Annapolis and after (vintage) – Page 2 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Golan, the human story

Much of the western media follows the Israeli-initiated habit of thinking and speaking about the issue of Golan only in (very threatening) strategic terms. But Golan is also– like the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza– a frequently heart-rending human story, one of dispossession, exile, oppression, and the splitting-up of families.
You can read a lot about the human dimension of Golan in Golan Days, a series of five articles that I published in Arabic in al-Hayat in 1998. They were the result of research/reporting trips I had made to Israel, occupied Golan, and Syria earlier that year.
Note that Israel unilaterally annexed Golan in 1981. But that act of Anschluss was quite illegal under international law. During the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of the early and mid-1990s, Israeli premiers Rabin and Peres promised the U.S. that, if they could win the security, economic, and political measures they desired from Syria, then Israel would be ready to withdraw from the whole of the Golan.Those negotiations failed after that Israeli offer was abruptly pulled off the table by Ehud Barak in 2000.
Meanwhile, throughout and since the 1990s Israel’s policy of implanting settlers on the broad, fertile expanses of Golan’s land has continued, though not with the fervor and frenzy of the settlement project in the West Bank. In 2006, there were 18,105 settlers on Golan, according to this table from the Foundation for Middle East Peace (which is an excellent source on the Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank, too.)
Before Israel occupied Golan in 1967, there was a population of around 130,000 Syrians in the area, mainly farmers. This 2000 map (PDF) from FMEP shows you the ghosts of the villages and towns that they left behind them– the empty grey circles and squares there. Tragically, in the fighting of 1967, nearly the whole of the indigenous Syrian population of Golan fled or was forced out. Their national army, which had previously held the whole of the Golan plateau, had suffered a humiliating rout.
Only a small number remained– mainly followers of the Druze religion, who lived in winding villages clinging to the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon). You can see their five villages in grey near the top of the map. Nowadays, they have, I think, around the same population as that of the Israeli settlements– but living under very different circumstances from the land-pampered settlers. You can read a little about the lives of the Golan Syrians who still live in their family’s ancestral homes, in Parts 1 and 2 of my Golan days series.
Also, you should go look at the two installments of an English Al-Jazeera documentary called Across the Shouting Valley, that are available on YouTube here and here. They very movingly portray the human and many other dimensions of the Golan issue. They have some interesting interviews with settlers; and they have many beautiful shots of the Golan landscape, too.
(Great job, Al-Jazeera!)
The second installment there has a short interview with an Israeli settler called Effie Eitam who is also a leader of one of Israel’s rightwing parties. But in general, the political profile of most of the settlers in Golan is significantly different from that of the West Bank settlers. For starters, Golan is not generally considered by most Jews to be part of the historic “Land of Israel”. So there is very little of that intense, religio-nationalist fervor that marks the activities of many West bank settlers. Secondly, putting settlements on the Golan was overwhelmingly a project of Labour governments in Israel, who put them there for reasons that– at the time, in the late 1960s– were much more justifiably “for security reasons” than most of the settlements in the west Bank. (Since then, of course, the development of long-distance missiles means that possession of the high ground in Golan is no longer the strategic “ace in the hole” that it once was.)
But the result is that the 18,000 Golan settlers are much more likely to be long-time Labour supporters than most of the West Bank settlers. And though many of their most vocal community leaders are staunchly on the hawkish, pro-territorial expansion wing of Labour, there are many others who are not– including a very interesting farmer called Yigal Kipnis whom I met and talked to back in 1998, as you can see in Part 4 of the series.
Read in particular, his views on the possibility of Israel withdrawing in the context of a peace treaty:

“We need to remember that we came here in 1967 to protect our own settlements inside Israel, and to protect our water rights — not to take any extra land. Our presence here was and is still intended to provide that protection. But if we have a peace agreement with Syria, the situation would be quite different — provided those things were protected.”

