Excursions on the Middle East, politics, the Levant, Islam in politics, civil society, and courage in the face of unbridled, otherwise unchecked power.
If it were easy to do, an American president would have long ago shepherded Israelis and Palestinians into the negotiated two-state peace agreement that both peoples and their neighbors so clearly need — a peace that would greatly enhance U.S. interests.
There are many reasons why it will be hard for President Obama to achieve, in his second term, the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that has eluded him and his predecessors for so long. The rise of radical one-state nationalists and ideologically driven settlers in Israeli politics, the debilitating split in the Palestinian camp between Hamas and Fatah, the power struggles and sectarian enmities roiling the region — these are all factors adding to the difficulty of forging the two-state peace agreement that alone can end the agony of occupation for Palestinians and bring Israel a sounder more durable form of security.
"Abraham Hassel (ph) from Jacksonville, Florida. "How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian-American Republican, I'm here to tell you we do exist. BLITZER: All right. Let's ask Governor Romney, first of all. What would you say to Abraham?
Writing in the Boston Globe, Juliette Krayem argues that a "blunder" by Dennis Ross and David Hale helped convince Mahmoud 'Abbas and his advisors to proceed with their UN initiative. In a letter handed to the PA leader he was urged to take into account the massive increase in Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
"According to Abbas’s advisers, a letter given to the Palestinian leader was the final straw. The letter has not been publicly disclosed by either party, but Arab media and commentators have zeroed in on a single reported sentence. In pushing for direct negotiations with Israel as an alternative to seeking UN recognition, the letter argued that the Palestinians need to consider Israel’s rightful security needs, as well as “demographic changes’’ that have occurred since the war in 1967."
Perhaps Krayem is writing sardonically when she describe the phrasing as a surprising blunder. After all, one of the Dennis Ross' talents has been to channel the Israeli narrative. He is aptly described in a Times interview as an "ardent supporter of Israel" and his penchant for coddling Israel is hardly a secret.
"It’s a surprising blunder for a man with Ross’s decades of experience in trying to close the deal on the peace process."
Krayem concludes with a call for "demographic change" in the U.S. diplomatic team.
"But whatever the outcome of the wrangling at the United Nations, the whole contretemps has served to weaken the United States in the Arab world. That is why Americans deserve to hear from their own envoys, Ross and Hale, about why their meeting with Abbas went so badly awry, so that everyone can judge what happened and make the necessary “demographic’’ changes to produce a new generation of American envoys."
"Instead, with no discussion of Israeli settlement activity, building in Jerusalem, or the difficulties of Palestinian movement through checkpoints, Obama limited himself to one side of the story. In essence, the punishment meted out to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas for rejecting Washington's request to shelve his UN gambit was that Obama came to New York as Israel's ally, not as an impartial mediator of peace diplomacy."
"Just as the context has changed in the Middle East, so too has it been changing in the international community over the last several years. There is a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process – or the absence of one. Not just in the Arab World, but in Latin America, in Europe, and in Asia. That impatience is growing, and is already manifesting itself in capitols around the world.
"These are the facts. I firmly believe, and repeated on Thursday, that peace cannot be imposed on the parties to the conflict. No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state. And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the UN or in any international forum. Because Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate.
"Moreover, we know that peace demands a partner – which is why I said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist, and we will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric.
"But the march to isolate Israel internationally – and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations – will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative. For us to have leverage with the Palestinians, with the Arab States, and with the international community, the basis for negotiations has to hold out the prospect of success."
Shatz discovers pockets of creative thinking, and quite a lot of skepticism about the two-state mantra even as the PA aims to gain United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state (the quest for which may be more valuable before the fact rather than afterwards). A few excerpts follow, but the essay (which runs 19 pp.) deserves a full reading:
"[On the security apparatus established by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad with lots of help from the U.S. and to the satisfaction of Israel:] It is an extraordinary arrangement: the security forces of a country under occupation are being subcontracted by third parties outside the region to prevent resistance to the occupying power, even as that power continues to grab more land. This is, not surprisingly, a source of considerable anger and shame in the West Bank. The question is whether Palestinians will grow exasperated enough to confront the Sulta."
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"[On the al-Nakba demonstrations of May 15, 2011:] The PA had no part at all in the main event of the day: an unprecedented march to the border by thousands of Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Occupied Territories, co-ordinated by activists on Facebook and Twitter. At least a dozen people were killed by Israeli soldiers, but more than a hundred succeeded in crossing into the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan, including a 28-year-old man called Hassan Hijazi, who made it all the way to Jaffa, his ancestral city, travelling there on a bus with Israeli soldiers who had no idea they were sitting next to a ‘security threat’; he turned himself in to the Israeli police after visiting his grandparents’ house. A spectacular enactment of the drama of return, shown live on TV news broadcasts, the crossings electrified people in the West Bank. ‘For 63 years, Israel has tried to un-nation us, to turn us into West Bankers, Gazans, East Jerusalem residents, “Israeli Arabs” and refugees, but on Nakba day we were united,’ Husam Zomlot said."
