by Robert E. Hunter
For Secretary of State John Kerry, the good news this past week is that he has finally got Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to agree to talk directly about peace. The bad news is that Kerry now has the thankless task of delivering the [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
For Secretary of State John Kerry, the good news this past week is that he has finally got Israel and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to agree to talk directly about peace. The bad news is that Kerry now has the thankless task of delivering the goods.
The Secretary of State is wasting no time in getting started. He has asked Ambassador Martin Indyk to coordinate the process for the United States. Indyk was US ambassador to Israel (twice), assistant secretary of state for the region and senior official on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. He knows the issues and the dramatis personae and is committed to a two-state solution. He has the needed confidence of key people on Capitol Hill and in the American Jewish community. His first test, however, will be to establish credibility with the Palestinians as an honest broker.
The negotiations will be unusual because the most viable solution is well-known, as it should be after 34 years’ efforts. (Yours truly was NSC representative when the talks first began in May 1979). Most diplomats who have been involved in the peace process agree that the best parameters for a two-state solution were laid out by President Bill Clinton in December 2000 (found here). A more detailed variation is the so-called Geneva Accord, designed by some former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
By these formulae, Israel would gain sovereignty over portions of the West Bank that include most of the Jewish settlements and swap an equivalent amount of Israeli land to the Palestinian state. Palestine would effectively be demilitarized and security arrangements would be devised. Jerusalem would become the capital of both states. Some compensation would be made for Palestinian refugees from the 1947-48 war. Arab states must bless the arrangements and end all calls of war against Israel.
Other matters of consequence include agreement on a political, economic and physical connection between the West Bank and Gaza, one of which can be found here. The Hamas leadership in Gaza must end the conflict with Israel and recognize it as a Jewish state.
NATO forces could be stationed in Palestine to help provide security, including against terrorism. And outsiders need to provide substantial aid and investments to the Palestinian state, to give it a chance to survive and for the people to have a chance at bettering their lives. NATO countries would agree to provide the former (troops) and the West and hopefully rich Arab countries would provide the latter (money). These are small prices to pay for ending this seemingly endless conflict.
The roadmap to peace-with-security is thus complex but relatively clear. Yet there is so far no indication that either side will make the compromises needed to reach an agreement. The corrosive issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is to be put off until later. Whether Israel will let Palestine share Jerusalem as its capital is far from clear. Nor is it clear that the PNA President, Mahmoud Abbas, can deliver on his part of a bargain, given the politics of the West Bank and Gaza.
Secretary Kerry has thus managed to lead the Israeli and Palestinian horses to water, but they so far lack the political will to drink. Nor is it clear that, if the process reaches the point of deal-cutting, President Barak Obama will assume the political onus of asking Israel to make concessions that will not sit well with some of the important domestic constituencies he needs to help him fulfill his legacy, which is in domestic and not foreign policy. He is not yet publicly invested in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, though he has given Secretary Kerry free rein to see what he can achieve. At some point, however, Obama will have to do some heavy lifting. Without his direct and resolute involvement, peace will not be possible. Ideally, he should table the Clinton Parameters as the bottom-line US proposal.
There are thus enough doubts to buttress skepticism that Secretary Kerry’s efforts will succeed. But there are even deeper concerns; the peace process can not take place in a political vacuum. For the PNA, it will be difficult if not impossible to reach any viable agreement with Israel unless Gaza is included, and that depends not just on Hamas’ cooperation (now non-existent), but also on Israel ending Gaza’s economic isolation which, ironically, strengthens Hamas politically.
Israel’s politics will be even more difficult. It faces three major security challenges that do not derive, at least primarily, from the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian agenda. The linchpin of Israel’s security is its treaty with Egypt, which provides reasonable confidence that Israel will not be successfully attacked by conventional forces of any possible Arab coalition. With Egypt’s current political turmoil, there is some question whether the treaty will hold. That is likely, but not guaranteed.
More important, Syria’s civil war has transformed its frontier with Israel from being one of the most stable in the region, based on a modus vivendi Israel reached with the current Syrian president’s father after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to being one of the most uncertain.
