Malley on refugees, settlers, etc

I realize I promised to put something on the blog about the presentation that Rob Malley made during Thursday’s discussion of Hussein Ibish’s latest anti-one-state screed. Let me convey just the main points here.
Rob started off by noting that all the attempts to get a two-state outcome that have been undertaken since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993 have failed. (He later referred to “serial failures.”)
He was, of course, part of the diplomatic team, based in the Clinton White House, that was responsible for many of those failures. (But only a junior member.)
He asserted that, “The one-state solution doesn’t meet even the basic needs of Israeli Jews.”
If I’d had more time, I’d have loved to ask Rob to be a lot more specific. Which basic needs, precisely, of Israeli Jews does he see it as not meeting?
He said, “I haven’t given up on the two-state solution. Rather, I’ve soured on the methods used until now to attain it.”
He (like, I think, both the other people leading the discussion– Hussein Ibish and Aaron Miller) made one or more references to the need to attain a conflict-ending two-state solution.
But he said the US needs to do two main things different in the methodology it pursues, than what it did in the past. (And he, like the others, was still talking very definitely about a diplomacy that would continue to be led by the US.)
The main ideas in what he said were familiar, actually, from the NYRB article he co-authored with Hussein Agha back in June.
His first suggestion for a change in methodology was to ask, “Have we left out some vital actors: on the Palestinian side, the refugees and the Islamists, and on the Israeli side the religious and the settlers?”
He argued that in all the rounds of diplomacy carried out since 1993, members of all those groups were excluded and “treated like lepers.”
“We need to stop doing that,” he said, “Because we will need as much endorsement as we can get from all those groups for any eventual peace deal, because they are so present and so well-mobilized.”
His second methodological suggestion was that the people running the diplomacy should realize that, to be conflict-ending, the final peace agreement “has to deal with the issues of 1948, as well as 1967.”
He defined “the issues of 1948” as consisting, on the Israeli side, of a continuing demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and on the Palestinian side, a “demand that they get acknowledgment and some form of reparation for what happened in 1948.”
These two “methodological changes” are, of course, linked to each other– particularly in their recognition that, to be sustainable, any peace deal has to address the concerns and at least some of the claims of the Palestinian refugees.
It does strike me that the first of his two suggestions– focusing on being more “inclusive” towards the religio-nationalists on both sides and also towards both the Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlers– is a little “unbalanced” in the diagnosis on which it is based: All the peace efforts carried out between 1993 and now have been very attentive indeed to the concerns of Israel’s settlers and religio-nationalists… To the point that all US presidents have endorsed final border lines that would annex huge chunks of settler-populated occupied Palestinian territory to Israel, while the Israeli governments they have negotiated with have always included representatives of Israel’s religio-nationalists; and indeed, Israel’s religio-nationalists, like its settlers, are all fully enfranchised within the Israeli political system…
Whereas on the Palestinian side– ?
The Clinton White House, just like the GWB White House, tried to completely downplay and minimize the concerns and claims of the Palestinian refugees. They worked hard to keep the Palestinians living in their Diaspora– all of whom, of course, are refugees– disenfranchized within the Palestinian system, by pursuing the idea that the Interim PA in Ramallah somehow represented “all” the Palestinian people. And they either encouraged (Clinton) or actively instigated (GWB) extremely brutal crackdowns on the leaders and members of the Palestinians’ principal religio-nationalist movement.
Also, it is a little misleading to claim that the interests of the settlers should in any way correlate with, or should be “balanced off” against, those of the refugees.
The settlers, who now number around 500,000, are people who for varying numbers of years now have been– usually quite wittingly– the beneficiaries of Israel’s highly illegal project to implant, and provide generous subsidies to, settlements that use land and other natural resources stolen from its rightful Palestinian owners.
So it hard to see why the claims of these people “deserve”, in any moral sense, much attention from anyone. Of course, as a matter of common humanity they should be addressed as human equals who need a place to live, preferably inside their own country. And as a matter of political expedience, it is probably wise to do a few things to try to reach out to them.
However, they have been illegally living off the fat of someone else’s land for varying numbers of years now. So let’s not go overboard in efforts to accommodate them, maybe?
The Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, consist of around 6.8 million people— 1.8 million registered refugees currently residing in the West Bank or Gaza, and around five million Palestinian people living in the Diaspora, only about 2.9 million of whom are “registered” with UNRWA.
These are fellow-humans who have been living– the vast majority of them for all their lives at this point– while stripped of the most basic right of residing in their family’s homes.
Many of them– especially, today, those in Gaza, those in Lebanon, and those in Iraq– live in extremely tough situations, in great poverty and subject to continuing threats to their physical wellbeing.
So are all human persons equal? Do we consider that the legitimate claims and concerns of one Palestinian refugee should have the same priority as the legitimate claims and concerns one Israeli settler?
How should we weigh the legitimate claims and concerns of 6.8 million refugees against those of 500,000 settlers?
Why would we ever think it is acceptable to fail to address the legitimate claims and concerns of Palestinian refugees? Why would we think it acceptable to allow any further delay in addressing their concerns, thereby continuing to consign them to the situation of insecurity and impoverishment that so many of them have lived in for 62 years now?
… In the Q&A period of Thursday’s discussion, both my friend George Hishmeh (a longtime refugee from Palestine) and I asked questions about the need to include the refugees in the peacemaking, rather than continuing to exclude them from it. In Malley’s response to me, he referred to the the formula Hamas has proposed, whereby it would allow some non-Hamas negotiator to proceed with negotiating the peace, but any peace agreement conclided should thereafter be submitted to a referendum of all Palestinian people– and Hamas would abide by the results of that referendum..
Malley agreed with my assessment that the Diaspora Palestinians would need to be included in that referendum.
That was good.
However, at some point in the Q&A he also rephrased the point he’d made earlier about Israel “needing” to get some recognition of its status as “a Jewish state”, by talking about “Israel’s need to get recognition as the homeland of the Jewish people.”
That sounded like a serious change. The “homeland of the Jewish people”? All of them? When a Jewish American like Rob Malley is talking like that, is he implying he sees Israel as his homeland, too? I found that reference mystifying, and disturbing.
At the end of his main presentation, he summarized his current expectations thus: “I am not optimistic. Maybe we have to lower our sights for the next few years.” Later, he talked about the possibility of “a longterm interim.”
Very depressing– as if we didn’t have reason enough to be depressed before he spoke…