AmbassadorBlog

Netanyahu 2, Abbas 1, & Obama 0

If we were keeping score on the question of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel based on the New York meeting on Tuesday, we would have to award Prime Minister Netanyahu two points, the Palestinian President Abbas one point, and President Obama no points.  Obama certainly did not get much joy from Netanyahu in New York.  In the peace process, as an American negotiator, you can gauge how well you are doing by the number of right wing Israeli settlers protesting outside the Prime Minister's residence after a round of talks. The streets were empty today.  Of course, you can always count on the Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman to tell it like it is without the diplomatic coating that Netanyahu is so careful to preserve.  According to the Israeli press, Lieberman said on Wednesday that Netanyahu's summit with Obama was a victory because it took place even though Israel rebuffed Obama's demand on settlements. Member of Knesset Danny Danon, from Likud's right flank was obviously jubilant and, at the same time insulting to President Obama when saying that he hopes "the summit stops the Hollywood movie in which Obama lives."

We do not know what went on in private between Obama and Netanyahu.  We don't know if there were promises made.  But Dennis Ross, who was in on the meetings, went down this road with me before in negotiations with Netanyahu the last time he was Prime Minister.  So Dennis knows that what is said in private does not always occur in fact. And, to be honest, how could the Prime Minister of Israel accommodate a full settlement freeze or a serious lockdown on expansion given the government he has cobbled together.  No Israeli Prime Minister has been able to do this in a sustained way in the past, and Netanyahu is a most unlikely candidate to be the exception. Look at the numbers and tell me how Netanyahu could sustain his government if he compromises on the settlements issue.  He can't even count on the right wing of his Likud party, let alone Yisrael Beitenu, Jewish Home, or the United Torah Judaism party.  George Mitchell knows better.  He made it clear after the meeting that a settlement showdown is not a precondition for resuming negotiations.   And Netanyahu made clear that the settlements issue can only be considered in the context of the final status negotiations.  "But we have to talk in order to talk about it," Netanyahu said. 

But what will they talk about?  That is the question Obama has to face.  If the Israeli coalition government would fall over the settlements issue, would it not be more likely to fall over any compromise or even any gesture on Jerusalem?  Or on refugees?  And how are we going to negotiate borders without impinging on settlements? This is déjà vu for me.  We seem to be fighting our way back to Menahem Begin's formula for Palestinian autonomy - a Palestinian government in the mind but not on the ground.  That no doubt would satisfy Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition. 

But what about the Palestinians?  The pressure was not on them in this round.  They have just as many internal political problems as the Israelis do.  Only in Abu Mazen's case the costs of compromise are likely to be renewed civil war and violence and possibly even his life.  So the Palestinians probably sighed a sigh of relief that they got out of New York without having to challenge Hamas and without undercutting their relationship with President Obama while leaving Israel to take the blame. 

Perhaps President Obama will have to stop thinking about this problem in the short term and stop looking for a quick fix.  It seems clear that no progress is possible on the critical issues so long as the Israeli government continues in its current configuration.  And in all probability no progress can really be expected so long as the Palestinians are a hair's breadth away from committing mutual suicide.  So perhaps the Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyed has it right.  This may be the time for the Palestinians to get their act together and form a credible government in the service of the Palestinian people.  And it may be time for Israelis to consider their future and decide whether or not they want peace to be held hostage by a rigid minority of the settler movement.  Or we can just mark time until Palestinians living on land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean outnumber their Jewish neighbors.  Then what?

Arab gestures, facts on the ground, and the shrill hysteria of incitement.

As a part of the package the Obama Administration is working out with Israel on the settlements freeze and return to negotiations, there is reportedly a promise of some gestures from the Arab world in the form of opening trade offices and providing overflight rights for Israeli commercial aircraft to link Israel to Asia. Arguably, these would be positive steps in creating a better atmosphere for peace, but would they make a significant difference? In fact, they are not likely to change attitudes where they count the most - in Israel and Palestine.