Then there is Iran, which many Israelis, including the current government, see as posing a mortal threat if it acquires nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is convinced that Tehran wants to do so and is not far from such a capability, as well as developing an Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that could reach the US. As he said a week ago on American television, he views the government in Iran, even with its new president, Hassan Rouhani (who will be subservient to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) as a “messianic, apocalyptic, extreme regime.”
With the security challenges Israel sees on three fronts, it is hard to believe that it will be politically or psychologically able to make the compromises needed to reach an agreement with the PNA, even though substantial majorities of Israelis and Palestinians want the conflict to be over and done with, so they can get on with their lives in a peace that has eluded them for decades.
This background has led many observers, myself included, to wonder why Secretary Kerry put the Israeli-Palestinian peace process at the top of his Middle East agenda — if not his global agenda. There is a rationale. If it were possible to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, at least some things would improve for the US elsewhere in the region, including limits on Iran’s ability to exploit its relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon and, though the connection is far less substantial, with Hamas in Gaza. The US would be far less likely to be chided by Arab governments over its support for Israel; one recruiting tool used by Islamist terrorists would at least be depreciated; and, not incidentally, America’s much-diminished stature as an effective political force in the region — in the eyes of friend and foe alike — could be refurbished.
But even if the peace process did miraculously lead to an agreement in relatively short order, it would not be enough to meet America’s strategic needs in the region. Leave aside Egypt, which, assuming the treaty with Israel holds, is now less consequential than the Levant or the Persian Gulf. The civil war in Syria is spreading to other parts of the region, where there are deep rivalries between Sunnis and Shiites spurred by the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which toppled a minority Sunni government that had long dominated the Shia majority. This has led Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to try redressing the balance by supporting the Syrian rebels’ attempt to end minority Alawite (Shia) rule and bring the Sunni majority to power, even at the price of a worse bloodbath than now and major gains for Islamist extremists. President Obama, unfortunately, hastily declared two years ago that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go — and the White House repeated this demand this week — without first devising a policy to bring it about or to pursue some other alternative consistent with US interests, either in Syria or more broadly in the region.
Equally consequential for its strategic needs in the Middle East, the US has greeted the election of a new Iranian president with cold indifference, along with pressure from the House Foreign Affairs Committee to increase sanctions rather than make a gesture to the people of Iran. The administration has not signaled readiness to try moving beyond mutual hostility toward mutual accommodation. Nor is it willing to accept an obvious requirement of successful diplomacy: no nuclear deal with Iran is possible unless the US publicly recognizes that Iran, as well as the US, Israel and the Gulf Arabs, have some legitimate security interests.
In short, like Winston Churchill’s famous “pudding” that “lacked a theme”, the US still lacks a strategy in the Middle East that brings all the different elements together and charts a course that can meet America’s national interests throughout the region. Thinking strategically needs to be the first task. The second needs to be setting priorities, where Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking should not be at or even near the top.
Be that as it may, now that Secretary of State Kerry is on the verge of getting the Israelis and Palestinians to at least talk to one another, he and President Obama must turn their attention to the larger canvas. The US cannot profit from moving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process a few inches forward if Washington fails to meet more pressing requirements in the region that demand the coherent, committed, intelligent and strategic engagement of the United States, the only power that can even begin to bring some order out of the rising chaos.
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
The stakes in President Barak Obama’s impending visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan have risen steadily in recent days. It is taking take place, after all, almost immediately following Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip around the region — but not to the same stops [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
The stakes in President Barak Obama’s impending visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan have risen steadily in recent days. It is taking take place, after all, almost immediately following Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip around the region — but not to the same stops on the President’s tour — which, coming so soon after Kerry assumed office, almost inevitably can do little to advance America’s regional agenda. This agenda includes fostering regime change in Syria and ending its civil war; promoting political stability in Egypt and reinforcing its relationship with Israel; gaining Iran’s compliance on the nuclear issue; and setting the stage for a more salubrious course for the so-called Arab spring than has been seen so far, at least in the Near East. On top of that, Kerry had to deal with a complicating comment by the Turkish prime minister: “It is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism, or anti-Semitism, or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.” That slur did nothing to increase Israel’s confidence regarding its neighborhood.
