The End of the Two-State Solution? Part I

Purely by coincidence, today's edition of Real Clear World has three very pessimistic articles on the Middle East peace process only about a week or two after I mailed in the manuscript for my latest book, tentatively titled Why the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Remains Unsolved: the Politics of the Two-State Solution, which will probably be published by McFarland Publishing of North Carolina sometime late next year. These three articles here, here, and here, tend to blame the Palestinians and Arabs in general rather than Israel. The first is by a noted Italian commentator on international affairs, Emanuele Ottolenghi (eight tongues); the second by The New Republic's longtime columnist Leon Wieseltier; and the last by a writer at a conservative Israeli tabloid, Yediot Aharonot (confession: this was the paper I usually read when I was a student in Israel over three decades ago because of its relatively easy Hebrew). 

The problem with the two-state solution since it was first proposed by West Bank Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals in the 1970s was that it required both sides to go way out of their comfort zones and take real risks for peace. The risks on the Israeli side--at least until Rabin's assassination by a radical religious law student in November 1995--were mainly political rather than physical; on the Palestinian side they were both. Plus these two sides had to be ready to take these risks at the same time and while the United States administration was prepared to vigorously mediate between them to reach a solution. Since the early 1990s the two sides were out of sync. First, Arafat was most desperate for a deal in 1992-93 at the start of the Oslo process when the PLO was bankrupt due to a cutoff of Gulf state contributions following Arafat's embrace of Saddam's annexation of Kuwait. But Rabin wanted to take it slow and test Arafat and develop support for a final settlement. Plus, it was not all that clear that Rabin supported the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Under Netanyahu from mid-1996 to mid-1999 Israel pursued a go-very-slow policy. By the time that Ehud Barak was ready to negotiate with the Palestinians in early 2000, Arafat was suspicious of his motives and ready to appease the Islamists and reject Israeli compromise proposals at Camp David. In October 2000 the Al-Aksa Intifada broke out with both Arafat and Arik Sharon bearing heavy responsibility for it. After that a solution was precluded until the Palestinians had a new leader. But this resulted in Sharon replacing Barak as prime minister in February 2001. A settlement now awaited a new Israeli leader as well. This did not occur until March 2006 when Kadima leader Ehud Olmert followed Sharon two months after Sharon's massive stroke.

Israel: The Siege Tightens

I have written a number of posts in which I assert that Israel is a siege democracy along with Northern Ireland. Here is an article by veteran New York Times Middle Eastern correspondent and now columnist Thomas Friedman on Israel's environment as perceived from Israel.

Israeli perceptions may seem to outsiders like paranoia--and they definitely are not the perceptions of a normal state. But Israel is not a normal state inhabited by a normal people. It is the Jewish state called for in the UN General Assembly partition resolution of November 29, 1947 (whose 64th anniversary was marked by Friedman's article).  Jews have suffered from a basic insecurity from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ACE/AD until the present day. There have been good periods of relative security and well being followed by periods of extreme insecurity. From 1881 to 1946 there was a period of extreme violence for European Jewry starting with a series of pogroms (incited massacres) in Russia and Romania and culminating in the industrial slaughter of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population in the Holocaust. Not coincidentally, this is exactly the period that saw the rise of Zionism with the first Zionist theorists on anti-semitism in Europe (Leo Pinsker in 1882, Theodore Herzl in 1895) and the first Zionist immigration to Palestine. But the perceptions are perfectly rational and normal for a people that has suffered the experiences of the Jews in recent history.

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.

Was George W. Bush really at fault?

During both the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections the Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Barack Obama, as well as several unsuccessful presidential candidates criticized Bush for not doing enough to make peace between Israel and the Arabs on his watch. In this post I'd like to examine if that criticism was justified, but I should also confess that during his term I signed several letters from Americans for Peace Now (APN) and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom calling for a more vigorous peace effort. Brit Tzedek is now the local grassroots arm of J Street.

Former State Dept. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller in his 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam) described how the outgoing Clinton administration briefed the incoming Bush administration on Camp David and the Al-Aksa Intifada and blamed it all on Yasir Arafat. Everyone from National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Clinton himself blamed the failure on Arafat--the Liar. Bush quickly concluded that he didn't want to waste time and precious political capital on a fruitless quest for peace. A month after Bush came to power, Ariel Sharon replaced Ehud Barak as prime minister in Jerusalem. Sharon thought that peace with the Palestinians was for subsequent generations, not his. This meant that as long as either of them remained as leader of his country, peace was unlikely. Bush until September 9, 2011 as a minority-vote president had very little political capital to spend and none to waste.

