The End of the Two-State Solution? Part II

When the two-state solution was first proposed in the Middle East in the early 1970s it was envisaged as a deal between a Labor Party-led government on the Israeli side and the PLO led by Fatah on the other. Even as it was first being proposed in 1973 it was almost too late. On December 31, 1973 elections demonstrated that the brand new Likud was a competitive challenger to the ruling Labor Party. In May 1977 Menahem Begin, the leader of the 1940s Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) or Etzel was elected prime minister at the head of the Likud. He simultaneously went about negotiating peace with Egypt and colonizing the West Bank and Gaza with Jewish settlements. A Labor-led government without the Likud would not return to power for fifteen years. 

Labor coalitions were in power for six years out of that decade. But starting in 1996 both Labor and its more dovish coalition partner Meretz began losing seats. By 2009 they had lost three-fourths of the seats they had when Rabin formed a government in 1992. That year--1992--was the only year since 1977 that the Center-Left had more seats than the Right and the religious parties. Barak in 1999 decided to build a broad coalition with the religious parties. These parties deserted his coalition as soon as he departed for Camp David in July 2000--even before he made his radical concessions on Jerusalem and borders.

Obama's Second Term and the Peace Process

Back in 1986 William Quandt, who had served as Jimmy Carter's Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, wrote in his book Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics that presidents have basically five years to work on Middle East peace, provided that they are reelected. In their first term presidents spend the first term acquiring expertise about the area and learning the ropes and their last year running for reelection. In their second term--for those lucky enough to have one--they have the first three years because in their last year they are a lame duck. Quandt based his calculations on his experience in the Carter administration and his academic observations of the Johnson and Nixon-Ford administrations. I agreed with this when I read it and I still do some 26 years later. Obama has already used up his first two of five years. What will he do in his remaining three?

J Street, Post-Zionism and the Two-State Solution

This weekend J Street, the liberal Zionist pro-peace lobby, will be holding its third conference since its founding in 2008. In 2009 it attracted 1500 people to its first conference, this expanded to over 2,000 at its second conference last year, and it is expected to have over 2500 attendees for its third conference. This has worried the Zionist Right in America, aligned behind the dominant Likud Party and the other parties of the ruling coalition. They have been very inventive in the ways they attack it, which mainly amounts to guilt by association and obfuscation.  But J Street may not be much of a threat to their Greater Israel project.

Bertie Ahern to be expelled from Fianna Fail?

There were two stories of interest today in Irish Central's Newshound site dedicated to Northern Ireland politics. One is that an official Irish commission, the Mahon Commission, has found that former Taoiseach (Prime Minister pronounced teeshuck) Bertie Ahern, was less than honest about the source of his wealth. The other is that his party that he led to victory three times (1997, 2002, 2007) as the most successful party leader since Eamon de Valera, the party's founder, is seeking to expel him for corruption. Ahern collaborated with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in bringing peace to Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2007. Stephen Collins, the Irish Times political reporter and the author of a very good book on Fianna Fail from the 1970s to 2000 as well as a biography of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, writes that expelling Ahern will be the easy part for the party. It will be much harder for the party to recover its reputation that it lost as a result of the economic collapse in 2010. A disclosure, two years ago I was researching Fianna Fail for a project to compare it with Israel's Likud Party. I turned to Collins to advise me on bibliography.

For observers of Irish politics what happens to Fianna Fail is of great interest. It should, however, also be of interest to those interested in the future of the Middle East peace process. Here is why.

Why Kadima Can't Replace Labor as Peace Party

Here are five quick reasons why Kadima cannot replace the Labor Party as the backbone of the Israeli peace camp:

1) It is led by a leader, Tzipi Livni, who has confessed that she doesn't like politics and feels that politics is like a sewer. Here is Ha'Aretz's take on that revelation.

2) Tzipi Livni barely beat out Shaul Mofaz for the leadership of the party in 2008. Mofaz has in order three ambitions: a) take over as Kadima party leader; b) replace Barak as defense minister--his old job; 3) replace Netanyahu as leader of the Right.

3) In order to nearly keep its same strength in the 2009 election as in 2006, Kadima had to cannibalize Labor and Meretz. This has left it incapable of leading a coalition on its own.

4) Kadima has no core principles or ideology--it was founded as a party of convenience like the Center Party and the DMC before it. It has avoided their fates simply because it was much more successful at the polls the first time out because of Sharon, who is permanently gone.

