The Middle East Blame Game and the Truth

After the op-ed writers and foreign policy bloggers began writing their obituaries on Secretary of State John Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian mediation effort, some began assigning blame. The chief culprits demanding on which side of the partisan divide one stood were Israeli settlement activity and Palestinian intransigence. But in this op-ed piece former State Department Middle East negotiator Aaron D. Miller, deputy to Dennis Ross in the Oslo era, dismisses this and simply states that the two sides were too far apart on all the issues. I made the same prediction for the same reason last August during the release of my most recently-published book, Israel/Palestine and the Politics of a Two-State Solution, before the Madison chapter of J Street. In fact I made a Venn diagram to illustrate that there was no overlap between the Israeli and Palestinian positions on the aggregate of issues. In fact in the most serious previous negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians in 2008 the two sides never reached agreement on any of the four main issue areas: borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees.

Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon Reveals the Truth

This week Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon told the Times of Israel that the ruling coalition was opposed to the two-state solution and would vote against it if it ever came up as a government proposal. This is important because in June 2009 in a speech at Bar Ilan University, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first Likud leader to officially embrace the two-state solution. He made it conditional, however, upon the Palestinians officially recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which Danon said Netanyahu knew they would never do. If they did accept this he would come up with a new condition.  Here is a Jerusalem Post editorial on the confusion.

Israeli Interlocutor with the Palestinians Part III

In February 1983 the Kahan Commission, appointed by Begin under pressure by the Israeli peace movement and Labor following the massacres, held Sharon unfit to serve as defense minister and Eitan to serve as chief of staff. Sharon became minister without portfolio and spent the next fourteen and a half years in internal "exile" filling minor posts in Likud governments. Begin went into a deep depression and retired from politics in September 1983.

His successor was Yitzhak Shamir, a former leader of the Lehi underground movement and foreign minister under Begin. Shamir spent the next nine years making sure that settlement continued without stop on the West Bank--he met little resistance from Labor--and that no peace plan got anywhere. In 1992 after losing an election Shamir retired from politics and his designated successor, Moshe Arens, suprised everyone by retiring as well.

Shamir's successor then became an Arens protege, a scion, of a distinguished Revisionist and Israeli family, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu. Sharon would spend the remaining fourteen years of his political life attempting to outflank Netanyahu from the right or the left. He joined Netanyahu in attacking the Oslo peace process. Netanyahu appointed him foreign minister in October 1998 on the eve of the Wye Plantation Summit to fortify his own right flank. Bibi signed a deal but upon returning to Israel lacked the clout to sell it to his coalition. His government collapsed and Sharon emerged as leader of the Likud, a prize he had sought since founding it a quarter century before.

In July 2000 the Camp David Summit ended with no agreement and Clinton failed to produce bridging proposals. Arafat prepared the Palestinians for a major uprising by stocking up on medical and food supplies, something that the Palestinian leadership had not done in 1936 or in 1948. Netanyahu, who had resigned his Knesset seat, looked to be preparing a comeback. The Likud voted in the Knesset for a law that would allow Netanyahu to become prime minister without being a deputy. Sharon needed to act quickly. He sought and won permission from Prime Minister Ehud Barak to visit the Temple Mount with a police escort at the end of September 2000. The visit lasted about an hour and provoked some minor clashes with Palestinian worshippers on the Mount. Arafat quickly exploited this to touch off the Al-Aksa (named for one of the two mosques on the Mount) Intifada. Barak called an election for prime minister for February 2001. Sharon handily won and then had to clean up the mess that he had helped to make.

The Al-Aksa Intifada quickly devolved into a contest between the Islamists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Fatah Al-Aksa Brigades to see who could mount the bloodiest terrorist incidents. Unlike the mid-1990s, the Islamists no longer needed to fear any temporary jailing by Arafat. Arafat quickly returned to his true metier as leader of the "armed struggle." Attempts by Washington and Cairo to intervene got nowhere because Arafat was determined to improve his bargaining leverage and his popularity, seriously eroded due to the nature of his regime, and Jerusalem was determined to not allow Arafat to gain any advantage.

Sharon gradually adopted two main tactics. The first was "targeted killings" a euphemism for assassination of Palestinian terrorist and political leaders. The other was invasion of the areas of the West Bank from which the IDF had withdrawn in the mid-1990s under Oslo. After a major terrorist bombing in Netanya on March 27, 1992, Sharon sent the IDF back into the cities of the West Bank to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. Unlike in 1982, this time he had the complete sympathy of the American president who despised Arafat. After reestablishing control Sharon adopted the separation strategy proposed by Labor, but changed the boundaries. The separation barrier, a combination of electrified fence and high brick walls, ran along the Palestinian side of the green line or border and occasionally deep into the West Bank to include settlements like Ariel.

