One of the most dangerous and most common mistakes people make about the Middle East is to believe that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just around the corner.
This is an easy mistake to make; peace is such a good idea, who could be against it? After all, it’s very easy to see what the only reasonable solution would be: a division that roughly corresponds to the old pre-1967 Green Line, with some land swaps for each side. It’s also easy to see that both sides would be better off if they agreed to the compromise. The Israelis could settle down in peace with the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors, and the Palestinians, with lots of aid from the rest of the world, could start to build their state without the effects of the Israeli occupation.
Yes, there are some tough issues. For the Israelis, there is the question of Jerusalem and, to a lesser extent, the problem of the religious and ultra-nationalist settlers who dream of a Greater Israel that goes (at least) to the Jordan River. For the Palestinians there is the emotional issue of the ‘right of return’, the belief that those who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 have the right to return to their original homes in pre-1967 Israel. There is also the problem of the radical groups who refuse to recognize Israel and believe in continuing war, whether ‘holy’ or not, against the Jewish state.
Outsiders and especially Americans look at this situation and draw what seem to be the obvious conclusions: the ‘moderates’ on both sides need to control their ‘extremists’ so that the common sense solution can be reached. Outside powers like the US can and should help the two sides reach the agreement, and also provide sweeteners — financial incentives, security guarantees, anything else that might be useful — to make that process easier. To get the negotiations going, the ‘extremists’ on both sides must be prevented from acts that place obstacles in the path: The Palestinians need to give up provocative actions like terror attacks; the Israelis need to stop building settlements, and improve conditions in the occupied territories. America’s job is to get both sides to do the right thing and to empower the moderate majorities to overcome (or buy off) the radical fringe.
Many people argue that Israel is the side that most needs to crack down on its crazies right now. The settlers’ movement, the aggressive tactics of the occupation, the brutal response to rocket attacks from Gaza have made it next to impossible, people argue, for the moderate Palestinians to participate in serious peace talks. Worse, the continued expansion of settlements is an assault on the core concept of a compromise peace. As Israeli settlements grow thicker and denser beyond the Green Line, it becomes less and less likely that Israel will ever withdraw. Palestinians lose hope that the peace process will ever pan out, and the chances for peace diminish.
This belief helps explain why so many people in so many countries care so passionately about stopping Israeli settlements. It’s not just that people perceive the Palestinians as the underdogs. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute threatens the peace and security of the whole world, and these Israeli actions are seen as blocking a quick, fair and final resolution of the quarrel.
This picture of the Middle East peace process is partly right and partly wrong. It’s right about the obvious compromise; any final border between Israel and the future Palestine will have to run on or near the Green Line. The conventional view is right about the difficult issues; it’s even right that outside powers like the US should work to nudge the two parties down this path — and that Israeli settlements at this point are not helpful.
But the standard model is also partly wrong. The two sides are not ready to make peace yet, the obstacles to peace are not symmetrical and continuing Israeli settlements (which I agree are not in Israel’s interests) are not the main obstacle to peace.
The core problem is what it has been since the Arab side rejected the UN partition plan of 1947: a critical mass of Palestinian opinion, backed by some governments in the region, does not accept the basic idea of partitioning the land. There have always been some Palestinians who supported the idea of a territorial compromise, and over the decades their numbers have increased and their influence has grown, but a large and influential core of the Palestinian national movement the is not ready to give up the demand that displaced Palestinians must return to the lands and homes they lost during the Israeli War of Independence.
Today’s division between the more moderate “Fatahstan” on the West Bank and the more radical “Hamastan” in Gaza has deep roots. In general, the West Bank has historically been a stronghold of Palestinians who might under the right conditions be ready to accept the 1967 borders; Gaza has been dominated by those who reject the idea. It’s easy to see why. Almost all the Palestinians in Gaza are the descendants of refugees, and the Gaza strip is a barren zone of desert land with no resources or prospects. Territorial compromise condemns virtually everyone in Gaza to a bleak future; the dream of a return to lost lands is the driving current of Gaza politics. When Arafat and the PLO started to hint at giving up the right of return, opinion among the refugees and the dispossessed shifted away from Fatah toward Hamas. If Hamas begins to soften its approach, other, more radical movements will likely pick up support.
