Europe and the Middle East Peace Process

For a number of years I have advocated that the United States enter into a partnership with the European Union for the purpose of sponsoring a non-biased peace process in the Middle East that can engage with both the Palestinians and Israel and bring pressure on both of them. The model for this dual mediation is the Anglo-Irish peace process in Northern Ireland from 1993 to 2007.

But recently an article on the Real Clear World website pointed out that Stephen Wall, a former senior British Finance Ministry official responsible for policy towards Europe and author of a book on British European policy, said that as a result of the Euro crisis in Europe with both Greece and Ireland in trouble and Spain and Portugal threatening to go bad, he expected to see the whole European economic and political project to unravel within his lifetime. He is 64. So figure some time within the next 20 years at the outside. This is partly because Europe is forever trying to run before it can crawl properly.

It has instituted a common currency without having a common monetary policy or economic policy binding on all member states. This has led to the present crisis.

Since 1979 it has been issuing policy statements on the Arab-Israeli conflict and trying to get its foot into the door of regional diplomacy. But in the early 1990s when a crisis--or more correctly, several interrelated crises--occurred in Europe's backyard in the Balkans, Brussels was asleep at the wheel. The Bosnian civil war was finally resolved by American mediation in late 1995 after Washington grew tired of Europe's empty claims of preeminence. Tens of thousands died in the killing fields of Bosnia--many under the noses of European peacekeeping troops--while Europe struggled unsuccessfully to come up with a common problem. This was because Germany supported the Croats in Bosnia and Croatia while Britain and France favored the Serbs for historical reasons dating back to World War I.

It may be another decade before the region is again ripe for a peace process. Before the Palestinians are united around a common negotiating position that would allow a solution with Israel. A decade before the Arabs in the surrounding countries have dealt with the issues arising out of the Arab Spring. That will give Europe and the United States a decade to work out a solution and implement it before Europe collapses. In Northern Ireland it took nearly fourteen years to do this, and the conflict in Northern Ireland is much simpler than that in the Middle East without hundreds of thousands of refugees, without holy sites in Belfast sacred to three of the world's major religions, and without a massive ongoing settlement effort by unionists on nationalist land. 

So maybe all the pessimists are right and the conflict is unsolvable.

Israelis are honest in Washington

J Street, the liberal pro-Israel and pro-peace lobby, is now holding its second conference, having held its first in October 2009. I attended the first out of both curiosity and a desire to support the organization by making a strong first showing at its first conference. Because of both my schedule and my wallet I'm forced to watch the conference by video feed from its website. I watched some of the panels by live stream on Sunday and then watched most of the recorded sessions from Sunday and Monday today. The conference ends today with a lobbying day of congressional offices. Having attended an AIPAC conference in 1995 during the Oslo conference and the J Street conference in 2009, what struck me about the former was that it was mostly intended to fire up the troops and allow politicians to compete in kissing up to the Israeli lobby. J Street instead of just conducting workshops on messaging and the upcoming election cycle in the U.S., attempted to educate its supporters about the conflict by inviting members of the Palestinian government and the Israeli Knesset to the conference to serve on panels.

Nachman Shai, a former academic expert on the Israeli nuclear deterrent and now an MK for Kadima, was very open. "There is no chance for electoral reform or for a constitution with the coalition parties." This means that Israel is incapable of producing the type of party system that will produce the two-party coalitions that ran the peace process in Dublin. It was these coalitions that allowed the dominant party to give up Ireland's constitutional claim to Northern Ireland. Israel has the much tougher task of giving up a physical occupation and hundreds of settlements after 43 years.

Oren Magnezy, a former aide to Ariel Sharon who is now an MK in Kadima was honest about Israeli decision making. "We work at an emotional level when making decisions. Its a lot about messaging. We have an obligation to reach Israelis in the Center who aren't liberals or Left like J-Street." Another Kadima MK, Yoel Hasson said, "Not all Israelis want peace. Some don't want it because they know the price that must be paid for peace and they don't want to pay it."

Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst, was blunt: "The Left is toxic in Israel right now. Israelis don't like to think in the long term. This is a problem. They need a leader with a vision." She cited a polling survey to claim that 45% of Israeli Jews self identify as Right, 27% as Center, and 17% as Left. She claimed that those in the Center behave much more like the Left than like the Right when it comes to the solution to the Conflict. She also said that a larger percentage of Kadima supporters than Labor supporters listed peace as their top concern in politics. Here is a link to an article by her on her presentation at the blog 972.

"Among young people the dominant sentiments are nationalism, patriotism, and Zionism," according to Scheindlin. "This is the narrative of resignation." They grew up in the last decade with the failure of Camp David and the Al-Aksa Intifada as well as with two wars. They are volatile and could drift to the Center or even the Left depending upon how events unfold.

