Whatever its shortcomings, the Geneva Initiative unveiled on 1 December 2003 is a significant development in the context of the decades old Arab-Israeli conflict. It is a peace plan which originated outside government. Simply put, it is a civil society endeavour even if its two leading protagonists, Yasser Abed Rabbo and Yossi Beilin were once Ministers in the Palestinian and Israeli governments respectively. Though not the first effort of its kind _there was the Gush Shalom Peace Proposal in 2001 and the Ayalon-Nusseibeh Statement of Principles of 2002 - the Geneva Initiative has attracted a great deal of public attention. It has demonstrated to the world what civil society can do for peace at a time when governments appear to have abdicated their role of protecting the well-being of their citizens.

The Geneva Initiative has also attempted to grapple with most of the controversial issues dividing Palestinians and Israelis, including issues such as territorial borders, the status of Jerusalem, the time-table for ending occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and so on. In some instances it has gone into great detail in spelling out how the accord would be implemented. For these reasons, the Initiative is different from the Oslo Accord and the Road Map, both of which avoid taking clear, unambiguous positions on issues such as Jerusalem.

However, the Initiative is also deeply flawed in many ways. While it offers some sort of "choice of permanent place of residence" to Palestinian refugees, it denies them `the right of return' - an inalienable human right contained in various UN Resolutions on Palestine. This raises a fundamental question about the future of some 4 million Palestinian refugees scattered in different countries. The Initiative also envisages a non-militarised Palestinian state which would have a police force but no armed forces. In a situation in which Israel is armed with nuclear teeth and possesses one of the best equipped and best trained armies in the world, a Palestine without soldiers and weapons is totally unacceptable not only to the Palestinian people but to the Arab masses as a whole.

Unless these and other anomalies are addressed, the Geneva Initiative will not win broad based support from the Palestinian people. But as a civil society enterprise, it has opened the way for other similar moves in the future which may come closer to fulfilling the aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis who yearn for a just peace.

6 December 2003.