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- A Last Chance at Middle East Peace?
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- BY HENRY SIEGMAN
- This article appeared in the January 12, 2009 edition of The
Nation.
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- December 23, 2008
- President-elect Obama will be the last American president who
has a chance to save the two-state solution to the
Israel-Palestine conflict. If he does not achieve this goal during
the first year of his presidency, the two-state "horizon" that
George W. Bush pursued so ineptly is likely to disappear for good.
But even a quick engagement by the new president will fare no
better than previous US peace initiatives--all of which have
gotten nowhere--if Obama and his advisers approach the task
believing that some more "peace processing" or
"confidence-building measures" will achieve the goal.
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- The Israel-Palestine conflict has defied US "facilitation"
over these many years not because of procedural shortcomings or a
paucity of ideas. The terms of a workable agreement--formulated in
the so-called Clinton Parameters of December 2000 and elaborated
in the Taba discussions that followed in January 2001--are well
known and enjoy near-universal support. They call for minor
rectifications in the 1949 armistice line (which served as
Israel's pre-1967 border) in order to allow Israel to retain a
cluster of nearby settlements based on an agreed equal exchange of
territory on both sides of the border; a capital for the new
Palestinian state in Arab East Jerusalem; a limited return of
Palestinian refugees to their former homes in Israel in agreed
numbers that do not significantly alter Israel's ethnic and
religious balance; a nonmilitarized Palestinian state that
addresses Israeli security concerns while respecting Palestinian
sovereignty; and a US-led international force that would ensure
security and assist with Palestinian nation-building for a
transitional period.
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- What has been missing is the political will to get the parties
to act on these parameters--a political and moral failure that has
doomed all previous efforts. This failure has not been the result
of ignorance but of cowardice--a willful disregard by Israel and
successive American administrations, as well as by much of the
international community, of certain unchanging fundamentals that
underlie this conflict. Peace initiatives that ignore these
fundamentals and seek an agreement on the cheap cannot succeed.
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- None of what follows is intended to excuse disastrous choices
Palestinians have so often made in pursuing their struggle for
statehood--from egregious failures at institution-building, to
murderous violence against innocent civilians, to the more recent
fratricidal warfare between Fatah and Hamas (for which Fatah's
refusal to accept the democratic choice of the Palestinian people
in the parliamentary elections of 2006, and US instigation of that
refusal, deserve most of the blame). Rather, it is to say that the
difficult measures Palestinians must take to put their house in
order will remain beyond their grasp unless they are given a
credible Israeli commitment to a state alongside Israel that is
"independent, viable and sovereign" by right, not as a result of
Israeli generosity. And because such a state is indeed the right
of the Palestinian people, its acknowledgment must precede--not
follow-- conditions set for its implementation.
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- That such a clear commitment has not been made to this day is
far more revealing of Israeli intentions and US/European
indifference than any number of confidence-building measures that
have left entirely unchanged the Palestinians' status as a people
under the heel of a crushing and open-ended occupation. Any
credibility that President Bush's call in 2002 for a Palestinian
state might have had was dissipated by his letter to Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, in which he called for Israel's
retention of "already existing major Israeli population centers"
in the West Bank.
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- In a recent interview following his resignation as prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, a longtime right-wing Likud hawk who for
many years supported Israel's retention of "Greater Israel" and
opposed the peace treaty with Egypt, shocked Israelis by endorsing
views held by Israel's hard left. Among other startling
declarations (such as his newly held belief that Israel will have
no peace if it does not return "all, or nearly all," of the
occupied territories or if it refuses to permit the establishment
of the capital of the Palestinian state in East Jerusalem), Olmert
said the reason Israel was able to reach a peace agreement with
Egypt--as opposed to its failure to achieve an accord with Yasir
Arafat or with Syria's two Assads--was not Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat's dramatic visit to Jerusalem, as widely believed. The
real reason is that well before Sadat's visit, Israel's celebrated
chief of staff and defense minister, Moshe Dayan, at a secret
meeting with Sadat's envoy in Morocco, delivered the following two
messages from Prime Minister Menachem Begin: "First, Israel is
prepared to return every last inch of Egyptian territory under
Israeli occupation. Second, we are ready to negotiate the
implementation of that goal." That, Olmert said, is something
Israel has refused to say to the Palestinians, and that is why all
previous negotiations have gotten nowhere.
