A new approach.

Byline: Chibli Mallat 

Summary: For 100 years, the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict has been elusive. This is because the equation was set wrong: it was all about land, settlements and borders, conceived under a zero-sum paradigm. What Palestinians (or Arabs, or Muslims) gain, Jews lose, and vice-versa, down to the wire.

FIRST PERSON Chibli Mallat

For 100 years, the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict has been elusive. This is because the equation was set wrong: it was all about land, settlements and borders, conceived under a zero-sum paradigm. What Palestinians (or Arabs, or Muslims) gain, Jews lose, and vice-versa, down to the wire.

There is no reason why the paradigm will not go on for another 100 years, similarly marked with violence, limited and daily throughout, massive at times in full-fledged wars and atrocities. The equation is wrong, and needs to be changed.

I propose a new paradigm to be started at Annapolis. Call it the egalitarian paradigm, or the human-rights paradigm, or the Kantian paradigm, or the Maimonides/Abu al-Ala paradigm, for the two towering figures of humanism in the classical Islamic-Jewish age. I'll call it the E-paradigm for short, E for empathy and for a new generation marked by the democracy of e-mails and the Internet.

The E-paradigm says land, settlements and borders are much less meaningful than what every individual gets out of them in terms of rights and entitlements. It says when you hurt, I hurt, and vice-versa. It says human rights come first. It says the law which applies is wrong when not conceived as a rule which both Arabs and Jews can respect and defend. It says there is no joy, genuinely no joy, when I make the other suffer, and no future when I do not mourn his loss as grievously as mine.

Where to start the E-paradigm shift in the Arab-Israeli conflict?

There are for our respective societies as many entry points as there are human interests, from learning the other's language and literature to the common conception of a high-technology breakthrough. The paradigm, for a leadership which believes in nonviolence and the sanctity of human rights, takes the shape of the law. It is much more than the law, but this is where I feel most comfortable and expert as a lawyer, and lawyers in leadership need to support our respective societies in formulating the legal paradigm of human rights that goes with the corresponding paradigm shifts in culture, the economy and politics.

The entry point could be more spectacular, as in the conception of a mutually re-enforcing common agenda in the Annapolis conference. The leadership may be incapable of that quality leap at the moment, and the design of an agenda that does not mention borders, settlements and land is not easy to conceive of. But we can start shifting it with new mental boundaries informed by the Empathy paradigm.

The paradigm for which Annapolis could be remembered, if it wants to remain in history, can take a common statement that reads along the following lines: "We - Israelis and Arab, Jews, Muslims and Christians - believe that our attachment to our common humanity is more important than the real and difficult issues that have divided us over a century on the land of Israel-Palestine. In our search for a lasting peace, we declare that attachment to land, settlements and borders should recede before the enhancement of security, dignity, freedom of movement and other basic human rights understood under a universal standard; that the means to peace starts with our resolve to foreswear violence, and to work together in empathy so that the suffering of any one of us will be felt as the suffering of all. We will be seeking in this conference a common legal standard, rooted in nonviolence, and which, as individuals and communities, we can start putting to the test."

Chibli Mallat is professor of law in Utah and Lebanon, and a candidate for the Lebanese presidency.

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