5) Kadima's potential Palestinian peace partner is Fatah, which is as conflicted as  Kadima.

Ripeness and the Arab League

In international mediation theory, ripeness is the key theoretical concept. I.William Zartman, an Africanist and a negotiations expert posits that three conditions are necessary for ripeness, which will allow foreign mediation between two or more warring parties to succeed. These are: 1) a hurting stalemate; 2) representative parties; and 3) a way out or formula. Most theory since then has worked on further defining the characteristics of a hurting stalemate. But I believe that representative parties is at least as important. The parties in the negotiations must represent the sides involved in the conflict.

All too often, one side will refuse to negotiate with the other and instead picks a more acceptable or palatable negotiating partner. This happened with Israel and the Palestinians from 1967 to 1988. It happened in Northern Ireland in 1973 during the Sunningdale initiative. And it has happened elsewhere. In Northern Ireland both the violent Protestants--the loyalists--and the violent Catholics--the republicans--were excluded from a power-sharing experiment. Both conspired against it and after only five months it collapsed. In the Middle East the Israelis refused to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) both because it used terrorism and because it refused to accept Israel's right to exist. Only after the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist in December 1988 did Israel finally choose to negotiate with it in 1993 in Oslo, Norway.

Today, some twenty years later there is a similar problem. The PLO/Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza have been in competition since the founding of the latter in 1988. In January 2006 Hamas defeated Fatah, the main component of the PLO, in open elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Eighteen months later Hamas staged a coup in Gaza and ejected Fatah from power. Since then the split has been an aggravating factor in the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Fatah has been unwilling to offer concessions similar to those demanded of Israel out of fear that Hamas will exploit these concessions in inter-Palestinian politics. When Al-Jazeera published reported minutes of 2008 Israel-Palestine negotiations the PLO was quick to denounce the reported concessions made by it as false slanders.

There may be a solution to the problem posed by competing nationalist organizations. In African nationalist politics in what was then Rhodesia and now is Zimbabwe, there were four veteran nationalist leaders competing for domination in the mid-1970s. The leaders of the Frontline States (FLS) that bordered on Rhodesia and Namibia or provided sanctuary to the guerrillas fighting against the white minority regimes in these two countries, formed an organization in late 1974. This was in order to facilitate negotiations between the ruling white minority Ian Smith regime and the African nationalists. The FLS recognized the problem posed by the lack of nationalist unity and attempted to provide a solution. This was not only to facilitate negotiations but to avoid a repeat of the civil war in Angola between rival liberation movements fighting over power once Portugal decided to pull out of its colony.

First the FLS forced four rival organizations to consolidate within one larger umbrella organization, the African National Council, in December 1974. Eight months later the negotiations with the Smith regime had collapsed before they really started and two rival leaders, Joshua Nkomo and Bishop Abel Muzorewa, had split the ANC into rival wings. Then the FLS attempted to organize a joint guerrilla army out of the armed wings of the veteran ZANU and ZAPU movements. This organization lasted for about eight months before it broke down as a result of inter-organizational fighting in the camps and desertions by ZAPU guerrillas from the joint army.

In October 1976 the two rival leaders of ZANU and ZAPU, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, formed a diplomatic alliance ahead of a Geneva conference on the territory hosted by the British government, which had official legal sovereignty over the territory but no real power. For seven weeks three competing nationalist delegations and the Rhodesian government delegation talked past one another. A few weeks after the conference ended without result in mid-December, the FLS recognized the Patriotic Front as the sole legitimate representative of the Zimbabwean people. A month later the Organization of African Unity (OAU) recognized this decision.

Thirteen months after this the two nationalist leaders without guerrilla armies signed an agreement with the white minority regime in Rhodesia for a form of majority rule with extensive powers reserved in the hands of the whites. The war continued and escalated. Finally in December 1979, exactly seven years after the war began, the war ended after three months of negotiations between the the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government and the Patriotic Front. With the support of the FLS who were suffering from attacks from the Rhodesian military, the British government forced a settlement based on elections.

In the future, the Arab League, which first recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in October 1974, might perform a similar function of arbitration between the secular nationalist Fatah/PLO and the Islamist Hamas. This could be by forcing Fatah to admit Hamas into the PLO. Or if support for Fatah significantly weakens due to continuing corruption, it could simply delegitimize the PLO in favor of Hamas. 

