After 60 years, isn’t it time for a new vision?

• Last Updated: May 08. 2008 11:13PM UAE / May 8. 2008 7:13PM GMT

With the boom, bang and flash of a massive fireworks display in Jerusalem, Israelis have started their celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state. The occasion is an awkward, perhaps irreconcilable, commemoration of opposites.

For Jews around the world, the establishment of a state in the Levant represents historical fulfilment, a return for many to the land of their fathers. For Palestinians, of course, it is the catastrophe that saw some 700,000 sisters, brothers, mothers and sons forced from the land of their fathers. Anyone who marks this event without acknowledging both the legitimate tears of rejoicing it arouses among Jews and the legitimate tears of sorrow it causes among Palestinians, has failed to grasp the profound events of 1948 and all that has occurred since.

Since David Ben-Gurion declared an independent Jewish state in 1948 — six months after the United Nations voted to partition what was then Palestine into Jewish and Arab states — the fates of Palestinians and the Jewish state have followed sharply divergent paths.

Israel is now a modern nation, with a parliamentary democracy, a hi-tech economy and nuclear weapons. At least four Israeli companies rank in the top 10 of the Nasdaq stock exchange, and the country of slightly more than seven million people enjoys a per capita GDP of $28,800.

Palestinians, on the other hand, are mired in poverty and chaos, largely due to the occupation. The economic and political institutions of the occupied territories are in a shambles, and the 4.1 million Palestinians living there have a per capita GDP of $1,100. More than six million others are scattered around the world, some residing in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon and others sitting in Gulf boardrooms.

Despite these differences, each side is beset by political malaise and riven by festering internal divisions that, in their consuming obsession with each other, have gone unattended.

For its part, Israel has yet to define its borders. It has no constitution. It has no agreed-upon legal definition of a Jew. It is divided along many fault lines: between rich and poor, Arab and Jew, secular and religious, Jews of European descent and those of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

In the clash of nationalist aspirations that has been under way since 1948, Jews have a state and Palestinians do not. It is no longer clear that their fates are intertwined, since Israel is wealthy enough to sustain a low-intensity war that annually costs far fewer lives than the number of Israelis who die on the nation’s roads. The question now is how Palestinians will one day be able to mark the birth of their own state too.

In this struggle between unequals the first place to begin is with the United States and Israel’s other friends in the West. Until they understand that withholding pressure on Israel has led it to compromise less rather than more, the peace process will remain a cruel hoax.

The next reckoning belongs to the nations of the Arab Middle East. They must recognise that Israel is here to stay. It is moral, political and intellectual folly for the Arab world to continue hoping for its demise, just as it is wilfully blind not to recognise what Israel has accomplished in its 60 years despite the ongoing conflict.

Keen to sidestep the obvious solution to the legitimate nationalist ambitions of both Jews and Palestinians — two states, side-by-side along the 1967 armistice line — voices from both sides have reached to the bygone past for a solution. Some right-wing Israelis call for the establishment of Jordan as a Palestinian state and the transfer to it of all Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Some Palestinians call for a binational state where Israelis and Palestinians battle it out for power at the ballot box. For them, the ultimate Palestinian weapon is the womb, since Palestinian birthrates outpace those of Israelis.

Still other Palestinians hold that with enough military pressure, Israel’s Jews will become demoralised and give up. Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, declared last month: “If Israel has 200 nuclear warheads, the Palestinian people have 200,000 suicide bombers, waiting to blow themselves up.” This is morally and politically bankrupt and, like the other obsolete proposals, wishful thinking.

Starting on Monday and continuing through all of next week, this newspaper will examine how other Palestinians and Israelis view their present and their future, as well as their past. In stories from the United States and Europe, as well as from across the Middle East, you will hear voices that underscore the need for a new vision in a conflict that has been with us for far too long, and that has been inhibiting our collective political and economic development.