Sari Nusseibeh’s and Ami Ayalon’s declaration of principles is strewn with potholes and political pitfalls. For example, the fiction of “two states for two peoples,” that is mentioned in the sense that in the Palestinian state there will be no Jews while Israel will be a sort of bi-national state. For example, the fiction of an “end to the conflict” (over which the Camp David meeting fell apart), as if it were enough for a pair of words to put an immediate end to a national, religious, economic, cultural, historical and demographic dispute. However, the main stumbling block that makes it hopeless is in fact cultural, and this is not readily apparent.

In the entire history of the Arab world, no major decision has ever been made under pressure or coercion from below, as a result of citizens organizing and compelling their leaders. Even the Koran states that disobedience to the ruler is a serious offense, all the Arab revolutions were military, and always replaced one elite with another. That is why the theory behind the signature campaign,”When we come with hundreds of thousands of signatures to our leaders, they will have to act”, is not realistic, mainly in the Palestinian world after three years of Intifada. If the Nusseibeh-Ayalon motto,”now it is in our hands”,were possible, the face of the Arab and Palestinian world would look entirely different.

What we have are autocratic-centralist regimes and conservative-traditional mobilized societies whose motto is “stand beside the wall,” i.e., if you always stand on the side of the regime, you will benefit.

A Nusseibeh-Ayalon type signature campaign is liable to be considered as undermining the Arab regimes, as being even more defiant than the Oslo defiance and the new Middle East. This is not just not standing beside the wall, this is an attempt to break the wall. If, today, a certain civilian formula is forced on Arab rulers from within, then tomorrow, God forbid, it will also be possible to force democracy and civil liberties on them. This is not in the interests of any Arab ruler, including Arafat. Moreover, even if Arafat agreed with the Sari Nusseibeh-Ayalon ideas, he would most likely oppose them because of their inherent defiance of him.

That is why this symmetric way of looking at the issue, Sari Nusseibeh versus Ayalon, Israel versus Palestine, is misleading. On one side is a democratic western state of the first world, where the administration and the regime are elected and are replaced and the voter is courted and there is responsibility toward the voter, contrasted with an eastern Palestinian society where the prevailing ethos is traditional, where there is a relationship of “bay’a,” an oath of allegiance between the ruled and the ruler. This signature campaign is acceptable and effective in Jewish society but is alien and requires personal courage in Arab society.

Even if tens of thousands of signatures are collected on the Palestinian side in favor of relinquishing the right of return to Israel, it is unlikely they will kindle any sort of process among the leaders. Whereas the signatures on the Israeli side, in favor, for example, of a full withdrawal, may have a motivating effect (as already happened in the matter of the withdrawal from Lebanon or the separation fence, which were influenced by public pressure). Popular pressure can therefore be effective on one side of the equation, the Israeli side, whereas on the other side a vagueness with no readiness to commit will continue to prevail, as has been the practice of the Palestinian Authority for a decade now. The Israeli public is likely to conclude from this internal-Palestinian cultural mechanism that the Palestinian regime does not want peace, and so it will happen that precisely those who want to bring peace will be the ones who push it further away.

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