Sharon, who believed that a Palestinian state should consist of less than half the territory of the West Bank, began using the language of the Israeli Center-Left. He spoke of occupation and the suffering of the Palestinians. And he prepared a redeployment of the Israeli military to politically more defensible lines--he would withdraw from Gaza, abandoning the settlers who had lived there for a quarter century. And he abandoned four settlements in northern Samaria. The Likud bulked at this plan and Sharon had to turn to Labor for the Knesset votes necessary to win approval. The IDF carried out the redeployment in August 2005. Sharon then withdrew from the party, which he had founded thirty years before, two months later. Two months after that he suffered a massive stroke and his political career was over.

Sharon, except for the length of his political career, is typical of many of Israel's military politicians. He in many ways serves as a role model for military politicians in the Likud and Kadima such as Shlomo Mofaz and Moshe "Boogie" Ya’alon. Dayan had his first encounters with Palestinians fifteen years before Sharon in 1938-39 as did Yigal Allon. Ehud Barak had his about fifteen years after Sharon's in the late 1960s. His role in the assassination of Palestinian terrorist leaders in Beirut in 1973 helped to make his military career and establish him as Israel's most decorated soldier.

Except during Oslo in the 1990s and in 2008, most Israeli leaders have only dealt with Palestinians, either directly or indirectly, on the battlefield. In this they resemble Andrew Jackson who dealt with American Indians from 1788 until 1837, mostly on the battlefield or in one-sided peace negotiations. Jackson, like Sharon, also exceeded his orders in invading foreign territory in Florida in 1817. But unlike with Sharon, it helped his career. Maybe we can count Sharon's fourteen years in minor posts as a major advancement. Jackson, unlike Sharon, was able to carry out his dream of removing the natives. Sharon could only plan for this when he was a staff officer in Northern Command in the late 1950s.

Welcome to Reality, Noam

One of the leading bloggers on the Israeli Left, Noam Sheizaf, has finally recognized reality--the obstacles to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not all on the Israeli side but are on both sides. The Israeli Left spends its time combating and deploring Israel's march to the right, so it is perhaps understandable that it misses the fact that the Palestinians are even more nationalistic. This is usually excused by the occupation when pointed out. The Palestinians believe that the occupation is a moral "get out of jail free card" that excuses any number of sins such as terrorism, irredentism, fascism, and a complete lack of political realism. No wonder the Israeli Left has problems convincing the Israeli Right (which has its own narcissistic agenda) of this! But in a recent post, No More Peace Plans Please, Noam recognized that the problem was not one of producing a compromise that reasonable people could live with, but of finding a way to get two unreasonable and traumatized peoples to conduct fruitful negotiations. Noam finally realized that the time is not ripe for peace.

During the transition to the Obama administration, I wrote a guest column for Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove blog in which I argued that Obama would simply be too busy with other problems to invest the necessary time and political capital for a serious peace effort in the Middle East during his first term. It now appears that this will likely hold for his second term--if he receives one from the electorate--as well.

To negotiate peace in the relatively simpler and less complex Northern Ireland conflict the British and Irish governments had to focus their attentions on the problem for some 14 years--over three Irish coalition governments and two British governments. The only American administrations that have shown similar dedication to peacemaking in the Middle East were Jimmy Carter during his first two years in office and Bill Clinton during his final year in office. Carter felt he had a religious calling to solve the conflict. Unless we get a similar president--who is a two-term president who can work closely with the European Union, the conflict will remain unsolved. And before such a president can be effective, there must be an end to the power struggle among the Palestinians between Fatah and Hamas. And the Israeli Center must experience a revival to replace the Labor-Meretz Center-Left coalition governments of the Oslo process of the 1990s.  That is a tall order.

The Northern Ireland Troubles

Not only is Northern Ireland internally the closest settler and foreign society to Israel, the Northern Ireland Troubles that lasted from late 1968 to 1998 are the closest native-settler conflict to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other two contenders are the conflicts between the Native American Indians (or Amerindians) and the United States and the conflict between the ANC and the South African government from 1961 to 1994.

The conflict between the Indians and the settlers can be instantly dismissed as not very comparable because Indians are a racial group rather than a people--they are composed of hundreds of peoples. These peoples fought individual conflicts with the settlers, often aligning themselves with various of the European powers: the French, the British, the Spanish, and the United States itself. At best they formed small alliances or confederations of peoples to take on the British and the Americans as during Pontiac's Rebellion of 1759 during the French and Indian War, during the early 1790s in the Ohio Valley, during the War of 1812, during the Red River War of 1874-75, and during the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. After the end of the War of 1812 the Indians lacked a powerful foreign ally--the Spanish were a weak ally until 1819. Thus, after the American Revolution the Indians rarely proved to be an existential threat to the American settlers as the Arabs were until 1982.