Daniel Ben-Simon, a Labor MK, saw the split in Labor as positive. "A month ago Labor moved to the opposition. Before I was between Israel Beitenu (Israel is Our Home--a right-wing party supported mostly by Russian immigrants) and the most radical members of the Likud. I felt like a hostage! Now Labor is like a family--no quarrels, no factions." I guess he grew up in a small family.

Shai said, "We need Labor on the Left. Otherwise we are not in the Center. We need the Left back and to weaken the Right. We need fifty seats between Kadima, Labor and Meretz so that we can attract the moderate Right into a coalition."  Labor now has eight seats and Meretz only three; polls show Labor receiving about the same number of seats in the next election.  Kadima has 28 seats and is polling at about 31 seats. 

The MK panel of Kadima and Labor MKs thought that any type of boycott of Israeli products was bad, rather it was only of products made by settlers in the West Bank or from Israel proper. "Any boycott of the West Bank is bad because it unites all the settlers," said Yoel Hasson.

The problem is that Hamas wants to delay any solution of the conflict until it is a clear majority among the Palestinians and can negotiate for peace on its terms. It will therefore carry out actions that will help keep the Israeli Right strong during the next election.

Israeli doves are expecting J Street to work as a deus ex machina to deliver Washington to impose a peace agreement on the Israelis and Palestinians. But as former Chief Negotiator for the Middle East Dennis Ross said in a plenary speech, "For peace to succeed the parties have to own it; to own it they have to invest in it." In other words Washington cannot do for Jerusalem and Ramallah what they cannot do for themselves.  Ross knows this from personal experience over eight years in the Clinton administration and a career in three previous administrations as well as his present job in this administration.

What are American interests in the Middle East?

In 2005 Palgrave Macmillan published a book by Leon Hadar, who like myself both has a doctorate in international relations and is a graduate of Hebrew University, called Sandstorm. The book appears to be largely a continuation of his earlier book, Quagmire, published in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War a year later. In Sandstorm Hadar argues that most of America's policies and difficulties in the region stem from a failure to reexamine the Cold War era Middle East Paradigm (MEP), which dominated from the time of the Truman Doctrine to the end of the Cold War. The MEP had three overriding American interests in the region: 1) Guaranteeing the supply of oil at a reasonable price; 2) combating Soviet expansion and influence in the region; 3) and ensuring the security of Israel. The only concession to reality since 1990 has been to substitute Al Qaeda and Iran for the Soviet Union.

Hadar reminded me of a fact that I knew but had forgotten: the United States gets ninety percent (90%) of its oil from outside the region. Protecting the oil flow from the region was largely a factor of the United States leading the anti-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. It allowed Europe and Japan to become free riders on the back of the American tax payer during the Cold War and has continued that policy since.

America's support for the peace process stems largely from an attempt to reconcile the incompatibility of the first two goals with the third i.e. American support for Israel hurts America's standing in the Muslim countries of the region. Hadar argues persuasively that it is really Europe and Japan (and South Korea) who have much more at stake in the region than the United States does. America's fixation with the region is really a symptom of Washington's imperial complex--its desire to function as a hegemon on the world stage. Europe is unwilling to back financially Washington's policies in the region without an equal input into determining those same policies. America's propensity to use military force and to back the policies of the Israeli Right in the occupied territories have been gradually causing a rift with Europe. The 2002-03 rift over the war in Iraq between "Old Europe" and America was almost a mirror image of the November 1956 Suez Crisis argument between Washington on one hand and London and Paris on the other.

I agree with Hadar that America can best reconcile its real opposing interests in the region by making a much smaller footprint. This can be accomplished through a gradual military withdrawal from the region. This would force the EU and Japan to play a greater role. It would also mean that Israel would have to make adjustments--funneling money away from settlements and into defense.

Now is a very opportune point to begin this process for two reasons. First, the publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera demonstrates how incompatible the Israelis and Palestinians still are. A Kadima-Labor coalition government was afraid of making concessions to match major Palestinian concessions out of fear of the Right. A Likud-led government of the Right is unlikely to be even as forthcoming, while the approach of the Palestinian Authority has been to deny that it made any concessions to Israel. Internal politics on both sides combined with the power gap prevent an implementation of the two-state solution at this time and for some years to come.

Second, the Arab world is in upheaval with autocratic Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen being challenged. Washington can either opt to sacrifice democracy for stability in the hope of delaying a major upheaval or risk dealing with unknown forces taking over in possibly two or three Arab countries including important American allies like Egypt and Jordan. Either result poses considerable risks for America. Better to lower our identification with the local regimes.

My own research into the peace process in Northern Ireland pointed to imitating the Anglo-Irish dual mediation in the Middle East with a peace process co-sponsored by the European Union and the U.S. Brussels has been trying to get into Mideast diplomacy since 1980 with the Venice Declaration. It played an observer role during the Oslo process. By shifting some of the burden on to Brussels, Washington can hope to accommodate its interests as well as cancel its own pro-Israel bias. Brussels can offer Jerusalem a bribe that Washington cannot match--membership in the EU in exchange for peace. But this is for the future.