The way forward in Palestine

Last December, when the co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group presented its recommendations to President Bush, the Prez angrily swept them aside, placing his emphasis instead on the planning for his own much-trumpeted ‘surge’.
Well, the surge has been underway for some weeks– and it seems increasingly clear that the Bushites are now, in addition,backing into some degree of compliance with at least two of the ISG’s key recommendations! They have already held some preliminary official contacts with both Iran and Syria, and more are to follow. And they have launched a new round of Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy that may yet show some signs of robustness.
The politics of this Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy are particularly interesting. At this point, after Fateh’s entry into a coalition government with Hamas, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has acquired considerable new political strength. Even if domestic support for the bicephalous PA government is not quite the 96% support that PA Info Minister Mustafa Barghouthi claims, it is still extremely high.
In addition, this Palestinian leadership is now– quite unusually– backed by a wall-to-wall coalition of Arab states. The Arab leaders will soon be convening at a summit meetingin the Saudi capital, Riyadh; and the central issue on their agenda there is an effort to push forward the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy on the basis of the key peace plan that an earlier Arab summit endorsed, back in Beirut in March 2002.
But here’s where the structure of this round of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy gets complex: Both Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and the US Prez himself are extremely weak with their respective publics. Did I see somewhere that political support for Olmert had dropped to around 3%? Anyway, it’s extremely low. And Bush’s job-performance and ‘favorability‘ ratings have both been hovering down between 30 and 37 percent throughout most of this year.
Bush, at least, can’t resign. (And I’m interested to see that the ratings given to our newly elected Congress are just about as low as Bush’s numbers. So the Dems have no particular reason to feel triumphalist at this point, either.) But Olmert can resign, and may well be forced to at some point over the next three months. So this all raises a number of intriguing questions:

(1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert as such, since the guy is so evidently a very lame duck?
(2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next government that comes into power in Israel?
(3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public? and
(4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?

One approach I think we might adopt is to stop calling the Arab peace plan the “Arab” peace plan. Why should it not be the world’s plan for bringing peace to this very tormented part of the world? Indeed, let us hear what reasonable objection any other governments in the world– or indeed, the UN as a body– have to this peace plan?
Here, in a nutshell, is what the 2002 peace plan does:

(a) It calls on Israel to withdraw completely to the territory it held prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the establishment in the Palestinian portion of the occupied territories a “sovereign independent Palestinian state… with East Jerusalem as its capital”;
(b) It calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194”; and
(b) It promises, in return, that all the Arab countries– including, presumably, the sovereign Palestinian state to be created– will determine that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been finally ended, and these parties have no outstanding claims against Israel. They will also all sign peace agreements with Israel; will “provide security for all the states of the region”, including Israel; and will establish “normal relations” with Israel.

I note that the withdrawal clause is in full accord with UN Security Council resolutions on the matter, which all mention the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
The main objections I have heard to this plan have been over that withdrawal clause… and over the clause that addresses the refugee issue. UNGA Resolution 194 did, in its clause 11, state that the General Assembly,