Also inevitably, an unavoidable linkage between President Obama’s trip and the issue of the Iranian nuclear program was reinforced by the administration’s obligatory recitation of its policies before the annual meeting in Washington of AIPAC, “America’s pro-Israel lobby.” Vice President Biden was most dramatic: “President Barack Obama is not bluffing. He is not bluffing. We are not looking for war. We are looking to and ready to negotiate peacefully, but all options, including military force, are on the table.” That is nothing more than Obama has already said, in one way or another. But it comes immediately after the resumption of talks in Kazakhstan between Iran and the so-called “P5+1” countries — the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the European Union. These talks, containing at most a sliver of hope of future progress, were probably just a “time buyer” in any event — especially to get both sides past the Iranian presidential elections in June. But, now, “confidence-building,” assuming that it’s possible, will have to wait for another day.
President Obama’s trip thus does not begin on an upbeat note for America’s overall ambitions in the region. But on one level, that is almost beside the point. This is, after all, the first time he has been to Israel, more than four years into his presidency. The very fact of his going is thus important. A neat parallel was President Anwar Sadat’s almost-hectoring speech to the Israeli Knesset in 1978. At the time, I asked a leading Israeli whether Sadat’s words undercut his message of peace. “The fact that he was standing there in the Knesset,” my interlocutor said, “spoke so loudly I couldn’t hear what he was saying.”
So Obama will be there, underscoring by his presence not just that the US “has Israel’s back,” but also, made necessary by the fact of his trip, that Israel-Palestine negotiations are on his agenda. But what else?
Certainly, given the administration’s declared objective of restarting the moribund Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” — where Kerry has characterized failure as a “catastrophe” — Obama has to address the subject, and do so in more than pro forma terms. Most important is providing a sense of his own personal commitment, assuming that that is his intent, to seeing the process move forward, a highly-elastic term. One observer with about as much experience as anyone, Ambassador Dennis Ross, laid out his own 14 steps for confidence-building in last Sunday’s New York Times. While quite possibly realistic in terms of confidence-building, they are far from confidence-inspiring and are devoid of significant concrete goals, much less an end point, the so-called “final status.” Notably, Ross did not mention the so-called “Clinton Parameters,” of December 2000, which can be viewed here, and which are widely understood to be the only realistic basis for peace and the “two-state solution.”
While nothing is easy in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, the Clinton Parameters compete for the prize: land-swaps would incorporate most West Bank Jewish settlements into Israel; Jerusalem would be the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state; Palestine would be essentially demilitarized, with Israel retaining some residual rights of defense; outside peacekeepers (probably NATO) would be introduced; and arrangements would be made for Palestinian refugees, certainly better than their current circumstances. But 12 years after these sensible ideas were put forward — and 33 years since negotiations began — success is not now even remotely in sight.
Obama’s peace mission — if that is how he sees his Near East trip — will be complicated by Israel’s deep security concerns, most immediately the civil war in Syria. Jerusalem and Damascus have had a tacit agreement since the mid-1970s to prevent a breakdown in their uneasy truce, but that is now in jeopardy. And although Egypt’s continuing commitment to its treaty with Israel, the latter’s geopolitical linchpin, will probably hold, this is not something on which Israel can bet the farm.
And then there is Iran and the nuclear conundrum. Of necessity, Obama will have to repeat, and perhaps even reinforce, what Vice President Biden said to AIPAC. He can express hopes for a peaceful outcome, but he will have to underline, and underline again, the military consequences if Iran does not respond in terms that the US, with Israel at its elbow, has set. This will not be the time or place for the US president to lay out a comprehensive strategy for dealing with Iran, including one essential element that has so far been missing: that the security needs not just of the US and Israel, but also of Iran, must all be on the table. Instead, Obama’s trip will be a time primarily to provide, and provide again, reassurances to Israel, the sine qua non for everything else.