Sharon and Arafat spent the first eighteen months of the Bush administration trying to get rid of each other. The Al-Aksa Intifada soon deteriorated from conventional warfare to terrorism with suicide bombings rapidly escalating as Hamas's armed wing, the Izzadine al-Kassem Brigades, and Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, held a body bag competition. In March 2002 the IDF reinvaded the West Bank and gradually destroyed the terrorist infrastructure there. In June 2002 Bush made a presidential speech on the Middle East in which he declared Arafat persona non grata and openly invited the Palestinians to come up with a new leadership.

In 2002 as Bush organized the upcoming invasion of Iraq with British Prime Minister Tony Blair he was urged by the latter to follow Blair's example in Northern Ireland and wage a peace process as well as a war. An American peace initiative became the price for getting Britain's involvement in the war. It also became the price of support from Jordan's King Abdullah II. As a result, in 2003 Bush announced the road map for peace. He forced Arafat to create the post of prime minister in his administration and tried to force him to turn over all executive power to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat easily outmaneuvered both Abbas and Secretary of State Colin Powell and so Abbas soon resigned in frustration.

Arafat died of a mysterious ailment (some said poison, others said AIDS) in November 2004. Abbas became interim president until he was elected president in early 2005. But throughout 2005 Sharon was preoccupied with carrying out an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This was the first major Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory since Lebanon in 2000 and the first voluntary withdrawal of Israeli settlers in Israeli history. Then, after the withdrawal, he was preoccupied with creating a new political party based on "liberal" Likudniks and a few Labor people, Kadima, which was launched in November 2005.

Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2006 and was replaced as Kadima's leader by former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. That month parliamentary elections were held in the Palestinian Authority at American insistence, despite Israeli warnings that Hamas would improve its status and maybe even win. But Bush equated democracy with elections and wanted to be the president to bring democracy to the Arabs and the Middle East. Hamas won the election and a majority in the Palestinian Assembly. Hamas refused to accept the preconditions that the U.S. and the European Union insisted on for being involved in the peace process. Sharon now had an official excuse not to deal with the Palestinians.

During Bush's second term from January 2005 to January 2009 his new secretary of state was his former National Security Advisor Condi Rice. Dr. Rice, a former Soviet specialist--trained by Madeleine Albright's father, was new to the Middle East. She had spent much of her time since 2001 dealing with Al Qaeda and with Iraq and Afghanistan. Largely because she was afraid of her legacy, she pushed for a new peace initiative in the Arab-Israeli conflict in late 2007.

The Annapolis Conference in November 2007, like the Madrid Conference of 1991, kickstarted a peace process. But it was a peace process that was doomed from the start. Ehud Olmert and his government had been fatally weakened by Israel's poor performance in the July 2006 Second Lebanon War, which Hezbollah began by kidnapping a pair of Israeli soldiers. Olmert had the first defense minister in decades who was not a former general or defense industry technocrat, but simply a civilian novice. In the summer of 2007 Hamas had driven Fatah out of Gaza and seized control of the strip after two decades of power struggle finally boiled over into open warfare. The result was that the Palestinians were deeply-divided politically between two rival parties and two rival territories. The Annapolis initiative got nowhere as the sand ran out on the Bush administration.

Clinton administration veterans and apologists are quick to explain Clinton's failure to negotiate a peace treaty in the Middle East in terms of the failings of Arafat, Netanyahu, Sharon, and even Barak. But they don't extend the same courtesy to Bush. If Bush can be faulted for not being vigorous enough in pushing for peace between Arafat's death and the Palestinian elections of January 2006, then Clinton can be faulted for not pushing hard enough for peace between Rabin's assassination in November 1995 and Netanyahu's election in June 1996 or during Barak's first year in office.

American presidents cannot handpick the Israeli, Palestinian and Syrian leaders that they have to work with in the Middle East. Their best bet is to wait until conditions make the situation ripe for peace and then use all the influence they have to conclude realistic agreements. In order to do this they must realize what is doable--the best is the enemy of the good in the Middle East as elsewhere. An American president whose campaign biography was Why Not the Best had to learn this the hard way in 1977. But once Carter had set his sights lower and on a realistic target--a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty rather than a comprehensive peace--he went flat out until he was successful.

Presidents cannot produce the conditions for peace with an inspiring speech, or what appears to be a successful war. They must wait until the parties themselves are forced by events to seek peace. American Jewish organizations wanting to relieve the discomfort of American Jews over the actions of Israel do not have this luxury. Like other politicians or political interest groups they must appear to be constantly in motion fighting the good fight.

There is another alternative suggested by Leon Hadar in his 2005 book Sandstorm. I will discuss this in my next post.

My last post was picked up and reproduced by Ralph Seliger at the MeretzUSA blog.