The South African liberation struggle is a much closer fit. But the whites in South Africa were always a small minority. The ANC was never a serious military challenge to the South African government. In fact internally within South Africa it was the paramilitary South Africa Police rather than the South Africa Defense Force that was responsible for fighting the "terrorist" threat. And although there were divisions among both the black majority and the white minority, these were never nearly as deep as the divisions on both sides that characterized the Northern Ireland and Middle East conflicts.

The Northern Ireland conflict can be said to have had four or five logical start points: the oldest was the Ulster plantation of 1607 when entrepreneurs began settling Scots and English families in Ulster; the next is 1886 when the unionists first organized in opposition to the first Home Rule Bill; the next is 1912 when the Ulster Covenant was signed by nearly all the unionist families in the province in opposition to Home Rule and the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force was organized; the next was the creation of Northern Ireland through partition in 1921-22; and finally October 1968 when a march of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was attacked by Paisleyites. The last is the conventional starting point of The Troubles.

The Troubles began as a reactionary unionist backlash to a nationalist and liberal drive for reforms that would end the inequality in the province. This soon escalated into major interethnic strife in August 1969 that led to intervention by the British army in order to restore order. The interethnic strife was accompanied by widespread ethnic cleansing of Catholics from mixed neighborhoods in Belfast and Derry and some ethnic cleansing of Protestants from Catholic neighborhoods in retaliation. The Provisional Republican Movement was created as a traditionalist "splinter" group from the mainstream Irish Republican Army (IRA) in December 1969 and January 1970 with some assistance from a group of rebel ministers in the Dublin government. (The ministers offered to provide arms to the splitters as long as they did not operate in the Republic of Ireland.) In early 1971 the Provisional IRA began an insurgency against the British state in Northern Ireland and the Official IRA soon followed suit. The two groups competed for over a year until the Official IRA declared a ceasefire in May 1972 that soon became permanent. In late 1974 the splinter Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) split from the Official IRA and it began an armed struggle in 1979 with the assassination of the Conservative Party spokesman on Northern Ireland, Airey Neave, in the parking lot of the House of Commons.

Over the thirty years of The Troubles there were some 3500 deaths due to conflict violence and thousands more wounded, many maimed for life. The majority of those killed were killed by republicans with the vast majority of these killed by the Provisional IRA. Republicans were responsible for more Catholics killed than were the British security forces. The prostate loyalists killed over 900, mostly nationalists but a few unionists--some killed in intergroup feuds and others in cases of mistaken identity, as well as a few members of the security forces. The loyalist paramilitaries were heavily involved in criminal activities such as protection rackets and building fraud. The republicans were also involved in criminal activities but mainly as a means of funding their anti-British armed struggle. With the loyalists the struggle was more used as a cover to legitimize criminal activities.

The unionists were a majority of over 60 percent of the province's population at the time of partition and this has dropped to just over 50 percent by the end of the century. But on the island as a whole the unionists are about a fifth to a quarter of the total population. Thus there is a situation of a double majority/double minority--the nationalists are a majority on the island, but a minority in Northern Ireland; the unionists are a minority on the island but a majority in the province. This is similar to the status of Arabs and Jews within Israel and the region. But unlike the Middle East or Southern Africa there is no regional core and periphery in the British Isles.

The goal of the republicans had always been politicide--the destruction of the British province on the island of Ireland. This is similar to the Arab goal of destroying Israel before 1979. And this is still the goal of many Palestinians, especially the Islamists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. If Northern Ireland were destroyed as a British province the unionists would have the choice of either living under Irish rule or emigrating across the Irish Sea to a Britain that is in many ways culturally foreign to them. This is the same dilemma that whites faced in South Africa and that Jews face in Israel. The main difference is that as British citizens the unionists have a guaranteed refuge in mainland Britain, whereas many Afrikaners lack a natural refuge (many English-speakers have emigrated to Britain and Australia), and many Jews would lack a natural refuge.

In Northern Ireland the republicans backing armed struggle were always a minority within the nationalist population of the North as a whole. Sinn Fein never polled more than 40 percent of the nationalist vote and usually polled about a third. The remainder went to the SDLP, which was opposed to armed struggle but did support Irish unity through persuading the government in London to coerce the unionists into a united Ireland. Among the Palestinians armed struggle has since 1948 always been a position with majority support as far back as surveys have been taken. There is no real Palestinian equivalent of the SDLP in terms of the support that it received. The closest thing is Abbas's Palestinian Authority after he took over following Arafat's death in November 2004.

The Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 was essentially a negotiation among the British and Irish governments, the Ulster Unionist Party, and the SDLP. The republican and loyalist paramilitary parties were restricted to largely negotiating terms for prisoner releases and decommissioning of weapons. Throughout the negotiations the UUP refused to speak directly with the Sinn Fein delegates, whom they regarded as terrorists and murderers.

In my next post I will examine the conditions that led to the Northern Ireland peace process and compare them to those that prevail in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.