On the West Bank, the picture is mixed. The Palestinians who lived there before 1967, and especially some of the elite and well established families and groups among them, are often genuinely and sincerely ready for compromise peace. Opinion in the refugee camps is more mixed; more people in the camps feel like the Gazans.
Then there is the Palestinian diaspora: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond. There are many currents of opinion and thought among these Palestinians, and there are differing degrees of commitment to Palestinian issues, but as is often the case, romantic and extreme views of nationalist issues can be found among the diaspora. Just as Irish-Americans went on collecting money for the IRA long after most of the Irish in Ireland were heartily sick of them, so Palestinian exiles and immigrants may continue to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue in romantic and emotional terms and support radical groups.
Palestinian opinion is very far from reaching a consensus on giving up the right of return in exchange for recognition of a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders. Even Yassir Arafat, with his immense personal prestige (and considerable personal charm) could never take that final step. As long as peace means sitting indefinitely in Gaza (with perhaps some people moving to the already crowded West Bank), it is unlikely that many Palestinians there will see much advantage to a ‘peace’ that solves none of their real problems.
Worse, even if a group of Palestinian leaders signs a treaty with Israel, a substantial chunk of Palestinian opinion is likely to think that the treaty is at best a temporary arrangement and at worst a betrayal of the national cause. There will be a ‘rejectionist wing’ of the Palestinian movement; it will likely continue armed struggle against Israel and perhaps against a Palestinian government considered illegitimate. This struggle could come as religious terrorism; it could be secular, nationalist terrorism. It could be both; there is likely to be plenty of it. Outside powers are virtually certain to support various resistance movements for their own purposes. Will the Palestinian government be able to crack down ruthlessly on a resistance movement that will likely have foreign funding and significant popular support?
The Israelis know this; that is one reason so many Israelis are not enthusiastic about making concessions for peace. Israelis want the violence and the killing to stop; if it isn’t going to stop, why make concessions?
Outsiders want peace so much and find peace so desirable that we cannot believe that this problem cannot be solved. It’s pretty clear that we want negotiations more than either the Israelis or the Palestinians; otherwise why do we spend so much time, effort and money trying to threaten, bribe or cajole the two sides into sitting down? Indeed, the fact that so much of recent history in the region revolves around the efforts of outsiders to get the two sides to make peace should tell us something. If the two parties wanted peace badly, they wouldn’t need so much help negotiating it and negotiations would not be so dragged out.
The truth is that American national interests require a peace process in the Middle East even if peace remains out of sight. An ongoing process between the Palestinians and Israelis offers hope to the region, helps keep day to day tension under control, makes Iranian and Syrian efforts to make trouble more difficult and eases the path of Arab governments who want to work with us on other issues and who in any case are more worried about Iran than about Israel right now.
This peace process is not (or does not have to be) a hypocritical sham. The long haggling process between the two sides has already clarified some of the difficult issues surrounding, for example, the future status of Jerusalem. Interim agreements reached during these discussions can improve living conditions for both Palestinians and Israelis. And gradually building relationships and trust between the negotiators at least on the two sides helps; the concept of ‘two states living side by side in peace’ is more substantial today than it used to be. We are 62 years closer to peace in the Middle East today than the world was in 1948.
Arguably the biggest single blunder the United States has made in this long process was the decision to ‘go for broke’ at the end of the Clinton administration, when the White House basically risked a total breakdown in the peace process in order to get an agreement on President Clinton’s watch. We are still struggling to recover from that mistake a decade later; if President Obama could get back to the status quo that President Clinton gambled away, he would count himself a very successful diplomat.
It’s hard to tell from the outside if the Obama administration believes that a relatively quick peace agreement is possible or not. Because America needs a credible peace process, a smart administration would be talking up the prospects for peace even if it understood that a final agreement remains out of reach. On the other hand, the attractive mirage of a quick solution to this problem has led past presidents to miscalculate before. Ask President Clinton.
If the administration understands that its goal is a credible peace process that reduces tension in the region and improves life for Israelis and Palestinians on the ground while making modest, incremental gains toward real peace, it might get what it wants — if it plays its cards carefully and well. But if it believes that a quick dash towards peace will get it over the goal line, it is probably going to be disappointed — and the fallout in the region will be severe.