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- By contrast, when asked in 1968 to describe his plan for the
future of the occupied territories, Dayan replied, "The plan is
being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as
a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." A decade later, at a
conference in Tel Aviv, when asked what was the solution to the
occupation, he responded, "The question is not 'What is the
solution?' but 'How do we live without a solution?'" As noted by
Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who has
monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, "Living
without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the
key to maximizing the benefits of conquest while minimizing the
burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation."
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- Of course, while in office, Olmert did nothing consistent with
his newly found convictions. To the contrary, until the last
moment he personally approved measures, such as authorizing
further construction in the settlements and East Jerusalem, that
deepened the despair of Palestinians and made a two-state solution
an even more impossible fantasy.
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- So back to the fundamentals. The first and most decisive one
is the vast discrepancy of power and influence that defines the
Israeli- Palestinian relationship. It is rare for a country with
the overwhelming military, diplomatic and economic advantages
enjoyed by Israel to yield to demands of a near-impotent adversary
without a powerful third party restoring some balance between the
two. In this situation the only outside power capable of restoring
that balance is the United States, because its support is
unquestioned by Israelis and understood by everyone to be the
country's most important security asset--one they dare not
compromise.
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- The four-decade colonial dynamic of the settlement enterprise
has resulted in so extensive an expansion of Israel's population
into Palestinian territories as to make a Palestinian state
impossible. And that, indeed, was its purpose. What is not clear
is whether these "facts on the ground" established unilaterally by
Israel are still reversible. Their reversibility depends entirely
on whether President Obama is prepared to draw on the large
political capital the United States has accumulated these past
sixty years with its unstinting support of Israel to leave no
doubt about his resolve to end the conflict on the basis of the
existing international consensus, while at the same time fully
supporting--and participating in--the measures that will be
necessary to enable Israel to deal with security challenges
created by such an accord. However complicated and costly, these
measures hold far greater promise of protecting Israel's security
within its borders--and at lesser material and moral cost-- than
the perpetuation of the occupation.
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- American peace processors in previous administrations have
repeatedly warned that an agreement imposed on the parties by
outside powers would quickly fall apart. They are wrong, for the
permanent-status parameters that President Obama and the
international community would be advocating are based entirely on
principles that both Israel and the Palestinians signed on to when
they formally endorsed UN Resolutions 242 and 338, the 1993 Oslo
Accords, the 2003 "road map" and the 2007 Annapolis
understandings. The United States and the international community
would be demanding--after forty years of Israeli and Palestinian
noncompliance--only that these commitments finally be implemented.
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- To be effective, such a new American initiative must be based
on a clear reaffirmation of the foundational principle of the road
map and other previous agreements. These agreements specify that
while changes in the pre-1967 situation, territorial or otherwise,
may be inevitable, they will not receive US support or recognition
if made unilaterally by either party. It is a principle that Bush
and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly affirmed
rhetorically but never acted upon.
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- Particularly misguided and damaging has been the oft-repeated
demand that Palestinians offer territorial concessions that match
the "painful concessions" Israel's leaders have said they are
prepared to make. It is a formulation that reveals a profound
misunderstanding or deliberate distortion of the history of this
conflict, one that will inevitably produce a one-sided outcome
that is unjust and untenable.