Last June, The Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace published a poll of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian attitudes toward peace (http://truman.huji.ac.il/poll-view.asp?id=279). The results were not very encouraging.  While the majority of Israeli Jews felt that the conflict with the Palestinians imposed a high to unbearable cost on Israel, a similar number believed that Israel could bear that price for decades and even forever.  What those numbers should be telling the Arab rejectionists and the hostile regime elements in Gaza is that Israel can live with a sustained level of violence indefinitely.  Too many Palestinians got the wrong message from the Israeli excursions into Lebanon and their withdrawal under pressure.  In fact, if the shelling from Gaza starts up again, most Israelis believe a military solution to that problem is possible.  30% would reoccupy Gaza and over half of all Israelis think that Israel can overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza if it so desires.

What I found striking about the poll was the fact that 62% of Jewish Israelis thought that the aspiration of the Arabs, in the long run, was to conquer the state of Israel and of that number, 42% thought the goal was to destroy a significant part of the Jewish population in Israel.  If that is your assumption about the people you are expected to negotiate with, then the price for any concessions would seem to be too high. This cynical attitude about the prospects of living in peace is reflected at many points in the survey on both sides.  65% of Palestinians and 63% of Israelis believe it is impossible to reach a final status settlement these days.

Gestures by the Bahrainis or Qataris, or any other Arab state, are not going to change these numbers.  To imagine that peace is possible on this foundation of deep mutual antipathy and mistrust really stretches credulity. Peace may be a function of Prime Ministers and Presidents, but it is ultimately dependent on the people of both sides.  Confidence has to be built from somewhere below zero where it currently resides.  That will only happen when the voices of reason can out-shout the voices of intolerance and irrationality, when children are taught facts rather than slogans, when the media no longer points the camera at the loudest voice in the room, and when we get back to efforts to purge ourselves, our schools and our media of incitement.

We tried it once in 1998 as a result of the Wye agreement.  We formed an anti-incitement committee and even had meetings for several months.  Unfortunately, only the Americans took it seriously. As a result, it was still born. Perhaps the Obama Administration should consider leading a new effort, but this time with the energy and eloquence of the President of the United States. Peace is not going to come from clever formulas and untenable compromises.  It will only come when the people who are most affected want it to come, and believe in it.  That is not the case today.   

The Thirteenth Palestinian Government

From the earliest days, once the Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat forced the United States back in 1978 to take an active role in resolving the Palestinian problem, we have largely focused our efforts on security and the key final status issues like borders and Jerusalem.  President Bush embraced the  policy of a two state solution, but aside from some discussions in the context of the Autonomy negotiations and in the Oslo process years ago, there has been very little focus on what the Palestinian State will look like, how it will be organized and what are the premises on which it will be based. Presumably, these are questions that the Palestinians will have to answer in due course.  But, it is very hard for me to imagine that Israel, or for that matter the United States, is a disinterested party.  Will the Palestinian state look like Gaza under Hamas?  If that is the expectation then it is not very likely that negotiations on the final status, even if started, would ever result in an agreement.  

What we have all known for a long time is that Israel will not accept a hostile, independent state in the West Bank and Gaza and nor should it.  If there was ever any doubt of this, all we need to do is to examine the Israeli and US reaction to Hamas' rule over Gaza.  The Israelis will have to know who their neighbors are and will have to have a high degree of confidence that once a Palestinian state is established, it will not become a launching pad for attacks on Israel.  Without a substantial degree of mutual confidence, issues like security, settlements, borders, Jerusalem and refugees cannot be resolved.  This is not only a question of lines on a map.  It is also a question of intentions.