Taken to the extreme, the belief that the two sides are close to peace leads some to embrace one of the most dangerous ideas in the world: that the United States should define and impose a peace on both sides, using American troops if necessary to patrol the new frontier. It is hard for me to think of a riskier proposal; violence on the frontier more than likely would not stop, and the United States would be caught in both the political and military crossfire between two angry parties.
In the medium to long term, the United States badly needs peace in the region. Unfortunately, getting the Palestinians to “yes” will be hard. I’ve argued in Foreign Affairs that we need to think much harder about how to compensate and resettle refugees. Even that will not win over the entire population; Palestinians have repeatedly said in the past that such measures are not what they want. They want to go home and for more than sixty years most have refused to accept anything else. The passing of time and the permanence of Israel have slowly built support for alternatives among Palestinians; developing attractive alternatives will help speed the slow process of change.
But the bad news and the brutal truth about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that until the Palestinians give up the dream of returning to pre-1967 Israel, peace will not finally come. Neither Israel nor anybody else can force them to give up this dream. The dream is real, the dream is woven into memory, culture, politics and faith.
With luck and skill, we can perhaps manage this conflict; we may even be able to hasten the day when it ends. Anything is possible in this world, but a quick, negotiated end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is almost certainly not in the cards.
Netanyahu is a fool, and the settlers ought to be uprooted, in the interests of a resolution.
That said, the Palestinians are not going to get any more than what Barak offered Arafat in 2000, and what Olmert offered Abbas a few years later.
I think that accounts for the stubbornness on the part of the old Palestinian guard that is still clinging to leadership positions. Why all the sacrifices in the intervening decade between Camp David and the present, if the final terms are roughly the same?
With respect to Israelis, Saudi Arabia’s veteran diplomat referred to Arafat’s rejection of Camp David as a crime against the Palestinians.
It was so disastrous in its effect on the prospects for peace and the confidence of Israelis in the sincerity of their Palestinian counterparts, that international received opinion has had to rewrite history, and claim that the U.S. was “acting as Israel’s lawyer,” as if that fact, even if true, has any bearing on whether or not Arafat should have accepted the deal, rather than stalked off without making any kind of counter offer.
Moreover, Israel withdrew from Lebanon, and uprooted its Gaza settlers, and got two wars in return, and a thrown stone from terror apologist Edward Said.
Again, received opinion pretends that these withdrawals never occurred, and therefore condemns Israel for it’s military response to border attacks from both neighbors.
Finally, more Jews were effectively expelled from Arab states after the creation of Israel than Arabs were from the old, Turkish and then British Palestinian mandate. They comprised some of the culturally-richest communities in the Middle East, and they will never be reconstituted.
There are numerous Arab states, and there will be an additional one when Palestine achieves independence, but there will never be a Jew-ran, or Jew-raq, or Jew-syria, or Jew-egypt, or Jew-rocco, though Jews in these countries have, in principle every right to sovereign territory in these nations that the Palestinians have in their territories.
The truth is, Arab’s get many nations, with their oil wealth, but Jews only get one, and even that one is declared illegitimate.
Netanyahu is a fool, and the settlers ought to be uprooted, in the interests of a resolution.
That said, the Palestinians are not going to get any more than what Barak offered Arafat in 2000, and what Olmert offered Abbas a few years later.
I think that accounts for the stubbornness on the part of the old Palestinian guard that is still clinging to leadership positions. Why all the sacrifices in the intervening decade between Camp David and the present, if the final terms are roughly the same?
With respect to Israelis, Saudi Arabia’s veteran diplomat Prince Bandar referred to Arafat’s rejection of Camp David as a crime against the Palestinians.
It was so disastrous in its effect on the prospects for peace and the confidence of Israelis in the sincerity of their Palestinian counterparts, that international received opinion has had to rewrite history, and claim that the U.S. was “acting as Israel’s lawyer,” as if that fact, even if true, has any bearing on whether or not Arafat should have accepted the deal, rather than stalked off without making any kind of counter offer.
Moreover, Israel withdrew from Lebanon, and uprooted its Gaza settlers, and got two wars in return, (and a thrown stone from terror apologist Edward Said.)