This, of course, will do little to move forward efforts to defuse the time-bomb with Iran. But with those efforts necessarily being on hold until after its June elections, nothing should be expected from the US president, other than some reference to giving diplomacy a chance. But what of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?
An old rule of thumb, based on both the facts and appearance of power, is that US presidents don’t do “fact-finding” or go on “listening tours.” They have mid-level officials to do that. What American presidents are expected to do by both friend (with hope) and foe (with fear), is to lead. Words will not suffice: Obama has already done that in Cairo, Ankara, and Accra with three essays in eloquence that advanced the proposition that hope buttressed by hard work can triumph over experience. Now the world waits to see his Act Two.
There is one thing to do: be bold. Not baby-steps, like those suggested by Dennis Ross — as well as by others over the years — and which have yielded so little for so long. The place to start consists of two steps that go directly to “final status.” First, to endorse in clear-cut terms the Clinton Parameters as the United States’ bottom-line, a formal commitment to a two-state solution — full stop; and second, to promise the diplomatic and other efforts needed to see them through to completion, whatever it takes. I have already argued for the appointment of Bill Clinton as Special Negotiator. Or perhaps the Secretary of State would want to do it, though that would necessarily take him away from the rest of his global duties. But the principle is clear: if the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is ever to succeed — a huge “if” — the US president has to enunciate a concrete, simple, and unambiguous plan, set his seal to it, and be a bull terrier in carrying it through.
Be bold, Mr. President, or it would be better that you stay home.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
To say that President Barack Obama’s visit this spring to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan is the proverbial gamble is an understatement. He may end up (rightly) congratulating himself on his wisdom and courage in taking this step and doing so at this time — and being thus recognized as a truly valid recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize conferred on him 3 years ago. Or, he may deeply regret venturing into such troubled waters and ending up, like so many of his predecessors, with not much to show for his pains in trying to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
In any event, he has now embarked on a course that he must see through to the end or risk making matters worse, possibly for the regional parties and certainly for the reputation of the United States. Yet if he is prepared to do so — with demands that will match anything else in foreign policy that he has done in his presidency — the payoff will be immense, not just in the Levant but throughout the Middle East.
The lack of success in creating a viable Palestinian state, at peace with Israel and with both peoples living in mutual security, is not from a lack of effort from many senior, talented and dedicated people in the 34 years since President Jimmy Carter’s summit at Camp David with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin launched what were then called Autonomy Talks for the Palestinian territories.
Nor is the lack of success in producing what is known as the “two-state solution” a failure of ideas. These have been fussed over for decades, but have come down pretty much to a consensus on a few cardinal points, looking toward “Final Status.” These were best put in a brief statement by President Bill Clinton in December 2000, following the abortive Second Camp David Summit and a scant four weeks before he left office. They can be found here.
In brief, they propose a swap of land between Israel and the West Bank, so that about 80 percent of Jewish settlers on the West Bank would be incorporated into Israel; the state of Palestine would have contiguity (which implies some link to Gaza); Israel could keep troops in the Jordan Valley for a 3-year transitional period, plus long-term warning stations; arrangements would be made for Jerusalem that boil down to there being two capitals in one city with respect for everyone’s religious sites; there could be any one of five Clinton-suggested approaches to dealing with Palestinian refugees, with at least some being admitted into Israel proper; and Palestine would be a “non-militarized state” with an “international force for border security and deterrent purposes.” With a colleague, I later proposed that this “international force” be NATO, and that idea has gained currency.
Compared with the reams of negotiating documents and the years of talk, this is a simple formulation. It is also recognized by almost everyone who has actually been engaged in these negotiations — as I have — as probably the best that can be achieved and a balanced approach from which all can gain and that could, finally, bring the conflict to an end.
These Clinton Parameters, the obvious solution, were advanced 12 years ago, yet the conflict continues. The reason is manifold: part has been a general lack of political will to move forward, especially with the complex — if not tortured — politics in both Israeli and Palestinian societies; part is the natural human difficulty of taking a leap in the dark after decades of stasis; and part is what else has been happening. And it is this “what else has been happening” that Obama cannot avoid addressing during his visit and that will still be there when he departs, no doubt after applying his well-honed skills of inspiration, intelligence, and honest application to tough problems. This will be so even though opinion polling has long shown that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians want the conflict to be over and done with.