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"Palestinians inside Israel, like Palestinians in the West Bank, are learning the effectiveness of mass, non-violent mobilisation; young people in particular are starting to communicate with people in the Occupied Territories and in neighbouring Arab countries, using Facebook and Twitter to organise themselves. People who a few years ago were admirers of Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, are now saying that they ‘don’t need his rhetoric of resistance because they have discovered their own power and their own voice’."
The plates of U.S. policy in the Middle East are beginning to shift as well. Zvi Ba'rel ruminates on the possibility that the U.S. may soon be talking to Hamas. Recall that since the Hamas electoral victory of 2006 the U.S. has devoted considerable diplomatic, financial and military energy to marginalizing Hamas. The effort has failed profoundly, as demonstrated by the steps toward PA-Hamas reunification, steps made possible by the toppling of Husni Mubarak.
Also of note: a report by the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon Michael Williams that reportedly addresses the violent Israeli response to the May 15, 2011, al-Nakba demonstrations. The report was distributed early this week by Ban K. Moon, the Secretary-General, to the members of the Security Council. Williams notes that on the Israel-Lebanon border 7 unarmed demonstrators were killed by the Israeli army and 111 were wounded. The demonstrators were attempting to cross the border. Israeli soldiers shot the demonstators on Lebanese soil, it should be added. Special Coordinator Williams is appropriately critical of Israel's excessive use of violence. I have not yet been able to get a complete copy of the report. When I have a copy, I will post it here. Israeli officials are in a tizzy about the chutzpah of the U.N. official that he would use the most "the moral army in the world" of using unnecessary deadly violence as opposed to non-lethal crowd control measures.
The Honorable Barack H. Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President,
We write to you in light of the breakdown of Middle East peace talks following your most recent efforts to get the parties to resume negotiations for a two-state accord.
We believe this latest impasse once again confirms the impossibility of getting the parties to reach an agreement on their own. Left to their own devices, it is the vast disparity of power between the two parties rather than international law and fairness that will continue to prevail. The experience of these past two years has surely not suggested any other possible outcome.
What is widely perceived as a terminal failure of US Middle East peace diplomacy has left a vacuum that threatens to deepen the State of Israel’s isolation, undermine Palestinian moderation, and endanger American interests in the region and beyond. That vacuum is beginning to be filled by new international initiatives that increase Israelis’ sense of existential threat from what they perceive to be a global movement that seeks their country’s delegitimization.
But it is not the State of Israel within its 1967 borders that is being challenged. It is Israel’s occupation, the relentless enlargement of its settlements, its dispossession of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and the humanitarian disaster caused by its blockade of Gaza that are the target of international anger and condemnation.
We strongly support America’s commitment to Israel’s security, but that commitment cannot justify obstruction of legitimate international efforts in the Security Council and in other international institutions to halt illegal behavior that the US itself has long opposed.
It has been said that terms for a peace accord cannot be imposed on the parties. But surely the United States can declare the principles that will henceforth determine what this country will support and what it cannot and will not support. The declaration would serve to let friends and foes throughout the world know that America remains faithful to the principles and values that you so eloquently articulated in your address in Cairo.
What we believe should be the major features of such a statement of US policy was described in two previous letters to you of November 6, 2008, and April 30, 2010, to which many of us were signatories. We have reviewed them in the light of current developments and have attached suggested formulations which we believe are balanced, equitable and likely to be effective in finding the answers to key differences among the parties on the central questions. If US parameters are rejected by Israel or by the Palestinian Authority (or by both) as the framework for a permanent status agreement, they should be submitted for adoption by theUN Security Council.
We are persuaded that a clear statement reflecting longstanding American principles would influence the debate within Israeli and Palestinian societies far more consequentially and constructively than a renewal of the unproductive bilateral talks that have taken place to date. Such a statement would also help diminish Iranian influence in the region, improve Israel’s security, and reduce the risk of a military conflict with Iran.
Because of our long and unique history of deep friendship with the state and people of Israel, only our country has the ability to help bring this conflict to a close. Only the US can provide the parties with the credible security assurances they will need to make compromises in their positions that a peace treaty will require. No other country can do that. Therefore, if we do not put forward a clear framework for a fair and workable two-state solution to the conflict, the peace process will in effect have been abandoned, for all other approaches have been tried—over and over again—and have failed.