Again, received opinion pretends that these withdrawals never occurred, and therefore condemns Israel for it’s military response to border attacks from both neighbors.
Finally, more Jews were effectively expelled from Arab states after the creation of Israel than Arabs were from the old Turkish and then British Palestinian mandate. They comprised some of the culturally-richest communities in the Middle East, and they will never be reconstituted.
There are numerous Arab states, and there will be an additional one when Palestine achieves independence, but there will never be a Jew-ran, or Jew-raq, or Jew-syria, or Jew-egypt, or Jew-rocco, though Jews in these countries have, in principle every right to sovereign territory in these nations that the Palestinians have in their territories.
The truth is, Arab’s get many nations, with their oil wealth, but Jews only get one, and even that one is declared illegitimate.
At the very end of Oslo, Clinton desperately pleaded with Arafat to accept the terms as negotiated. What did he want? Arafat replied, “More.” Another junior group of Palestinian negotiators were more explicit what “more” meant. They guessed that $500 billion in compensation might be enough.
We need to take them seriously. Blood money is real for them. Honor requires it. Land cannot be surrendered voluntarily, let alone by force, without compensation. Furthermore, Islam is a religion about the bringing real estate within the realm of “the law” just as much as Judaism is.
Ireland resisted foreign settlement in northern Ireland for 400 years even in the absence of a religious injunction. It is unrealistic to suppose that the Palestinians will eventually give up on their claims. And the demographic tides run strongly in their favor.
If Israel hopes to survive, it is imperative to settle now (in the next generation). Only Europe can supply the necessary means. Face up to it.
very good analysis. i would only add that the W. Bank population is not close to accepting concessions on refugees or anything else. the conflict must be looked at from the religious-islamic angle and not so much from the territorial.
egyptian peace is between the govt. of egypt and israel, while its people oppose israel overwhelmingly more due to religious inclinations.
This otherwise promising analysis unfortunately de-emphasizes what is arguably the most important aspect of the conflict – the active, pernicious and aggressively genocidal involvement of the Arab countries. The Palestinians themselves are nurtured in the state of endless belligerency by the “hosts” of their Diaspora that keep their descendants stateless, often confined to camps and educate every successive generation in militant schools. They are in many ways cannon fodder for the ambitions of Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, et al – to in fact eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. Now that Iran has joined the push in the last decades, it’s become even worse, since Iran is directly funding the radical elements within the settled Palestinian population west of the Jordan River as well.
Thus, no amount of good will concessions, partition plans, settlement removals or other “peace process” steps are likely to produce the desired outcome of peaceful coexistence, since they are all focused on mollifying that part of the Palestinian and Arab people that already largely coexists with Israel.
Essentially, it’s like selling the wrong thing to the wrong crowd – the decision makers are not in Ramallah or Gaza, and not even in the camps of Lebanon or Libya, but rather in Damascus, Mecca, Teheran, Tripoli and Cairo. And what they want to buy – Israel can’t sell them, since nobody would negotiate their own demise (and be able to carry it out in a democratic model of governance without losing power).
So the overall point here is correct – conflict management rather than conflict resolution is what is going on and likely will continue. Alas, the explanation of the root cause seems lacking.
There is one more fundamental abstraction at play that prevents an accurate understanding of the situation – even the Palestinians as the cannon fodder of the Arab war on Israel are not, in fact, participating in the war as a unified community. Rather, an observer would benefit from one more level of detail as follows: the Palestinians are split into subcommunities, often at loggerheads with each other, and each with its own degree of coexistence with the Jews west of Jordan. Some of the obvious examples are the Druze – non-Muslim Arabs allied to the Jews who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (often by choice in the Border Police detachments that are in direct violent conflict with the West bankers), vote Likud, etc, the Negev Bedouin – Muslim Arabs who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces (often guarding the violent Gaza border and in tracker units) but vote for their own sectoral party, the Galilee Muslims who are citizens of Israel but are radicalized to a large degree, the Galilee Arab Christians who are citizens of Israel and are largely integrated into the Israeli life yet don’t serve in the Army, the East Jerusalem residents who are permanent residents of Israel and are largely quiescent, the Judean Desert Bedouin who are neutral, the Beit Sahour/Beit Jallah/Bethlehem Arab Christians who are Palestinians and are quiescent.