Obama will no doubt reassure all parties of US commitment to be engaged until the job is done — and if he is not prepared to “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk”, he should stay home — ; to provide reassurances to Israel about its security and to Palestinians about the importance of what they call justice; and to call on peoples and political leaders to seize this particular moment. This should include a major address to the Knesset and some form of symbolic (as well as substantive) encounter with the Palestinians.
Then to the “what else is happening.” On the Palestinian side, Hamas’ control of Gaza and the on-again, off-again nature of its relations with the Palestinian Authority led by Mohammed Abbas on the West Bank are far from propitious, if not now impossible to resolve. Abbas will also insist, once again, that the US president get the Israelis to stop settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to ease significantly the isolation of Gaza.
On the Israeli side, current preoccupation is not with Palestine peacemaking, but with a trifecta of Iran, Syria and Egypt, all of which involve real or potential Security with a capital “S.” In Israel, Obama will no doubt be pressed, and pressed again, to confirm that “containment” of an Iranian nuclear capability is unacceptable to the United States and that all options — including the use of military force — are “on the table.” That will certainly not make negotiations any easier with the Iranians, in whatever form and whatever timing they take, and it will be even more difficult for Obama to change the US negotiating position to something that might have a chance of working — e.g., by recognizing that US, Israeli, and Iranian security concerns must all be accounted for. Prime Minister Netanyahu will also underscore Israel’s continuing concerns with attacks coming from Gaza and Iranian support for Hezbollah. And he will want the US strategic commitment to Israel to be further bolstered in concrete military terms.
Israel is also deeply concerned by the civil war in Syria, which, depending on what happens when President Assad departs (assuming that that will happen,) could turn that country into what Lebanon has so often been — a haven for attacks by Hezbollah and maybe others on Israel. President Obama can offer reassuring words, but the US may have little to offer, including in forestalling a larger, slow-burning civil war between the region’s Sunnis and Shi’ites, a byproduct of the misguided US invasion of Iraq a decade ago. And Israel is meanwhile very carefully watching what is happening in Egypt, where the 1979 peace treaty has been the bedrock of Israel’s strategic confidence ever since.
Nothing that President Obama says or does on his trip to the region will change fundamentally any of these factors. And, as usually happens when any positive possibility seems to be emerging in Arab-Israeli relations, a terrorist incident during the president’s trip is highly likely, further stimulating the fears of all those who would like to move forward, and undercutting moderate politics.
All this is the bad news. The good news — or at least potentially hopeful news — is that for the US to become again engaged in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is an essential ingredient: despite talk over the years that “we Americans can’t want peace more than the parties,” it has been proved repeatedly that only the US can press the parties forward. (That statement includes whatever other members of the so-called Quartet that the US fostered in 2002 — the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia — will try to do but where they have no capacity to be of much consequence.) It is also true that, when the US commits its prestige and that of its president, “things happen.” This effort is also coming at the start of Obama’s second term, whereas Bill Clinton got engaged seriously only when he was about to leave office — and thus was in no position to put US political muscle behind any forward progress.
Experience also confirms that serious negotiations on Final Status can only truly begin when the US plunks down for consideration the draft text of a complete treaty, perhaps for presentation purposes doing it jointly with the other three Quartet members. At the very least, President Obama needs to outline parameters for a settlement during this trip — whether he just calls them “Clinton” or a more proprietary “Obama” Parameters. He will need to paint himself into a corner in terms of his own personal commitment to success, however long and hard the slog may be.