Certainly, the Palestinian record thus far does not fill one with confidence.  The divided polity, the clinging to rhetoric instead of reality, the record of corruption in the Palestinian National Authority,  and failure to govern effectively even in areas where the Authority has sway, creates the expectation of failure, instability, and continued hostility toward Israel as the path of least resistance.  Palestinians have been reluctant to take on the hard issues of coming to grips with their internal differences using the excuse that with the Israelis hovering over every decision and intervening at will, the Palestinians cannot determine their own vision or begin the construction of their own state.  They have been unwilling to take the difficult steps of forging a common Palestinian vision and policy in the absence of the concrete governmental structure of a State in being - until now.  

Now the Palestinian National Authority is advancing a new approach in its program of the thirteenth government entitled "Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State" published in August 2009.  This is a document that has received little notice in the media, but which lays out a picture of a Palestinian state that could, if implemented, enable a constructive process of peace making.  The document includes a forward by Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister that sets out the objectives of the Government for the next two years as a "full commitment to this state-building endeavor" and emphasizes that such a program is "critical" to the "creation of the independent state of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital."  Fayyad's formulation in his cover letter is interesting since it is not found in the document itself.  He refers to "East" Jerualem - the document consistently refers to "Jerusalem" without any modifier.  The document itself has problems such as repeated references to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which established the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees to their homes based on their free choice.  However, the document assigns responsibility of dealing with the refugees to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and not to the Palestinian Authority or its government.  

The agenda that the program of the 13th government has set out is surprisingly detailed, which is unusual for political documents that have to appeal to a broad constituency.  What is even more surprising is the level of self-criticism that is implied by the document. Repeated references to the need for auditing government functions would appear to be in response to the heavy criticism of the Authority as being corrupt.  It would also tend to indicate that over the 17 years that the Palestinian Authority has been in existence, virtually no reforms have taken place, no strategic plan has been developed, no consensus on goals and vision has been reached, and that there has been little or no effort to establish the foundation for a viable Palestinian state.  A lot of the credit for this dysfunctional history has to be laid at the feet of Yasser Arafat whose style of governing was divide, conquer and never decide. 

While one could nit-pick the program. Certainly there are aspects that will cause heartburn particularly within the Palestinian community, but also among some Israelis.  Furthermore, there is a long distance between statements of intention and facts on the ground.  It remains to be seen if Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad can deliver on the vision and reform.   But it is virtually certain, in my view, that without such an effort on the part of the Palestinians, there will be no peace agreement, no Palestinian state, and no respite from terrorism.  The program's success is, as Prime Minister Fayyad says, essential if a peace agreement is to be reached. The program is predicated on and designed to help achieve the unification of the Palestinian polity, without which I do not give the peace process a snowball's chance of succeeding.  This is the very first time that we have seen a concrete, rational, official Palestinian projection of what a Palestinian state might look like and how it could sustain peace as a democracy based on the rule of law. That has been an important missing ingredient in all the past efforts to concoct a peace between Israelis and the Palestinians. We should give Salam Fayyad our full support and help him make his vision real.  

Jerusalem, the Eternal Capital of Israel

On August 11, the New York Times published an article by Stephen Erlanger on the divided road the Israelis are building around Jerusalem.  This road combines two roads - one for the Palestinians to be able to move from the Northern West Bank to the Southern West Bank and back - and one for the Israelis.  The roads are separated by a high wall.  For the Israelis, there are a number of exits that allow travelers to go into Jerusalem or down into the Jordan Valley.  For the Palestinians, there are no exits except at the terminal points.   The road is not news, nor is the concept.  It is, instead the fulfillment of former Prime Minister Arik Sharon’s vision of the future for the Palestinian entities in Judea and Samaria. Sharon told me his idea when we discussed the issue of settlements and how one could disentangle the Jewish and Palestinian populations.  To build a two state solution we in the State Department had always thought that there had to be real territorial unity between the Northern and Southern parts of the West Bank and that the Palestinian State had to have a presence in Jerusalem.  In fact, President Bush has on several occasions talked about the need for territorial contiguity within the Palestinian state. Sharon, however, never thought of the West Bank as one contiguous Palestinian entity that could form the basis of a State.