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation…

Pro-Israeli figures in the US have often argued that the implementation of this clause would result in Israel suddenly becoming demographically “swamped” by a flood of Palestinian returnees. For its part, ever since the GA adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948, Israel has staunchly asserted its right, as a sovereign state, to regulate any entry of persons into its borders (though this right surely cannot simply over-ride the right– enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights– of all persons to be free to leave the country of their birth or to return to it); and in practice, Israel has refused to allow the vast majority of the Palestinian refugees from 1947-48 to return to the homes and farms that they fled during that war.
It is surely evident to everyone that a workable (i.e. sufficiently “fair”) resolution of the refugee issue needs to agreed upon– and accepted by the great mass of the four million Palestinian refugees themselves– if any Arab-Israeli peace process is to be final and stable. Luckily, Resolution 194 itself specifically mentions a number of alternatives to outright “Return”. These include the payment of “compensation… for the property of those choosing not to return”, and “resettlement” (i.e., either where they currently are, or in third countries.) R-194 also specifies, for those choosing “Return”, that they commit to living at peace with the neighbors they will find around them after their return– and also, that this return be undertaken “at the earliest practicable date”…
So it does seem to me that within the context of a comprehensive peace agreement some package of different options– each with a different “compensation” component attached, and perhaps with varying implementation timetables– could be offered to each Palestinian refugee family (however defined), and this would still be in line with both resolution 194 and the longstanding norms regarding the kinds of outcomes that are offered to refugees in other situations around the world.
In other words, the reference to R-194 need not be seen as a barrier to other people and governments expressing their support for the “Arab” peace plan. And nor, in my view, should the reference to a full Israeli withdrawal.
Which among us, after all, is prepared to stand up today for the claim that it is indeed quite okay for nations to acquire new territories purely through the exercise of physical force??
If we want to go back and see what the United Nations itself has ever said, in a more positive vein, about the “national complexion” of the lands of West Bank and Gaza, then we need to go back to the 1947 Partition Plan, under which the whole territory of Gaza was declared to be part of the “Arab State in Palestine”; so was most of the West Bank– except for that chunk in the middle that, according to the Partition Plan, was deemed to be included (along with West Jerusalem) in the internationally administered “corpus separatum” of Jerusalem. A large area of further land that the Partition Plan also allocated to the “Arab State in Palestine” was conquered by Israel during the fighting of 1947-48; no-one in any rounds of diplomacy in the past 50-plus years has ever requested that Israel withdraw from and cede those areas. Israel’s control of them has been essentially uncontested for many decades now.
… The “Arab” peace plan has the huge advantage that– notably unlike the interim (and largely failed) accords concluded at Oslo in 1993– its clauses are all firmly rooted in the resolutions of the United Nations and in the norms of international law. For example, Oslo implicitly condoned the continuation of the support Israel gave to the illegal settlement-implantation project in the occupied territories– and quite explicitly gave open support to the settlement project by stipulating the construction of a whole network of settler-only highways throughout the West Bank. But the 2002 Peace Plan makes no mention of the settlers at all. If the assumption of the plan’s framers was that all the settlers should simply summarily leave the land of the future Palestinian state, still, perhaps the modalities of that relocation could also be subject to some negotiation… (And anyway, how many of the settlers would really want to stay in place under Palestinian sovereignty, and without the whole vast basket of special favors that they currently receive from Israel?)
The 2002 Peace Plan also has the great advantage– again, in clear contrast to the tragic, failed, and very damaging experiment of Oslo– that it speaks directly and solely to the issue of the final-status agreements that have always been so urgently required on both the Israeli-Palestinian and the Israeli-Syrian tracks. Oslo spoke only to the Palestinians, excluding the Syrians. Regarding the Palestinians it said nothing specific at all regarding the content of the final status, so when setbacks occurred, everyone on both sides immediately feared the worst about the intentions of the “others”, and very destabilizingly acted on those fears.
So now, let’s go back to those four questions near the head of this post:
(1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert?
I don’t think any of them should.
(2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next governmental change in Israel?
This is the more important campaign that pro-peace figures and responsible leaders in the Arab countries and elsewhere should be focusing on. The fact is, there are currently about 180,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, about 246,000 elsewhere in the West Bank, and 17,500 in Golan. These Israelis constitute a very significant voting (and opinion) bloc within the Israeli system.
In addition, though Olmert is currently weak, it is a sad fact that by far the strongest force that’s challenging him is from the right wing. After the political/military setbacks that Olmert government suffered last summer in Lebanon, the political mood in Israel seems deeply unsettled, uncertain, and fearful; and the pro-peace “left” that was once such an evident presence within the Israeli system is now only a tiny, weak shadow of its former self.
One of the actions that would have the greatest potential to focus the attention of Israel’s long-pampered Jewish population on the need to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Syrians (and through the Syrians, with the Lebanese, too), would be if the US government started showing its serious interest in the need for an peace that is comprehensive, final, sustainable, and based on the solid tenets and norms of international law.
It is probably quite unrealistic to expect that President Bush or any of his officials will come out any time in the foreseeable future and express open support for the “Arab” peace plan. We have heard him talking about the need for a Palestinian state (with no date or other details attached to that), and we have heard Condi Rice talking, rather tentatively, about the need for “a political horizon.”
It would, however, be much more reassuring and helpful to hear administration officials start talking openly and directly about the need for a peace that is “comprehensive and based on international legality.” They should certainly all be requested to do this; and if they refuse to, they should be asked for their reasons for this refusal. And then, beyond merely talking about the need for such an approach, they should be challenged to use the many levers of power they have over Israel (not only financial aid, but also access to markets, military cooperation, etc etc) to underline that message. In other words, the conditionality that used once to exist as between Israel’s activity in the settlement sphere and Washington’s granting fo special favors to Israel should certainly be reinstated.
Experience shows that when Washington undertakes such actions, it really does affect the political behavior of Israelis in the desired way.
But Arabs who are serious about their peace plan should also figure out ways to try to “sell” it to Israelis– or at least, to make sure that it gets clearly and directly explained to them, and in as humanly convincing a way as possible… I know that after the apparent failure of all the heavily funded “people-to-people” efforts the Palestinians engaged in with Israelis in the 1990s, the desire to repeat such ventures dwindled considerably. But still, the need for a sustainable and comprehensive peace is now so urgent that no effort to try to win the support of Israelis– or at the very least, to reduce the ranks of the Israeli hard-liners– should be spared…
(3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public, and from others?
In the present era of participatory politics, no peace plan can be expected– in the USA, or indeed anywhere else– merely to “sell itself”. Persuading the great mass of the US’s extremely powerful voting public of the fairness and essentially constructive nature of the 2002 Peace Plan will take a major, and very well-considered “marketing effort.”
And when I say “marketing effort”, the one thing I certainly do not mean by that is that some official in the Saudi Embassy in DC might put out a huge contract for this job with some slick “marketing” firm somewhere in the country and sit back and think the job is done.
Oh no. I have seen ways too many similar contracts go out in the past, with their results ending up being absolutely nothing (or, indeed, quite frequently risibly counter-productive, as longtime JWN readers might recall my having remarked in the past.)
What’s needed is a serious effort to engage politically with a broad range of opinion-makers throughout the country… And the great thing right now is that, for a number of reasons, the US citizenry may well be in a good mood to connect with such a message, for the following reasons:

(a) The terrible outcome to date in Iraq has prepared the US public to really “hear” many messages about the Middle East that it may well not have been ready to “hear” properly prior to 2003. The parallels between the disastrous consequences of the US decision to use force in Iraq and the Israelis’ repeated recourse to force in the occupied territories are evident. So is the role that strongly pro-Israeli figures played in jerking the US into the war in Iraq in the first place.
(b) The US now has many experiences of its own in trying to run a strongly contested military occupation. US citizens are in a much better position than they were before 2003, to really understand what military occupation is; how unsustainable and damaging it is over the long run– to all concerned!– and to understand that ending the situation of rule by foreign military occupation, wherever it occurs, is the only legitimate, moral, and in the long term feasible way to proceed.
(c) Some important steps have already been taken in recent months to open up the whole, very necessary intra-US discussion on the huge role and damaging effects of the country’s strong and very well-organized pro-Israel lobby. I wrote about the role of the lobby in the chapter on the US-Israel relationship that I published in my 1991 book on Israel, Syria, and the superpowers… But that didn’t attract much attention then. Now, the work of Walt and Mearsheimer, of Jimmy Carter, and Tony Judt, has opened huge additional public space in which the discourse-suppressing, truth-distorting role of the lobby can be dispassionately discussed. More importantly, by allowing discussion of the lobby’s role, this also allows a much franker and more reality-based discussion among Americans of the facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

…And finally,
(4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. As may be clear from the above, I do think that the US remains an important player in world affairs. But I also think it’s time for Americans and everyone else in the international community to break out of slavish adherence to the idea that it is somehow only right and “natural” that the US should continue to exercise near hegemonic control over all the modalities of Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
It is not.
In fact, it’s a pretty extraordinary state of affairs if one government, distant from the scene and representing less than five percent of the world’s people, should be judged to have any “right” to control all aspects of a diplomatic task as central to the stability of the whole of humanity as this one.
For this reason, I am at this point probably not among those who think it would be helpful for the US to put forward its own plan. For if we say that it would be desirable and helpful for Washington to do this, aren’t we just merely perpetuating the view of Washington as constituting the main focal point of any peace diplomacy?
How on earth did it get to the point that the United Nations would agree to be a junior partner of Washington in that strange arrangement called the “Quartet”?
So here’s my Four-point Diplomatic Plan for Palestine:

(1) Scrap the ‘Quartet’ with its ridiculous power arrangements and its continued adherence to that inane and by now quite outdated ‘Road Map to Nowhere’;
(2) Have the Security Council appoint a responsible envoy tasked with urgently convening authoritative negotiations over the terms of the final-status peace agreements on all the remaining ‘tracks’ of Arab-Israeli diplomacy– that is, between Israel and respectively Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians;
(3) Scrap the name the ‘Arab’ Peace Plan and let the Arabs energetically work to get global adherence to the terms of the 2002 Peace Plan, while sympathetically exploring the concerns that others might have about it and brainstorming with them on ways that those concerns can be met;
(4) Send Condi Rice and her sad and outdated set of very vague and woolly ideas home.

So there you have it…