There is some other news regarding Obama’s spring trip, the impact of which has yet to be proved; it raises questions about why he is acting so soon, other than to splash a big rock in the pool and thereby get everyone’s attention that “the US is back.” Happily, he has appointed a Secretary of State, John Kerry, who is deeply committed to success on this issue, calling failure a “catastrophe.” Yet, by the time Obama goes to the region, Kerry will not have had time to even put his State Department Middle East team together and get his key officials confirmed by the Senate. The NSC staff in the White House will have had to be beefed up with top-notch people in this area; and the nominated Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, who will need to offer strong backing — especially to reassure Israel of US strategic and military engagement — is not yet even in office. There is also precious little time before the president leaves for the Near East, for the White House to do the essential prior consultations with the Congress and key US constituencies, especially leadership of the Jewish community, if his trip to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan is to be – as it must now be – about substance and not just symbols.
For Obama to offer more than his own commitment and symbolism of “being there,” he must be ready to take one further step, if Kerry is to be spared having to spend a massive amount of his time and energy on the Middle East account, which regularly eclipses other priorities. That is to appoint a senior-level negotiator who will do what it takes for as long as it takes. The one person with experience who could also provide the necessary political clout as Obama’s personal emissary is obvious: former President Bill Clinton.
]]>via IPS News
The optimism expressed by U.S. President Barack Obama and newly confirmed Secretary of State John Kerry about restarting the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has been met with scepticism from many seasoned Middle East experts.
At his confirmation hearing, Kerry told the assembled Senate, [...]]]>
via IPS News
The optimism expressed by U.S. President Barack Obama and newly confirmed Secretary of State John Kerry about restarting the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has been met with scepticism from many seasoned Middle East experts.
At his confirmation hearing, Kerry told the assembled Senate, “I pray that maybe this will be a moment that will allow us to renew the effort to bring the parties to the negotiating table and go down a different path than the one they were on in the last few years. I would like to try and do that.”
Since his re-election, there has been considerable debate in the U.S. media about whether Obama would re-engage in peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians. It is often the case that second-term presidents engage more in foreign policy and have a freer hand, not having to be concerned about re-election at the end of their term.
Hagel faced much greater opposition on this score, and his confirmation is less certain than Kerry’s was, though it is expected that he too will be confirmed. Much of the opposition to Hagel stems from a 2006 interview where he said that “…the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people (on Capitol Hill)”, and “I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator.”
But despite Obama’s choice for the key posts, and a White House statement saying that Obama had pledged “to work closely with Israel on our shared agenda for peace and security in the Middle East,” during his congratulatory call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the latter’s re-election last week, few see a strong possibility that the new administration will put much effort into the vexing conflict.
“I don’t think that Mr. Obama is lying about his intentions, it’s simply that he’s required to say he’ll reengage,” Mark Perry, former co-director of the Washington, D.C., London, and Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, told IPS.
“The only other possible answer would be: ‘I’m sick of the whole damn thing, and we’ll just have to wait for new Israeli leadership’ – which is something he dare not say. Mr. Obama is focused on domestic matters – which will command his every attention. He will need every vote he can get to pass his domestic programme, and irritating conservative Republicans and Democrats by making demands on Israel is something that he just won’t do.”
Yet speaking in Washington in a globally broadcast address on Tuesday, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced optimism.
“I actually think that this election opens doors, not nails them shut,” Clinton said. “So I know that President Obama, my successor, soon-to-be Secretary of State John Kerry, will pursue this, will look for every possible opening… somehow, we have to look for ways to give the Palestinian people the pathway to peace, prosperity, and statehood that they deserve and give the Israeli people the security and stability that they seek.
“I think that still is possible, and I can assure you the United States under President Obama will continue to do everything we can to move the parties toward some resolution.”
Speaking at The Palestine Center in Washington, Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund, noted that Israel’s ongoing occupation and settlement expansion was a very minor issue in the Israeli election.
“The issue of peace is fading because the cost of occupation has become bearable for Israel and there is no motivation (to change) if the costs are low. The question that needs to be asked in Washington is how can we create incentives so an end to occupation becomes a reality. If we continue to support everything Israel does … we cannot expect it will happen.”
PJ Crowley, former spokesman for the U.S. State Department, told the same audience that the Israel-Palestine issue was no longer the same regional focal point it once was.
“In 2009, President Obama came in knowing that the Israel-Palestine issue is the key driver in the region. We believed that to be true in 2009, but it is not true in 2013,” Crowley said.
