His foreign affairs team comes, now, as no surprise. But what was welcome in his speech in Chicago today was the prominent mention he made of the need to find “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
That’s especially welcome, coming a few days after the veteran Clinton-era peace processor Aaron Miller came out swinging with a public argument that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is just too difficult, so Obama shouldn’t even make any effort at reaching it but should focus on brokering a Syria-Israel peace instead.
Let’s hope wiser heads prevail! Significant though a Syria-Israel peace would be, by far the greater worldwide symbolism– and by far the greater actual, continuing human suffering— attaches to the horrible structural and physical violence of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Plus, once there’s a final peace between Israel and Palestine, an Israel-Syria deal can fall into place extremely easily. (Its parameters have long been well known.)
The reverse is decidedly not the case.
So if a choice has to be made between the two tracks, Obama should plump for the Palestine track as the highest priority.
But here’s an important idea: Why should he feel he needs to make some kind of a contrived “choice” between the two tracks, anyway?
Why not aim at a speedy, grand settlement of all the outstanding portions of the Arab-Israeli dispute, all at once?
This is really not such a radical idea. In the great peace settlements of earlier eras– 1815, 1919, 1945, etc– huge numbers of outstanding disputes, some of them of very lengthy duration, were all resolved together, as a kind of a “package deal.”
Compared with those earlier, continent- or globe-girdling grand settlements, resolving Israel’s outstanding conflicts with Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon “all in one fell swoop” looks very do-able indeed, almost picayune. And right now, with the Saudi peace plan of 2002, there’s a great vehicle for getting into that comprehensive negotiation.
President Obama could also build on the precedent of the 1991, Bush-I-era Madrid peace conference, which also aimed at a comprehensive settlement of all the outstanding tracks of the Israeli-Arab dispute.
One big advantage of this approach, compared with trying endlessly– yet again!– to take partial or incremental steps along each of the tracks separately is that the “pain” of the settlement, in terms of the concessions that all the parties will need to make from their long-held political positions, will be a one-off thing, rather than a scary and continuing “death from a hundred cuts.” Meanwhile, the “gain” of the settlement, in terms of the huge relief the citizens of all these countries will win from the burdens of war, occupation, and international estrangement, will be much more definitive and palpable than any “gain” they could reasonably expect from partial settlements.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety will also breathe huge new life into the relationships Israel has with Egypt and Jordan, which remain very strained even though both those countries have long had formal peace treaties with Israel.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety on terms that are fair and enshrine the key principles of human equality, international legitimacy, and a commitment to setting aside all forms of violence will allow Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, and all the other peoples of the Middle East to breath a huge sigh of relief… to build new kinds of relations with other… and to move into a much more hopeful future.
So that’s why I’m glad Barack Obama put such an emphasis on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not that the Israel-Syria track is insignificant. It’s not. But it’s a dangerous illusion to think that brokering peace on that track could be any kind of a substitute for doing the hard diplomatic work that’s so urgently needed on the Palestine track.
Actually, it’s an even more dangerous illusion to believe that any “peace broker”– whether it continues to be overwhelmingly the US or shifts to being a more genuinely international effort– has to make a “choice” between pushing on the Palestine track or the Syria track.
Go for the whole grand Arab-Israeli settlement, Obama! That is the way to truly transform the Middle East– as well as our country’s relationship with the whole of the rest of the world.
9 thoughts on “Obama’s foreign affairs team and Arab-Israel diplomacy”
Comments are closed.
Sad that Miller retreated so badly — especially after his more intriguing comments recently at UVA Miller Center.
But when push came to shove, he folds….. and falls back to the lame change-the-subject, incrementalism-in-its-place non-approach to peace-making — without once mentioning settlements.
Ah, the sides are too far apart — so why bother. (right — while we still pump billions into Israeli coffers)
Curiously, he mentions at the end that we should send economic aid to Palestinians….. To what end? To buy time?
and how does he propose to do that? (given Israel’s ever tightening economic and news stranglehold around Gaza?)
BTW, any comments from your perch Helena re. the other HC as Secretary of State? (you know, the one who made John “bomb-bomb-Iran” McCain seem moderate by comparison when she was squawking about “obliterating” Iran.)
What in your view are the prospects that Obama really will “change the culture of the way foreign policy is made” in Washington if she becomes SoS? (particularly if Dennis Ross, Holbrooke, Woolsey, Rubin, et. al. show up under or near her?)
Will anything then have changed?
