a right of return of Native Americans? How might they make their claims? Is there some reason why Americans should give greater attention to the right of return of people who were expelled from their land in our own country than to those who were expelled from their land in some other country—or not?

e. Is there any land on earth which has come to those who have inherited it in a way that did not originally involve theft, murder, and expropriation? If so, what is the story of that land?

9.  Do you really believe that peace can be established through a set of agreements like this?

Answer: No. Peace will require a change of heart on the parts of both peoples. These legal arrangements are a good first step. Any lasting peace will require an inner transformation, and the Geneva Accord does not address that in sufficient depth. That is one reason why we continue to support our Resolution for Middle East Peace, which does seek to address these deeper issues. But the Geneva Accord makes possible the resolution of the killing that is the number one obstacle to real peace. Once it is in place, the Geneva Accord must be followed by the kind of thinking about reconciliation and repentance that have been central to Tikkun Community's perspective.

10. What can we do to help support this effort in the coming years?

Answer: The question correctly but unfortunately implies that the solution will not happen in the next few months, and that the position it articulates will be relevant for many years to come. So here is what you can do to help us:

Become knowledgeable about the situation. Create a study group with your friends and use Rabbi Lerner's book Healing Israel/Palestine as a way to get a stronger foundation. Then study the other books listed at the end of that  book. Then, get involved with the Tikkun Community, or with any of the many other worthwhile peace oriented organizations listed with contact information at the end of that book. We do not have the view that there is only one way to build peace in the Middle East, and we wish to be supportive to all those individuals and organizations that seek to bring peace in a spirit that validates the legitimacy of both Israelis and Palestinians and seeks not to have one triumph over the other, but both live in peace and mutual cooperation.  We would welcome any such organization to endorse and refer their friends to sign this petition at this site.

Seek to get the Geneva Accord  endorsed by locally elected officials, your city council or state legislature, your Congressional representatives, local churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, social change organizations, civic organizations, student bodies of high schools and colleges in your region, and anyone else who has any influence or constituency. Get friends, neighbors, coworkers, members of your church or synagogue or mosque or ashram to sign it. The discussion it provokes, even if it doesn't get the endorsement, will be extremely important as a way of providing public education. Remember, the goal is the change of consciousness—not getting an endorsement per se—because it is the change of consciousness that is the only real step toward making a change in the reality. So don't sacrifice the coherency of the perspective for momentary gain in getting more people to support it by playing down the vision of our common humanity which underlies this whole approach.

Ask anyone seeking your vote to take a stand on the Geneva Accord. Ask candidates running for President, or their local representatives, to discuss their stand on this Accord. Ask political parties to take a stand on this Accord. Get slates of candidates who will be elected to the national conventions of the political parties to tell where they stand on this Accord and ask them to promise to make it an issue at their party conventions—or at least to make sure that we are invited to present our perspective at their convention.

Join the Tikkun Community, and help us create a local Tikkun Community in your area. Read the Core Vision at www.tikkun.org, and if you get excited about its vision,  please join and help us make it happen. The organization is the vehicle to get the Geneva Accord into public discourse. We will work cooperatively with any other organization that has a similar agenda, and build coalitions wherever possible.