by Marsha B. Cohen
Last Tuesday (Oct. 29) administration officials met with what the Israeli daily Haaretz describes as a ”coterie of Jewish leaders.” Only four Jewish organizations were represented: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); the American Jewish Committee (AJC); and the Conference of Presidents of Major [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
Last Tuesday (Oct. 29) administration officials met with what the Israeli daily Haaretz describes as a ”coterie of Jewish leaders.” Only four Jewish organizations were represented: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); the American Jewish Committee (AJC); and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations.
Speaking for the administration during the one hour “off the record briefing” were White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice, her deputies Ben Rhodes and Tony Blinken, and Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman. Sherman is the senior State Department official representing the U.S. at ongoing talks over Iran’s nuclear program. The next round of negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany) are scheduled for Nov. 6-7.
The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations issued a news release that evening: “Leaders of several Jewish organizations participated in an off-the-record discussion with senior Administration officials about issues of the highest priority for the U.S., for our community and for America’s allies, halting Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”
“We had a constructive and open exchange and agreed to continue the consultation to enhance the prospect of achieving a transparent and effective diplomatic resolution,” the release said. “We welcome the reaffirmation of the President’s commitment to prevent Iran from attaining nuclear capability and that all options remain viable to assure that end.”
Numerous Jewish groups that are usually invited to Israel-related get-togethers — including representatives of the Orthodox and Reform movements and the younger “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group, J-Street, which has been very supportive of Obama’s foreign policy agenda — were not on the guest list. According to the Times of Israel, the White House had postponed a meeting scheduled for Monday with a broader range of Jewish groups. Instead, a meeting was set up for Tuesday with attendees from “organizations that had challenged the administration’s policies on Iran.”
The attendees included the Conference of Presidents Chairman Robert Sugarman, Executive Vice Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein, and former Conference Chairman Alan Solow. Abraham Foxman, who accused Secretary of State John Kerry the other day of having made “inappropriate” remarks about the use of “fear tactics” to undermine diplomacy with Iran, represented the ADL. Also attending were AIPAC’s Executive Director, Howard Kohr, and Jason Isaacson, the Director of Governmental and International Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.
Speaking for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan said in a statement that the purpose of the meeting was for the administration to reassure the Jewish organizations that “the United States will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, and that our preference is to resolve the issue peacefully through diplomacy.”
Pro-Israel groups have been supportive of congressional determination to impose new and stiffer sanctions against Iran even as the new Iranian administration of Hassan Rouhani has stated its determination to resolve the nuclear issue. Pro-Israel groups are supporting the congressional push for more crippling sanctions while the White House is arguing that any new sanctions should be put on hold for at least the duration of the next round of talks.
If the White House entertained the hope that an intimate and “off the record” gathering of pro-Israel, Iran policy hardliners who purportedly represent the views of American Jews would be kept quiet, there was a major miscalculation. Citing “sources familiar with the meeting,” Chemi Shalev of Haaretz initially reported early Friday morning that the pro-Israel Gang of Four had agreed to tone down their demand that new Iran sanctions be enacted immediately, without waiting to see whether the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 will reveal any signs of progress.
According to Shalev, the Jewish organizational leaders had agreed to grant the Obama administration “a limited ‘grace period’” of 60 days only after the administration assured them that no current sanctions would be eased and that no Iranian funds frozen in banks around the world would be released. By Friday afternoon, however, Shalev had found an anonymous source affiliated with an organization represented at the meeting who categorically denies that any commitment was given for any such moratorium. “In fact,” the source told Shalev, “we will support it.” Furthermore, according to Shalev, “Sources in the Jewish establishment emphasized that they did not make any commitment to refrain from supporting new sanctions in their private dealings with the U.S. lawmakers.”
The Jerusalem Post‘s Michael Wilner also reported on Friday afternoon that the organizations at the meeting had not agreed to desist from their efforts in support of new Iran sanctions. “I can tell you, within AJC, no decision has been made to revisit support for the Senate measure,” David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, told the JP. “There’s no process in place to reconsider our decision.”
Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is also mobilizing its million-plus Christian Zionists to urge their members of Congress to “support legislation to tighten the sanctions on Iran and to do everything in your power to ensure the prompt final passage of this measure.”