In the past the authoritarian Arab regimes favored secular Sunni Arab movements supported by them over allies of the Shi'ite Iran. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are seen by both Israel and the Arab regimes as Iranian proxies. But if as a result of the "Arab Spring" more democratic and Islamist governments come to power, then the Sunni Hamas could benefit. Arab regimes supported anti-Zionist and anti-semitic rhetoric but many preferred de facto peace with Israel as a means of ensuring regional stability and their own survival. This was true of Syria and Lebanon as well as Egypt and Jordan. Now with Egypt having deposed its president under popular pressure and the Syrian regime facing significant internal unrest, things could change. We could return to an era in which Palestinian nationalist organizations received regime support from surrounding countries that were competitors to rule the Arab world. This will be a trend that will be worth watching. One potential result of genuine revolutions--regime changes--in either Egypt or Syria or both--might be the Arab League stepping in to play a role like that played by the FLS in Southern Africa over twenty years.

Ossama Bin Laden and Palestine: the Ramifications

Two important events for the Middle East took place within days of each other. On April 27, Fatah and Hamas signed a unity agreement that will lead to the formation of a government of technocrats. Eventually, if everything goes right, it will lead to the reemergence of a united Palestinian polity with Gaza and the West Bank once more being under one authority rather than under two. Almost immediately Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu denounced the agreement and said it made the Palestinian Authority unfit as a negotiating partner. His former top foreign policy advisor Dore Gold had similar comments. This exposes, as if anyone needed further exposure, the disinterest that Netanyahu and the Israeli political leadership in the present coalition have in negotiations and peace.

Such an agreement can lead to two likely outcomes: either Fatah eventually converts Hamas and the way is open for peace negotiations with Israel. Or Hamas converts Fatah and the possibility of peace recedes until decades from now Hamas realizes that it cannot destroy Israel. Which is the more likely outcome may not be clear for years. After all, if we use an Israeli analogy, has the cohabitation made Labor more like the Likud or vice versa? The answer has been that there has been movement in both directions. The Likud was split, creating Kadima, a more flexible and pragmatic party. But Labor was also split creating Atzmaut, a smaller and more hawkish party to serve as Ehud Barak's personal vehicle, possibly for a trip eventually into the leadership of the Likud. It may take years before it is established which camp, the Left or the Right, was the winner in the co-habitation sweepstakes. It will take even longer with Palestinian unity.

But this may help to set up a Middle East peace initiative in Obama's second term, if he has one.

Ossama Bin Laden's death in combat ensures three short-term effects. First, it raises the profile of the Navy Seals and gives them a good slice of the elite forces budget for the military. Second, it makes Obama's job of withdrawing from Afghanistan easier as it eliminates partially a good deal of the rationale for remaining there. Third, it visibly improves Obama's chances of reelection. Timing wise, if this had occurred a week before the election instead of 18 months before it, it would have been much better for Obama. People tend to have short memories when it comes to voting. But Obama has demonstrated that he is capable of decisive action, of keeping a secret, and of waiting until the proper moment to strike. I'm sure that Obama's reelection manager will have a few ads featuring Obama and the announcement of his death to show the electorate in the fall of 2012.

Three New Developments

Three events have recently occurred, all of which would normally be worth commenting and editorializing about, but they have tended to drown each other out.

First, the IDF's internal enquiry into the Mavi Marmara boarding incident cleared the IDF. This was to be expected. The terms for the enquiry were whether or not Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal under international law and whether Israel used excessive force. Blockade is a well established belligerent practice in both international and internal conflicts. During the American Civil War President Lincoln held that the Confederate States of America had committed an illegal rebellion and refused to recognize that they had any legitimate rights under international law. At the same time he carried out a blockade of the South as if the CSA were a recognized belligerent. As recently as the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and more recently the Tamil Tiger rebellion in Sri Lanka blockades were used.

The second point is excessive force. It has been well established that the supposedly humanitarian ship was outfitted with a number of "peace activists" well armed with riot weaponry--iron pipes, knives, edged weapons, etc. The IDF was justified in using force to protect the life of its soldiers the same as if Iranians had attacked a U.S. Navy ship carrying out search duties during the UN trade embargo on Iraq and American sailors had fired back.  What is inexcusable is that the IDF, an army descended from the prestate Hagana/Palmakh militia that carried out blockade running against the British during the 1940s, was unprepared for this resistance.