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- Palestinians have not asked Israel to make territorial
concessions-- i.e., give up any of the territory Israel controlled
between the armistice agreement of 1949 and the 1967 war--nor has
Israel ever indicated it would under any circumstances consider
doing so. What Palestinians have asked is that Israel return
Palestinian territory on which Israel has illegally established
settlements and to which it has transferred its own population, in
violation of treaty obligations and international law. To describe
the return of illegally expropriated Palestinian territory as
Israeli "concessions" is to compromise the Palestinian case before
negotiations even begin.
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- Indeed, it is only Palestinians who have made painful
concessions. As a condition for Israel's acceptance of the Oslo
Accords, the PLO formally agreed to recognize the legitimacy of
territory acquired by Israel in the war of 1948. It is a
concession that reduced by fully one half the territory originally
assigned to the Arab population of Palestine by the UN partition
plan of 1947. Given that major Palestinian territorial concession,
any new initiative that does not provide that negotiations begin
at the pre-1967 armistice line and expects Palestinians to
relinquish (other than in equal land swaps) even more of the 22
percent of the territory that has been left them will be
stillborn.
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- The United States and the international community must reject
the unspoken but long-dominant notion that if the parties do not
reach a peace accord, the "default setting" of UN Resolutions 242
and 338 is a continuation of Israel's occupation. If that notion
were correct, its authors would have deliberately subverted the
resolution's goal by presenting Israel with an irresistible
incentive to avoid a peace agreement indefinitely. The United
States and the international community must therefore finally act
on the resolutions' plain logic that their default setting is a
return to the status quo ante-- without territorial and other
changes that negotiations and a peace agreement might have
produced. It is a default setting that should have kicked in long
ago.
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- Finally, while the cessation of violence is a necessary
condition for successful peace negotiations, it is an
unimplementable goal absent an independent and empowered
international mechanism that monitors violations by both sides. If
the occupying power--with its guns trained on the occupied
population--continues to serve as judge, jury and executioner, as
it has for the past forty years, violence is inevitable and
peacemaking will remain out of reach.
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- It is these fundamentals that must inform what will surely be
the last US opportunity to salvage a two-state solution. Losing
this opportunity will spell the end of Israel as a democratic or
Jewish state; given the emerging non-Jewish majority in the
territories under Israel's control, it can no longer be both. It
is difficult to understand why anyone would believe that
supporting or acquiescing in that kind of outcome is an act of
friendship to the State of Israel or the Jewish people.
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- The loss of the two-state solution would also severely damage
important US national interests. Across the Arab and Muslim world,
America's perceived partiality toward Israel and indifference to
Palestinian rights and suffering continue to fuel virulent anti-
American sentiment. James Baker and Lee Hamilton, co-chairs of the
2006 Iraq Study Group, warned that US success in Iraq depends in
part on progress in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Iran, which
exploits the Palestinian plight for political gain, would welcome
a failure to end the conflict to consolidate its strategic gains.
Hezbollah would exploit it to justify its continued use of an
independent paramilitary force in Lebanon. And failure would
intensify grievances that would continue to generate sympathy and
support for Al Qaeda and attract new recruits to its ranks. As far
as Al Qaeda is concerned, the loss of the two-state solution would
be the ultimate gift that keeps on giving.
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- The lesson the new administration should draw from previous
failures is that peacemaking gets nowhere if it focuses on
process, confidence- building and incrementalism in the absence of
clear parameters that define the endgame. It is a strategy born of
a lack of courage to tell Israel that its exploitation of the
absence of a peace agreement to continue its confiscation of
Palestinian land will no longer be tolerated by the international
community.
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- A US initiative that goes beyond the failed "facilitation" of
previous administrations to vigorous and determined diplomacy can
still produce a two-state solution, but only an American president
whose political and moral horizon extends beyond the next
Congressional elections--and who understands that by the time
those elections occur the two-state solution will have
disappeared--can hope to bring this multigenerational tragedy to
an end.
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- It remains to be seen if Barack Obama is that man.
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- About Henry Siegman
- Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New
York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung
Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London. He is a former national director of the
American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
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