Although mainstream pro-Israel organizations have always insisted that U.S. support for Israel is bi-partisan and have been very reluctant to turn support for Israel (which includes staunch opposition to any improvement in relations between Israel and Iran) into a “wedge issue,” the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon turned to its own anonymous sources to accuse the Obama administration of having repeatedly “screwed pro-Israel groups.” Alana Goodman quoted “a senior official at a top pro-Israel organization” who claimed “the pro-Israel community has helped the White House out of several political binds recently and has only received problems in return…Now the administration is demanding favors, to say nothing of trust.”
Update (Nov. 3): In response to Chemi Shalev’s reports on Friday, Abraham Foxman of the ADL confirmed to Haaretz on Saturday that the four major pro-Israel groups had agreed to abide by a limited “time out” during which they would not push for stronger sanctions on Iran.“That means that we are not lobbying for additional sanctions and we are not lobbying for less sanctions,” Foxman told Haaretz as well as other U.S. media outlets. A few hours later, however, a statement by AIPAC’s president, Michael Kassen, contradicted Foxman’s claim, insisting there would be “no pause, delay or moratorium” in AIPAC’s efforts to seek new sanctions on Iran.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
After twenty years of futility, more and more people are coming around to the idea that the Oslo process has failed and that the basis of Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution needs to be re-thought. Funny, there are those of us who have been saying that for years now.
[...]]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
After twenty years of futility, more and more people are coming around to the idea that the Oslo process has failed and that the basis of Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution needs to be re-thought. Funny, there are those of us who have been saying that for years now.
Ian Lustick, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, stated bluntly in an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday that the Oslo process was “…an idea whose time is now past.” Lustick’s controversial article urged new thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than trying to continue along a well-worn path that has not led to success or even hope in two decades.
“The question is not whether the future has conflict in store for Israel-Palestine,” said Lustick. “It does. Nor is the question whether conflict can be prevented. It cannot. But avoiding truly catastrophic change means ending the stifling reign of an outdated idea and allowing both sides to see and then adapt to the world as it is.”
Lustick made it clear that two states was still an option, just not in the form that the Oslo process had heretofore envisioned. His point was that the current process has failed and that all viable options must now be on the table, in whatever formulation of states. “It remains possible that someday two real states may arise,” Lustick wrote. “But the pretense that negotiations under the slogan of ‘two states for two peoples’ could lead to such a solution must be abandoned. Time can do things that politicians cannot.”
But David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, accused Lustick of “…dispens(ing) with the foundational Jewish link among a people, a land, and a faith.” He bases this on his highly selective quoting and interpretation of Lustick saying, as Harris puts it, that “Zionism… has become ‘an outdated idea,’ and Israelis should accept that ‘Israel may no longer exist as the Jewish and democratic vision of its Zionist founders.’” Harris does not explain how this in any way means Lustick is denying a Jewish link between Jewish people, their faith and the land in question. But Harris has never been one to allow facts or critical thinking to factor into his arguments.
At the neoconservative magazine, Commentary, Jonathan Tobin lays the entire blame for the failure of the Oslo process at the feet of the Palestinians. “So long as the Palestinians are unable to re-imagine their national identity outside of an effort to extinguish the Zionist project,” wrotes Tobin, “and to therefore recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn, negotiations are doomed to fail.” Tobin goes on to assail Lustick as “conceited” and “dishonest.” In his view, the ultimate flaw in Lustick’s thesis is that “…his determination to ignore the nature of Palestinian intolerance for Jews causes him not only to misunderstand why peace efforts have failed but also to be blind to the certainty that the end of Israel would lead to bloodshed and horror… Israelis understand that they have no choice but to survive and to wait as long as it takes for the Palestinians to give up on dreams of their destruction.”
Other observers, however, offer a more sobering assessment that supports Lustick’s main point: the peace process as we have known it has failed and new approaches must be considered. In the twenty years of the Oslo Accords, the United States was unable to create the sort of breakthrough between Israel and the Palestinians that the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 promised. Instead, the peace process itself has become a sort of trap.
“The peace process itself has become an institution,” said Leila Hilal of the New America Foundation and a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, speaking in Washington. “All incidents are fitted into this prism of the peace process, waiting for a bilateral agreement to end the conflict.”
Hilal’s point touches on the same key issue Lustick addresses. The entire underlying structure of Oslo was flawed from the outset. The disparity between a regional superpower and a stateless and powerless people makes the notion that the conflict must be resolved via bilateral negotiations between these two wildly asymmetrical parties an absurd myth that blocks any hope of progress. That’s precisely why the Palestinians keep complaining that the United States is not playing a role in the current talks while Israel is perfectly content with their patron playing the role of host and observer but not mediator.