“There are new players in region, with (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak replaced by (Mohammed) Morsi, who was helpful in ending hostilities with Hamas, but has a much different view of the Palestine issue and has very different dynamics domestically. King Abdullah of Jordan has his hands full with 700,000 Syrian refugees. So Israel-Palestine has been pushed from the top of the list.”
Others have focused on the personal issues between Obama and Netanyahu. Martin Indyk, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said that the two leaders have “bad chemistry” between them. This was echoed by former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, who put the blame for the tension squarely on Netanyahu.
“Frankly, I doubt that Obama…is likely to invest much effort in either supporting or opposing Netanyahu’s Israel now,” Freeman told IPS. “Netanyahu has not only beaten the warmth out of his government’s relationship with its American counterpart, he has left Obama with no basis for engagement with him other than posturing for domestic political effect.”
John Mearsheimer, professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago summed up the pessimism, telling IPS, “Obama will surely go through the motions to make it look like he is serious about pushing the peace process forward.”
“I would be very surprised, however, if he makes a serious effort to get a two-state solution, simply because the Israelis taught him in his first term that they are in the driver’s seat and they are not interested in allowing the Palestinians to have their own state. Nothing happened with the recent Israeli election to change that dynamic.”
Photo: President George W. Bush of United States (center) discusses the Middle East peace process with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel (left) and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in Aqaba, Jordan, Wednesday, June 4, 2003. White House Photo by Paul Morse.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
The Israeli elections ushered in a record number of new Knesset members, yet the prospects for resolving Israel’s 45-year old occupation of Palestinian land are as dim as ever, maybe even more so. Here in the United States, some noises are being made about trying to renew the [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
The Israeli elections ushered in a record number of new Knesset members, yet the prospects for resolving Israel’s 45-year old occupation of Palestinian land are as dim as ever, maybe even more so. Here in the United States, some noises are being made about trying to renew the moribund “peace process,” but there is little enthusiasm about it. Indeed, most observers do not believe there is any real possibility for progress.
This sort of atmosphere tends to engender two responses. One was presented to me directly by Professor Stephen Walt, co-author of The Israel Lobby, who said:
What the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians need is a peace settlement, not more ‘peace process.’ If Obama is serious, he should lay out a detailed U.S. plan for establishing a viable Palestinian state with appropriate security guarantees for Israel, and he should make U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military support for both sides conditional on their willingness to conform to it. If either one balks, the United States should distance itself and cut off aid.
I didn’t ask, but I feel safe in assuming that, despite the merits of this proposed course of action, Steve is well aware that the chances of this happening are roughly the same as Sheldon Adelson saluting a Barack Obama parade. Still, he is far from alone in advocating for pressure on both sides. Jewish Voice for Peace leads that call from the Jewish community, which is far more divided on this question than one is often led to believe. The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is growing and having an impact as well, including in the United States. A coalition of mainstream Christian leaders recently called for a review of US aid to Israel. And, of course, Palestinian-American and Arab-American activists continue their own dogged efforts, despite the particular obstacles they face in the US.
The other response, favored in Washington, is to simply say that the time is not ripe and the United States must manage the situation until conditions, particularly the leadership of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, are more suitable. This view is rooted not only in Israel’s intransigence, but also in the ongoing split between the PA and Hamas, as well as a certain conservatism about any action while the region is in such a state of flux. In fact, it appears that, until something comes about to change the dynamics, this is exactly the course that the Obama Administration is likely to follow.
But there are, in fact, other options, and here’s a modest one I’d like to put forward: Obama could spend the time until other action is politically viable, either domestically or in the region, by working to correct some of the United States’ most grievous missteps. And I suggest he start by walking back George W. Bush’s 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon.
That letter, part of an exchange of such letters between Bush and Sharon, fundamentally altered the nature of negotiations and was instrumental in poisoning the atmosphere around talks between Israel and the Palestinians. However flawed the Oslo process might have been from the beginning, the promises Bush made to Sharon in his letter magnified those flaws immensely.