Remind us why we should be audacious.
Aaron Miller should seriously weigh the costs of not engaging in peace talks, difficult as they may be. Israel’s primary response to perceived threats has been to trash someone in the neighborhood. Now the neighbors, as we saw in the Gallilee in 2006, are becoming all too capable of returning the favor. Another round of fighting will bring nothing more than more immense, wanton destruction on both sides.
How can Israeli officialdom not see the writing on the wall and resign themselves to giving something up for peace? The high cost of future wars will make the difficulties in achieving peace seem trivial by comparison.
Obama is putting an emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict only as a way of distracting attention from the illegal wars he intends to wage in Afghanistan and Pakistan and god knows where else. But there’s no way he’s going to change the American policy of making sure there is no peace between Israel and Palestine. It’s essential for the American war machine and the arms industry that this conduct continues, since it provides a large part of the justification for the American presence in the mideast. That’s why the American lobby in Israel/Palestine pours so much money into the politicians that promote war Christians and Democrats always want war, endless war, that’s what they’re about, all they stand for. Obama may talk peace, but rest assured that behind the scenes he and Hillary are making sure the arms industries’ gravy train continues. They’re genuine warmongers and thoroughly devoted to corporate power, altho a lot of people haven’t figured that out yet.
Watching Condi Rice yesterday was telling – she was over the moon at the prospect of Hillary taking over her Notebook.
Helena – given Obama’s NSC appointments it is very clear that any Palestine/Israel settlement will be very much on the lines of what Bill Clinton proposed at the end of 2000. As will a Syria/Israel settlement be very much on the lines of what Dennis Ross was negotiating with Assad pere in the Clinton years.
The point is, will you and the other Oslo rejectionists finally throw your support behind this – or will you continue to support the Hamas/Hezbollah rejectionist line?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/dec/01/barack-obama-foreign-policy/print
Barack Obama’s kettle of hawks
The absence of a solid anti-war voice on Obama’s national security team means that US foreign policy isn’t going to change
Alas….
bb What matters is what the Palestinians think. The only question is whether terrorism and starvation have reduced this generation of Palestinians to accept a truce and allow others to call it peace.
I certainly would not blame the bravest people on earth if they did accept the deals proffered. But the architecture of such a “peace” deal, including the continuing existence of the regimes in Jordan and Egypt, looks very shaky to me.
And, from the US point of view, there is the matter of the psychopathology of Israel’s electoral politics: US policy has helped shift the centre of political gravity there so far to the right that it is doubtful whether even a freezing of the status quo would not be opposed by the politicians who feel that it is treachery to accept a mere 80 plus% of mandated Palestine. Israel’s current, and likely terminal weakness is the heady cocktail that is composed of hubris and racism.
Bb, the problem with Oslo was that it was quite indeterminate (by the design of the Israeli side) and thus could have led to any one of a broad range of different outcomes. What it did in fact lead to was (1) an acceleration in the Israeli settlement-building project, and (2) a complete failure to finish the final-status agreement by the deadline agreed to in Oslo. That meant that the occupation and the large-scale colonization project in the West Bank continued. The vast majority of the primary stakeholders (= all Israelis plus all Palestinians) wanted an outcome very different from that. But the pro-settler networks among the Israelis and their sympathizers in the US won the day.
As for now, if we could get a viable two-state outcome (= two states that are both economically and politically viable) then that would be great. And I directly imply this in my post, where I express approval for the Saudi peace plan.
However, colonies/settlements make that harder to envisage by the day. If you read the book I worked on with 13 other Quakers in 2004 on the topic you’ll see the formulation we articulated there is that any outcome must be based on a robust principle of the equality of all human persons whether that’s expressed in the equality of all (Israeli and Palestinian) citizens within a single state or the real equality of two states living side by side. Which one is for the primary stakeholders to decide, but international law cannot allow a final-status outcome in which the principle of human equality is simply submerged under the flood of concrete on which the settlements have been built. Any more than it could have supported the apartheid regime’s Bantustans.
So how do you think the principle of human equality could best be embodied in a final status outcome? And, are you a primary stakeholder?
Helena, the Clinton proposal was a territory swap with most of the settlements being annexed to Israel, Jerusalem divided between the two, no right of return to Israel only Palestine itself, and no more demands from either side?
I take it you would only support the Saudi plan ie a palestinian state within the 1967 borders? If so it does not appear that the Obama admin will give you cause for optimism?