The conflict populations are in fact the primarily Muslim Gaza and West Bank village, camp and town residents who comprise less than half of the total Arab population west of the Jordan River, and not all of them are radicalized either.
On the other side of the equation, if one thinks of a fair split of disputed territory roughly following the ethnic composition of the population in the territory (a formula that was eventually applied to Bosnia in the Dayton Accords, for example), then Israeli Jews number around 500,000 in the area defined by the commentators as “settlements” – east Jerusalem and West Bank. Arabs number perhaps 2,500,000 in that same area. A “fair” split would give Israel approximately 15% of the combined east Jerusalem/West Bank area on the soul-counting basis alone, not even taking into account relative economic weight of the two populations, historical rights, security, etc. As the proportion of Jews in that area grows – and it’s been growing, the “fair” share of the split for Israel has been growing as well, and that’s the core logic behind all the screaming about facts on the ground…
I agree. Excellent analysis. I have only a few minor quibbles.
First, you’re probably right that the “go for broke” strategy turned out to be a mistake. But that wasn’t obvious at the time. Only by having Arafat reject peace did it clarify the situation that we’re in.
Second, it’s not so clear that the Palestinians have refused to accept anything other than going home. The fact is, nothing else has been offered to them. Unlike other war refugees, the host Arab nations have kept the Palestinians in refugee camps for several generations for their own propaganda purposes. Because, of course, most of these refugees were not born in and have never lived in Palestine. Like the Jews who were expelled from Hebron and the Arab lands, they will need to say goodbye to their old land.
The Palestinian-Israel conflict is, relative to other regional conflicts, less deadly. Management of it may be precisely what is called for. This is German sociologist, Gunnar Heinsohn, writing in The Wall Street Journal:
” In Arab nations such as Lebanon (150,000 dead in the civil war between 1975 and 1990) or Algeria (200,000 dead in the Islamists’ war against their own people between 1999 and 2006), the slaughter abated only when the fertility rates in these countries fell from seven children per woman to fewer than two. The warring stopped because no more warriors were being born.
And so the killing continues. In 2005, when Israel was still an occupying force, Gaza lost more young men to gang fights and crime than in its war against the “Zionist enemy.” Despite the media’s obsession with the Mideast conflict, it has cost many fewer lives than the youth bulges in West Africa, Lebanon or Algeria. In the six decades since Israel’s founding, “only” some 62,000 people (40,000 Arabs, 22,000 Jews) have been killed in all the Israeli-Arab wars and Palestinian terror attacks. During that same time, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars and terror attacks — mostly at the hands of other Muslims.”
Here’s the link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123171179743471961.html
(Sur)Realpolitik…
Since the latter days of the Bush administration and into the Obama administration, the over-riding strategic approach to the Iraq War has been to stabilize Iraq. As noted by a number of strategists, including Tom Barnett, stabilizing Iraq has been……
Sorry to be a wee bit off subject here, but having been a mideastern history major, and having hitched through the mideast in mid-60s and having kept up over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that this old saw about how we have to do a two-state solution BEFORE Arab Muslims accept Israel is exactly backwards. They need to undergo something akin to a reformation and they need to do that first. If there was a two state deal tomorrow, do you seriously think Saudis and Iranians would stop funding Pali terrorists? No way.
When I was in Damascus and Baghdad in1965 it wasn’t uncommon to see bazaar booth owners who had pictures of Hitler in their stalls, pictures festooned with flowers, etc., right next to that of whatever dictator ran Syria or Iraq at the time. Fact was I loved the Arabs. Their congenital hospitality to travelers is unparalleled. But the notion that there is such a thing as a single moderate Arab Muslim anywhere but in an expat diaspora far away from the Mideast is patent baloney.
Don’t mean to keep rattling on, but in the mid-60s, if you were a hitchhiker in the mideast, you soon learned the code word for Israel when walking the streets. It was “Disneyland,” and you dared not say the word Israel out loud lest an angry crowd would gather and begin to harrass you. At the time you could go by land from Jerusalem Jordan to Israel, but not back from Israel, nor could you ever travel in another Arab country once you had an Israel visa stamped on your passport (at least that was the word on the hiker’s street then, never was able to verify it). In the youth hostel in Damascus, there was a map of the mideast that the hostel owner had blackened out where Israel should have been. Little reminders of the extent of the hatred everywhere you went among a people who were otherwise wonderful.