The significance of Bush’s letter was huge. It didn’t introduce much that was new, but it essentially gave Israel gifts in the form of matters that were supposed to be negotiated. The letter also went further in Israel’s favor with some matters than the Clinton Parameters. Those Parameters were and are the essential basis for Israel-Palestinian negotiations.
The biggest departure Bush made from the Clinton Parameters was on Palestinian refugees. Clinton included at least some acknowledgment of the importance that the Right of Return has for Palestinians and listed five possible destinations for their relocation, one of which was within Israel proper. Bush summarily executed that idea. The relevant text from his letter:
It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.
To date, this framing has ruled. It has been considered an established fact that refugees would return somewhere other than Israel and that even any token return, as was occasionally discussed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, would happen on an insignificant level.
It was not unfair for an analyst, in 2004, to expect that such would be the outcome. But that would have been an expected result of negotiations, not an established fact preceding them. With an American president’s imprimatur, the entire framework of negotiations was changed, and the idea of refugees returning to Israel — something that is anathema to most Israelis and sacrosanct to most Palestinians — was simply decided by fiat in favor of Israel and removed from the negotiating arena.
Another passage has had even more impact: Bush’s assurance that Israel would not go back to the 1967 lines. The Clinton Parameters proposed that Israel keep the “major settlement blocs” as well. But it was Bush’s statement, again, which removed the issue from the negotiating table. In essence, he handed Israel an assurance that it would keep the “major population centers” that had grown up in the West Bank and, ever since then, Israel’s excuse for building in those settlements has been based on the argument that “everyone knows” they are going to remain in Israeli hands anyway. Again, the text of Bush’s letter:
In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.
Whereas the Clinton Parameters tied the retention of the settlements to a specific (if unbalanced) swap of land, no direct mention of the Palestinians receiving anything in exchange is made here. That has enabled Israel not only to use the US position as a cover for settlement expansion, it has also allowed them to essentially pocket these settlement blocs and negotiate over what else or how big a swath around them would be kept.
There are other points in the letter which are unworkable or inconsistent with international law, existing US policy or both. But those two points fundamentally altered the negotiating framework.
What Obama can do during his second term is walk these points back and return them to the Clinton Parameters. He can cite the Parameters’ five options for the refugees (return to the new state of Palestine or to the areas Israel swaps to that new state, settlement in the states they currently reside in, resettlement in other states or return to Israel) and reaffirm UNGA Resolution 194 as the basis for a resolution, as stated in the Parameters and in the now 10-year old Saudi peace proposal. This would be framed as a basis for negotiation, not as a finished proposal.
On the land issue, Obama could reaffirm the ’67 borders as the basis for talks, with agreed upon modifications that would amount to equivalent value when quality and quantity are accounted for. This does not amount to a map, and allows plenty of room for negotiation, including over the use of the West Bank aquifer, which is fully on Palestinian land but crucial for Israel’s needs.
If, in this context, Obama also reaffirms support for full Palestinian sovereignty and international guarantees of security for both Israel and Palestine, he could also address the condition of a Palestinian state being de-militarized, which is an impingement on Palestinian sovereignty and is a much more bitter pill for Palestinians to swallow than it was in 2000.
Of course, Congress will go ballistic, as will Israel, as the point of all of this is to take Palestinian demands just a little more seriously. But as much as Congress, AIPAC and Israel would like to deny it, that is a sine qua non for any substantive progress at this point and such a proposal would likely play very well in the EU, the UN and even with Russia and China. The Arab League will likely support it enthusiastically.
Obama would have to approach the process gradually and take the time to lay the groundwork for it. But it certainly appears right now that he has that time; he doesn’t seem to have many other cards to play in the Israel-Palestine milieu right now either. This is something that can actually be done and can have lasting effect, well after Obama is out of office. It also opens up a chance to rethink the whole outline of a two-state solution, which is the only thing that can possibly save that idea from the failure of Oslo. Obama would be well advised to try it.
Photo: President Barack Obama walks to his desk in-between meetings in the Oval Office, Oct. 20, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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