The second major event is the introduction in the Security Council of a draft resolution by the Palestinians condemning Israeli settlements as illegal. Numerous former diplomat have weighed in urging the Obama administration not to veto the resolution. Nearly everyone except Israel and American administrations--but not the State Dept.--consider the settlements to be illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from deporting or voluntarily settling its population in occupied territory. Israel's claim is that the West Bank and Gaza are not occupied but rather disputed territory, because Jordan had illegally occupied the West Bank and Egypt Gaza, previous to Israel seizing them in 1967. The near universal belief is that until clear legal title to the territories is established, no foreign power may settle them. That makes sense to me. I disagree with Michael Lame at rethinktheme.org (http://www.rethinktheme.org/) that this would jeopardize the peace process. Something that is already dead cannot be killed again before being revived.

In a Wikileaks-like development Al Jazeera news agency published documents that are purported to be the minutes of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of 2008 under the Annapolis peace initiative. The leaks seem to indicate that the Palestinian side was much more flexible than the Israeli side. At the time there was a coalition government consisting of Kadima and Labor as the main parties. The prime minister was Ehud Olmert, who was effectively a lame duck due to both his performance during the Second Lebanon War of July 2006 and corruption allegations. It was nearly a mirror image of Oslo. At Oslo Arafat considered himself to be under political threat from the Islamists led by Hamas, and thus not in a position to make any concessions. Ehud Barak's Labor coalition did make substantial concessions but important gaps remained on Jerusalem and refugees. Barak was denounced by the Israeli Right for the concessions that he made. Today it is the Palestinian Right of Hamas and parts of Fatah that are denouncing the purported Palestinian concessions of 2008.

The papers, whether genuine or not, were probably leaked by someone who is either connected with the Fatah hawks or with Hamas. From 1968 until 2004 it was Palestinian policy that the conflict could only be resolved through armed conflict rather than through negotiation and compromise. The papers seem to strengthen this preexisting fundamental belief.

Even during the Oslo process Arafat was quoted several times making a reference to a truce that Muhammad had made with Arabian Jews and then broke when it suited him. The message was that what was good enough for Muhammad was good enough for him, and that Oslo would result in a coerced peace made under duress that could then be broken at will.

This illustrates the difficulties of negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For this to happen four things are necessary: 1) A Palestinian government with credibility among the people must be willing to make an offer that realistically some Israeli government could accept; 2) an Israeli government must make an offer that some Palestinian government could realistically accept; 3) an American administration must be willing to take a vigorous role in mediating the conflict; 4) most difficult of all--the first three things need to take place at the same time. So far, at least one of the players hasn't been ready when the others have been. The PLO wasn't ready in 1999-2000; Israel hasn't been ready since 2000; and the U.S. hasn't been ready from 2000 to 2009. 

In my next post I will examine President George W. Bush's Palestine policy and what it says about the Middle East conflict and American policy.

The Start of the Northern Ireland Peace Process

This post will look at the conditions that existed in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s that gave rise to the peace process there. I will then compare them to the situation in the Middle East today.

The start of the peace process is usually dated to the Hume-Adams talks in 1988. The peace did not stabilize until the implementation of power sharing for a third time in May 2007--19 years later. This illustrates that making peace in native-settler conflicts is a long process. The Hume-Adams talks were a dialogue between the leaderships of Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the two nationalist or Catholic political parties in Northern Ireland. They came about initially because both of the two party leaders, John Hume of the SDLP and Gerry Adams of the SDLP, wanted to convince the other of the validity of his view of the conflict. Adams blamed the conflict on the "illegal British occupation of the North of Ireland" whereas Hume saw it as a result of the division among the people (or peoples) of Ireland. Hume, like the Fine Gael party in the Republic, believed that it was up to the nationalists to reassure the unionists of their position within a united Ireland. Adams wanted to drive the British out and the unionists in.

The six rounds of dialogue in 1988 ended without a conclusion, but with both parties having exchanged formal position papers several times. The two leaders renewed the dialogue in 1992. By that time Hume had convinced the Northern Ireland Secretary to formally state in a speech that Britain had no selfish economic or military interest in Northern Ireland, a contention that Hume had argued during the talks with Adams. The dialogue in 1992 was exposed by a nationalist journalist who saw Adams emerging from Hume's home one day. The two leaders agreed to write the draft of a memorandum that Dublin could then show to London as the basis for a peace process sponsored by the two governments.