Sharon spoke of the contiguity of movement - not territory.  His vision was of a series of tunnels and restricted access roads that would tie the various Palestinian parcels of land together. Meanwhile, Israel would dominate the high points and strategic crossing points to ensure Israel’s security in the future.  Sharon, who drove the settlement process, placed these Israeli outposts as a guarantee against the possibility of terrorist dominated Palestinian entity and invasion from the East. 

One of the implications of the new road is that the Palestinians neighborhoods of Jerusalem are increasingly isolated by physical barriers from the rest of the West Bank.  In fact, Sharon never contemplated giving any part of Jerusalem up.  From the earliest days, in 1980, when I was working with Sol Linowitz on the Autonomy negotiations Sharon made it clear to us that we should start with the Jerusalem question because once the Palestinians accepted Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, then a settlement of other issues and peace would be relatively easy to reach.  He never answered the question of how we were to get the Palestinians, let alone the Islamic world, to agree to such a solution.

The settlements that Israel has built around Jerusalem are unworthy of the name “settlement.”  They are mini cities that are permanent fixtures.  Their imposing presence convinced both Presidents Clinton and Bush that the Palestinians would have to accept this fait accompli.  And that very acceptance has pointed the way for Israel’s political leadership toward constructing - literally - a unilateral final resolution of the Jerusalem question.    There is still some more building to do to fill in the gaps that exist, but despite the inevitable wringing of hands in the State Department, I have little doubt that the Israeli plans will go forward and that the Arab parts of Jerusalem will, within ten years, be nothing more than an isolated island in the middle of a sprawling Israeli city. 

This is a story that has a long history.  My first post was in Israel in 1969.  At that time, Israel was in the process of establishing settlements in the Jordan valley.  They would start as Nahals, or military outposts, designed to pin down the border with Jordan and to secure the heights against future attack from the East. And gradually they would metamorphose into civilian settlements. The Israeli government had no declared policy of siezing the Jordan valley, but the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, Yigal Allon had written a short book in Hebrew outlining his concept of a peace in which Israel would gain sovereignty over one third of the West Bank along the Jordan border.  I wrote a report linking the plan to the settlements, but there was no interest in Washington in the Embassy in the facts on the ground.  Why waste time and leverage on settlements when all our efforts were directed toward a final settlement.

From that point on, we have watched and done nothing as the Israelis have built hundreds of settlements all over the West Bank.  And we have been particularly passive when it comes to Jerusalem.  Once in a while we have protested or sent our Ambassadors in to complain, but the Israelis know full well that we are not going to press the point.  It has always been inconvenient to press the Israelis on what was seen as the secondary question of the settlements when the more important issue of a final peace agreement was at stake.  And yet it is this very secondary question that has gradually excluded an increasingly large area of Palestinian land from any possible agreement and may put the possibility of any final agreement out of reach forever.

When I started in the business, my bosses conceded that the Latrun Salient - that small spit of Palestinian land that juts out from the West Bank into the land bridge that Israel had between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem - would be taken off the table and awarded to Israel. Now we are talking about taking all major Israeli city settlements off the table - over 8% of the West Bank.  And very soon, we will likely see the encirclement of Jerusalem completed and that too will come off the table.      

When that day comes the chances for peace will be gone, possibly forever.  How could a Palestinian agree to a settlement that did not have Jerusalem as an integral component? Yet I have not yet seen a US administration that has the political will to  stop the permanent acquisition of Jerusalem as the undivided eternal capital of Israel. The Israelis know very well that when the issue is Jerusalem, Congress will go their way and the President will not be far behind.  Objections based on the impact on our interests in the region will melt away in the warm glow of American politics.  It is not inevitable, but it is certainly possible.  So we had better start to plan now for how we will manage our interests in the long term as Palestinian statehood and an Arab stake in Jerusalem dissolve in the politics of Israel and America.