Shibley Telhami, the noted pollster University of Maryland professor contended on the same panel as Hilal that
It is impossible for the US to effectively negotiate Palestinian-Israeli peace without a president backing it and who believes it is strategically important for the United States… After 1973 and the Arab oil embargo, it was easier to make the case that the U.S. had interest in peace because it had interest in good relations with both Israel and Arabs. But by the time of (Bill) Clinton’s election, the Cold War had ended, foreign policy was not the central issue and his administration was not looking at this as a national security issue.
All of this sets up conditions that have led to twenty years of stalemate and left little hope that the situation between Israel and the Palestinians can improve. Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace stated bluntly that “Left to themselves, the parties are incapable of coming to an agreement. They need a guiding hand. Today, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in particular there is a system of occupation and settlement that has endured for almost half a century. There has been no agreement of any consequence since 1995, but the system remains intact.”
Aronson also pointed out that even the oft-cited decision by George H.W. Bush to cut loan guarantees if Israel didn’t curb settlement activity was an incidental tactic, and only policy change can actually create incentives for Israel to get serious about compromising with the Palestinians. Governments are not supposed to make concessions unless they have to. Until U.S. distaste for the settlement project and other odious Israeli practices is incorporated concretely into policy, things won’t change. This is true for other actors, like the EU, who have already shown what a tiny policy move — in this case, a policy of refusing to fund projects done in partnership with Israeli settlements, which means very little on the ground but has provoked a virtual tantrum from Israelis in and out of government — can do.
Neither in Israel nor in the Occupied Territories was there any hint of marking the twentieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, a telling point that reflects how this one hopeful event is viewed today by both parties. For Israel, the issue of the occupation has taken a back seat to broader concerns in the region, particularly with regard to Iran, Syria, Egypt, and economic concerns. But even for the Palestinians, the entire concept of the two-state solution has been thrown into question by the failure of the Oslo process.
The current round of talks are not just a microcosm of the twenty years of Oslo; they’re a magnification of it. After months of Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts focused on just getting the two sides to talk, they cannot agree on even the basic outlines of what they should be talking about. The U.S. envoy, Martin Indyk, has been to only one meeting with the two sides in that time.
All of this is why Lustick is saying a new approach is needed, from the ground up. It must not be built on the ashes of Oslo and rather must be an entirely new structure. Harris, Tobin and their ilk do not bash Lustick because he “hates Israel,” but because they are quite content with the status quo and wish to defend it. Those who wish to see millions of Palestinians living under harsh Israeli military rule freed; the rights of millions of dispossessed Palestinians addressed; and, perhaps most of all, those who wish to defuse this powder keg, especially in light of so many other explosions that have nothing to do with Israel enflaming the region, need to pay heed to Lustick’s words. Oslo is dead, killed by its own birth defects. It’s long past time for something new.
]]>Friedman takes on Harris’s attempt to debunk ‘linkage,’ the concept that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a burden on U.S. policy-making in the Middle East. [...]]]>
Friedman takes on Harris’s attempt to debunk ‘linkage,’ the concept that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a burden on U.S. policy-making in the Middle East. This has been a neoconservative effort of late, which has been mostly absurd, and sometimes from Israel itself, on the dime of a pretty far right-wing Israel lobby group.
Harris takes this tack, too. And Friedman takes him apart:
]]>Harris argues that some people have said that “without progress on the Palestinian front, it would be impossible to mobilize Arab countries to face the Iranian nuclear threat,” but that the cables released by WikiLeaks, which reveal great concern among many Arab governments regarding Iran, have “blown [this argument] out of the water.”
What Harris is implying, more broadly, is that there is no linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ability of the U.S. to mobilize support for its policies in the Middle East and beyond — an argument that simply does not stand up to logic or facts.
Like this fact: a full (rather than selective) reading of the WikiLeaks cables shows that Arab leaders are deeply concerned both about Iran and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — something Middle East experts have long argued to be the case. And the reality is that while the U.S., Israel and many Arab countries share concerns about Iran, it is undeniable that the failure of the U.S. to put forth a successful policy on the Israeli-Palestinian track, and the absence of progress toward peace (and continued provocative Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem), complicate virtually every aspect of U.S. relations with these same Arab countries, including mobilizing support for America’s Iran policy.