It has since been revealed that by the late 1980s the IRA was honeycombed with British double agents either working for the Special Branch (intelligence) of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or for the British army. These agents were either blackmailed by the British into working for them, went over to the British to avenge punishment beatings administered by the IRA or joined the organization in order to serve as double agents. As a result of their efforts most of the IRA's (and INLA's ) military operations failed with many members being either arrested and imprisoned or killed in ambushes. At the same time the political wing of the movement, the IRA, was held back from achieving its potential electoral return due to public opposition to the armed struggle in general and to IRA atrocities and operations gone bad. Adams and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator and today the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, wanted to cash in their chips and attempt to reap as much benefit as they could from ending the armed struggle.

Sinn Fein's main problem was the IRA' s rank and file activists, who had been recruited to fight and go to prison for a united Ireland. So Adams and McGuinness argued to the unsophisticated but dedicated members that Sinn Fein would establish itself as a viable party in both parts of Ireland and then work to force a united Ireland on the British, the unionists, and Dublin. The argument was that Sinn Fein would grow large enough in the Republic that it could force the two main parties to include it in any coalition government and it would then force the main coalition party to carry through with a united Ireland. This was a case of hope prevailing over reality. Adams and McGuinness also assured the IRA that it would never have to disarm as it had not surrendered or been defeated.

The IRA called a ceasefire at midnight on the last day of August 1994 in response to the joint declaration (Downing St. Declaration) of the two governments laying out the principles of a peace process in December 1993. Six weeks after the IRA the three main loyalist paramilitary organizations (UDA, UVF, Red Hand Commando) also called a ceasefire and offered an apology to the families of their victims. The Ulster Unionist Party under the leadership of Jim Molyneaux was reluctant to enter into negotiations. Under British pressure, Molyneaux resigned as party leader after 16 years and was replaced by David Trimble, who at the time was seen as the hard-line candidate. Following elections in June 1996 negotiations began among the two governments and the main unionist parties, Alliance, and the SDLP. Sinn Fein was excluded because the IRA had broken its ceasefire in February 1996 with a massive bombing in London. After both the British and Irish governments were replaced in the summer of 1997 by governments seen as more sympathetic to the Republicans, the IRA declared a ceasefire in July 1997. In September 1997 Sinn Fein entered the negotiations. The Democratic Unionists of Ian Paisley and the UK Unionists both walked out of the talks when Sinn Fein entered.

Serious bargaining took place for about six weeks from late February to early April 1998. On April 9, 1998 an agreement was signed known formally as the Belfast Agreement and informally as the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement called for power sharing in Northern Ireland between unionists and nationalists in exchange for Dublin giving up its claim to Northern Ireland and cooperation between Belfast and Dublin on a number of matters ranging from tourism to fisheries and forest management. Prisoners of all paramilitary organizations that had gone on ceasefire and recognized the agreement were to be released within two years. All parties were to use their maximum influence to ensure that decommissioning came about by the time prisoners were released. The IRA claimed that it would never disarm as it was not a party to the agreement.

In December 1999 power sharing began on a tentative basis and Dublin amended its constitution to end its territorial claim to Northern Ireland.

It would appear that at this point in time Hamas has not given up its belief in the political utility of armed struggle--a combination of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. Neither for that matter have many elements within the rival Fatah party. Neither have the parties on the Israeli Right such as the Israel Beitenu (Israel is Our Home) party and the Beit Israel party and parts of the Likud. They are all opposed to a two-state solution of the conflict. Washington insists on mediating the peace process solo, with only a token role for the Europeans, the Russians, and the UN. The SDLP has no equivalent party in terms of strength (during the 1990s) among the Palestinians and the Israeli equivalent of the Ulster Unionist Party, Labor, has been rapidly shedding members of Knesset (MKs) since 1996. The Labor Party is incapable of heading a coalition government. It was Washington's Israeli peace partner from 1969 to 2000.

The IRA finally decommissioned its weapons (or the bulk of them) in September 2005, some 36 years after it split from the Official IRA. Fatah did not come under moderate leadership dedicated to a two-state solution without the armed struggle until 2005--some 47 years after it was created in Kuwait. Hamas was created in 1988. Don't expect a major change in policy for another 20 or 25 years at least.  Remember the Provisional IRA and Fatah were/are secular organizations; Hamas is religious--its name means zeal.