Here is former legal advisor and general Counsel to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), James Lindsay. The agency, largely funded by the U.S., employs a staff of 24,000, and has survived 60 years, notwithstanding its original three-year mandate. Lindsay is critical of his former organization:
“UNRWA — is it part of the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict or part of the problem?
The humanitarian aspect of the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas has cast a fresh spotlight on the presence in Gaza of the nearly sixty-year-old United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), raising important questions about why the UN still operates schools, hospitals, and clinics for “refugees” six decades after the partition of Mandatory Palestine.
UNRWA began providing assistance to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in May 1950, in the wake of the 1947-1949 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, the organization has survived wars, coups, uprisings, and, in Gaza and the West Bank, even the creation of the first-ever Palestinian governing body — the Palestinian Authority — which operates in parallel with, not in place of, UNRWA institutions.
Over the course of its long history, UNRWA has rarely been the subject of comprehensive external evaluation, and virtually nothing has been written on the organization’s strategy and operations by a senior staff member with knowledge of how UNRWA actually works.
This path-breaking study by James G. Lindsay, UNRWA’s former general counsel, offers one of the first insider accounts of the organization. In it, Lindsay analyzes the agency’s evolution over the past half century, evaluates recent criticisms of its operations, and recommends bold new policies for the U.S. government — UNRWA’s largest single-country donor — that will help repair an aid and relief system that has strayed from its original mission.”
Here’s the link to his paper:
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC04.php?CID=306
Thanks for your insights Tom.
It definitely puts a lie to those who seem to forget that it was not the occupation of the West Bank in 1967 that caused the animosity towards Israel.
How many actual refugees from 1948 are still alive? That is, not counting those born since, in Lebanon, Jordon or Syria, how many are left?
I’ve heard the number is about 50,000. They’re all over 62 years old now. In 20 years the number will dwindle a lot.
An O’Reilly born in Brooklyn is not considered an Irish refugee. A baby born in Lebanon should be considered Lebanese.
It would be much simpler if Israel just changed its name to “Iran.” It would then get this administration’s love and respect…
A blemishless analysis, Walter. But it does not get to the two ultimate strategic questions (not that it purported to).
First, what’s the most propitious Israeli attitude to push the political majority of the Palestinian Arabs toward accepting Israel’s legitimacy? Concessions, reasonableness and diplomacy? Or the fist in the face? Will they be persuaded by civilized sincerity, or only by the bloody conclusion that they can never win?
Second, what’s the stake for the US? How much does this stuff really matter, compared to other stuff?
I would submit that once reasonable people agree on the essential analysis, which you have summarized brilliantly, these become the real questions that drive the main actors.
They are hard questions.
“The truth is that American national interests require a peace process in the Middle East even if peace remains out of sight.”
The trouble is that since the US is seen by Arabs as almost all-powerful (and certainly as possessing great influence over Israel), if it is involved in perpetually ongoing negotiations, it will be seen as acting in bad faith.
In 1967, Israel was threatened with a war of annihilation. Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were attacking; Israel won. Yet Israel is expected to sue for peace. Why is it that when any other country wins a war, they dictate the terms of peace, but Israel is expected to sue for peace.
This is a subject that is hard to deal with in just a short post like this, but the “narratives” presented here certainly capture much of the usual debates very well. However, if the US is looking for a solution, the most important point made by WRM is that the difficult issues date back to Israel’s establishment and the war launched by the Arab states to undo this. That’s why it is completely pointless to pretend that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is needed. It was the Arab-initiated war that created the refugees, and it was, and is, Arab intransigence that made this refugee status inheritable. As long as the Arabs refuse to face up to their responsibilities, the conflict will indeed remain intractable. And let us not forget that the Arabs also created some 800 000 Jewish refugees in the course of this conflict.
And while I’m a devoted WRM fan, I think he is wrong to claim in his Foreign Affairs article:
“George W. Bush failed at everything he tried.”
It doesn’t really come natural to me to defend Bush, but credit where credit is due: his Annapolis talks produce the Olmert offer, which is by now without doubt the blueprint for an agreement, at least as far as the territorial aspects are concerned.