This abandonment will inevitably return Israelis and Palestinians to the cycle of recurring conflicts of ever-escalating violence that has marked the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, into which other destructive forces in the region will be drawn, and into which we will inescapably be drawn as well.
We understand, Mr. President, that the initiative we propose you take to end the suffering and statelessness of the Palestinian people and efforts to undermine Israel’s legitimacy is not without political risks. But we believe that if the American people are fully informed by their President of the likely consequences of an abandonment of US leadership in a part of the world so critical to this country’s national security and to the safety of our military personnel in the region, he will have their support.
David L. Boren, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank C. Carlucci, William J. Fallon, Chuck Hagel, Lee H. Hamilton, Gary Hart, Rita E. Hauser, Carla Hills, Nancy Kassebaum-Baker, Sandra Day O’Connor, Thomas R. Pickering, Paul Volcker, James D. Wolfensohn
The loquacious Martin Peretz is intent to show that the Arab upheaval now has nothing to do with Israel's actions or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like many of Washington's self-appointed debunkers of "linkage" he persists in denying the obvious.
When demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square chanted, "irhal, irhal, ya 'amil (leave, leave, oh agent)" or depicted Mubarak surrounded by Israeli and U.S. flags, what would Mr. Peretz imagine was the meaning? Certainly, the momentous demonstrations we are witnessing are about casting out dictators, gaining freedom and, especially, recovering dignity that has long been trampled by autocrats. However, part of the critique of the autocrats rule was precisely that they were intent on preserving their privileges and power rather than serving their people or acting against injustice, whether at home or elsewhere in the Arab world. Mr. Peretz is only fooling himself if he thinks that that the fate of Gazans, the Israeli colonization of the West Bank, or America's vigilance to protect Israel, even when by doing so it contradicts its own policies, passes unnoticed among the young people who have led the uprisings.
What earned Mubarak the agent label was precisely the perception that he heeled to US and Israeli interests. As new governments emerge in the Arab world, one likely reality is that the emerging leaders will be far less likely to risk being accused of collaboration with Israel, or even the U.S. If anything, the popular pressure to achieve a just solution in Palestine will find wider expression.
"America cannot go on riding the tiger forever in the Middle East. We cannot expect to have “pro-American” forces in power in the Middle East when the publics don’t like our policies. We cannot continue our endless interventions – out of fear that some states might emerge as anti-American. The world is sick of such meddling. We have to deal with the causes of why populations have become anti-American. And all this comes in the context of the rise of new powers with their own interests, and desire for clout in what they see as a new, emerging, multipolar global order. The costs are rising on our old patterns of imposing Pax Americana."
Netanyahu was to meet Obama a month ago, but he curtailed his North American visit to return to Israel to deal with the crisis created by Israel commandeering the Gaza aid flotilla on May 31.
Expect little of substance from the meeting on the peace-seeking front, notwithstanding claims by Bibi-enablers that the Israeli leader "wants to be a peacemaker". Netanyahu will try to gain credit for adjustments to the punitive blockade of Gaza, adjustments necessitated by the resounding condemnation that Israel confronts for its collective punishment of Gaza. Key elements of the blockade continue, including prohibiting Gazan exports.
George Mitchell's laconic efforts to move Israel-PA proximity negotiations along have borne little fruit. This is no surprise. Netanyahu has no interest in a viable two-solution. He never has had such an interest. Recall that in his earlier tenure as Prime Minister, he played much the same game with Bill Clinton that is playing with Obama today: prevaricate then negotiate over petty concessions while demanding recompense and approval from the U.S.
As I have noted here, he may be opportunistic and crass, but Netanyahu operates within an ideological vector that has no room for an independent Palestinian state, particularly one premised on the end of Israel's colonization of the West Bank.
As the expression goes: the fruit does not fall very far from the tree. Here is a discussion with Netanyahu's father. Benzion Netanyahu, now 100 years old, was secretary to Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism. As you read his words, ponder the discussions around the Netanyahu kitchen table of Bibi's youth.
And here is the Prime Minister as a young man, in 1977. He was then known as Ben Nitay. He is questioned by a young Fouad Ajami.
Netanyahu's National Security Adviser is a former Mossad man named Uzi Arad, who was previously barred from entering the US as a security risk. Azad is a hardliner whose views are in synch with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Azad's bottom line on negotiations with the Palestinians? Concessions by Israel encourage Palestinian rejectionists. For Azad, Israel's strategic priority is confronting Iran. Meantime, you kick the two-state can down the road, placating the Americans without making serious concessions or ceasing the dispossession of Palestinians from their land. Do you think that Netanyahu chose a National Security Adviser who contradicts his own views?
What to expect from the July 6 meeting? Very little that will lend even a modicum of vitality to Mitchell's mission and lots of talk about the need to confront Iran.