The fact that the Palestinians were unwilling to say yes to Olmert’s proposals only goes to underline the validity of WRM’s conclusion that peace is not around the corner.
One final note on Gaza: there are some interesting proposals that envisage the land swaps that would compensate the Palestinians for the settlements as adding land to Gaza, which could enlarge the territory by about 1/3, instead of adding pointless bits and pieces of land to the West Bank. Obviously, these proposals are eminently sensible, because Gaza is not only the most densely populated Palestinian territory, but also has considerable economic potential, given its location on some prime Mediterranean beach, some gas reserves, the capacity for a port, closeness to Egypt, etc. If the Palestinians were really interested in a viable state, this should be the most attractive land swap.
I’ve to say that I’ve always rooted for Obama — when I saw the first interview with him shortly after he became a senator, I said that this man will be America’s first black president. Like many of his admirers, I now feel that I overestimated him. Certainly when it comes to the Middle East, his policies look more and more disastrous — and I’m saying this not just as an Israeli because he is leaning so hard on us. But I’m afraid it’s true that in the Middle East, it’s the “strong horse” that is admired, and under Obama, the US looks just appalingly weak and wavering. Being hard on old allies and deferential to bitter enemies doesn’t win you respect or clout around here.
tom good posts, shows how deep the issue is in muslim world.
I’ve never blamed the Arab street for the problems in the Mideast. They’re just pawns. I decided not to go to Israel, though that was where everyone from the west was going in late 1965 when I was there. Interesting to think back and realize that all or at least most of those wannabe kibbutzniks who went through the one-way Mandelbaum Gate in then divided Jerusalem were left-leaning in those days, smitten I guess with the promises of a life of collective gardening. Now those leftists, who couldn’t wait to “work the land” for Marx’s sake, are Israel’s worst enemies. Funny that. I was one of three oiut of about a hundred who didn’t go into Israel, because I didn’t want to be shut out from traveling through the rest of the mideast and northeastern Africa, since I was headed to Egypt, Sudan (where in 1965 it was said that one million were already dead in the south from the Sudanese Arab extermination and slave-gathering regimen and where my visa prohibited me from going anyway (anywhere south of Khartoum), and on to Ethiopia. When Bush and Powell finally brought peace to the south of Sudan, that’s when Darfur exploded, since the black rebels there (who unlike in the south, are Muslim just like their racist persecutors in Khartoum) wanted their autonomy too. Ironically, I was headed (age 18) to South Africa, home then of apartheid and the rule of its sl-called architect PM Verwoerd Now they’re calling Israel an apartheid state. It’s a valid concern, not because it’s Israel policy at any level, but simply because of the demographics of Arab birth rates about which Israel must do something. But what? And frankly, with this idiot of a president we’re saddled with, Israel had best reestablish its independent ways and regain the spirit that allowed it to triumph in 1967. And they sure as hell shouldn’t give that land back. There never was a Palestine to begin with, just sand and shacks and massive Islamic dysfunction, and Israel was about to be attacked on a multi-country front when they preempted. You expel an near attack like that, that otherwise would have ended in total Israeli genocide, you don’t return the land to your attackers, your would-be killers. Tough times ahead for Israel, but they’ve seen worse. They’re survive and continue to thrive.
“otherwise why do we spend so much time, effort and money trying to threaten, bribe or cajole the two sides into sitting down?”
Unless you consider press releases and briefings and the occasional trip to the region by someone who won’t be missed much while they’re gone, we spend very little effort and money. Time, yes, but that is the one thing we have in spades.
“We are 62 years closer to peace in the Middle East today than the world was in 1948.”
That implies you’ve always known that the date of the final peace was after March 24, 2010. If that’s so, maybe you know the precise date of the final peace. I hope you do and you quickly share that info with the rest of the world.
Btw, I’m still dying to know what you were doing in Palestine when Arafat gently kissed you on the crown of your head. And if you’ve since washed that spot.
Peter Burman has a question:
“In 1967, Israel was threatened with a war of annihilation. Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were attacking; Israel won. Yet Israel is expected to sue for peace. Why is it that when any other country wins a war, they dictate the terms of peace, but Israel is expected to sue for peace?”
The answer: Oil.