(Yigal still lives in the settlement of Maale Gamla. He and I kept in touch in a rough fashion after that. Some time later he enrolled in a Ph.D program in Haifa University– and wrote his whole thesis there on the Israeli political aspects of the Golan issue. I met him again recently in Washington DC. I want to help him get some of his work made available in English– it seems like fascinating stuff!)
Anyway, it has long mystified me why the Syrians have not done more to explain some of the human dimensions of the Golan issue, which are often just as heart-rending as all those “Let y people go!” campaigns that US Jewish organizations ran in favor the Soviet Jews back in the 1980s. Instead, the Syrians have allowed the Israeli narrative of Golan as “simply a strategic question– and an Israelo-centric one, at that” to dominate all discussion of the Golan issue in the west. Human-interest-centered stories about political issues may seem trite. But still, they do have a great power to help frame the way that people think about the political issues involved… But from the way Golan is presented in the western media, you’d think that it is just a single, steep and potentially very threatening strategic escarpment and has no human dimension at all. Not true!
(You could call this the “vertical” view of Golan– as opposed to a “horizontal” view that takes into account the fact that there’s a huge expanse of lovely, fertile land up there; and that there are people from both nationalities who have histories, lives, and claims there.)
I guess in my wondering– and discussing with a few Syrian friends– why the Syrian government has not done more to “humanize” the issue, I concluded that could perhaps be explained by two factors: (1) a lingering sense of shame about the extent and seriousness of the collapse that the national army’s whole network of positions in Golan experienced in 1967, and (2) a reluctance to do too much to empower and/or mobilize the Golani Syrians within the national political system.
By some counts, the “nazeheen” (displaced persons) from Golan and their descendants now number more than a quarter million. And of course, under international law (and human logic) they have every right to be able to return to their ancestral homes and properties there.
Unlike the Palestinians displaced in 1948 and 1967, the Syrian nazeheen did have a government that provided them with the basic services they needed to survive and to get a fairly good start in life: basic housing, health, and education services. And like many displaced persons throughout history they have actually, in general, done pretty well in the Syrian economy and professions, and in the Syrian migrant-labor community in the Gulf. But Syria’s Baathist government is chronically wary of seeing any auto-mobilization of sub-groups within the society, so maybe its failure to present the wrenching human dramas of the split and dispossessed families more effectively to the outside world has something to do with that, too.
So if the Syrian-Israeli negotiations do get resumed in earnest in the days and weeks ahead, I’ll probably try to follow up on some of these human interest stories.

State Dept spin on Annapolis: Other possible scenarios?

The very well-informed Boston University expert on Lebanon and the Middle East, Dick Norton, had a great catch on his “Speaking Truth to Power” blog yesterday: the text of the internal “Talking Points” (= spin) that the US State Dept HQ has been sending out to diplomats and consular officials around the world, regarding the imminent Annapolis meeting.
This spin-sheet is fascinating inasmuch as it can be understood as expressing a great deal of Condi Rice’s current actual hopes and planning for the Annapolis and post-Annapolis “process”.
However, though Condi and her boss might think they can control the whole of this process, I judge that it may well get beyond their control.
Back at the time of the last launch of a serious Israeli-Arab peacemaking process, in Madrid in 1991, the US stood at the height of its global power. The USSR was in the midst of long, four-year collapse into its constituent parts. The US was the Uberpower that had “won” the Cold war– and throughout the rest of the 1990s, it was able to control every aspect of the Israeli-Arab peacemaking diplomacy. (Which, guess what, got nowhere, while Israel continued implanting hundreds of thousands of additional settlers into the West Bank.)
But 2007 ain’t 1991. The US’s power position in the world has eroded considerably since then. As has– especially after summer 2006– the strategic utility of the military dominance that Israel continues to exercise over the whole of the Mashreq (Near East.)
In 1991, the Bush-Baker team at Madrid had the USSR sitting there as some kind of co-hosts. But really, that was a nearly wholly symbolic gesture. Two years later the USSR collapsed completely.
This year, the US has the other three members of the “Quartet” along in some kind of possibly co-hosting capacity. That’s Russia, the EU, and the UN. (The UN’s stance as “junior partner” to Washington in this peacemaking is highly anomalous and, I would say, not sustainable for very much longer.) We should not imagine that these three “partners” will all continue to be happy just to be Condi’s arm candy for very much longer. Matters for all parties, throughout the Middle East are far too serious for that; and the need to proactively pursue this chance for speedy final resolution of all the remaining strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict is correspondingly pressing.
I shall write more on this broader aspect of Annapolis in the days ahead. But for now, let’s look at the main dimensions of the spin that Dick Norton has caught for our edification:
Immediate comments on this:

1. No mention at all of the Syrian track.

the efforts of the Palestinians and the Israelis.

This is bad news for the Syrians, of course, who have for a long time been eager to resume and complete their long-stalled negotiations with Israel. But it is also bad news for everyone else. A US/Israeli peace effort that seeks mainly to split the Palestinians off from the Syrians and play one against the other is a recipe for failure on all tracks. A successful Israeli-Syrian agreement, reached in parallel with a successful Palestinian-Israeli agreement, would also bring in its train a rapid Israeli-Lebanese peace– and Israel would then be at peace with all its neighbors!
Imagine that! That was the vision held up at Madrid, and it is still the most compelling, and most viable, vision that we can hold up today.
2. No mention by name of the President. In the section on “U.S. commitment,” the spin-sheet refers only to actions undertaken by Rice. The US stance would be a lot more convincing if the Pres had committed his full power to this process. How can we be assured that that Dick Cheney is not still busy machinating hard against it behind the scenes?
3. Ignorance and boilerplate vagueness. Okay, I know it was the Thanksgiving Day weekend and probably lots of people in Condi’s spin-shop were not in the office… But look at this little sub-clause: “the stablishment [sic] of a Palestinian state for the first time in many years.” How sloppy! Folks: There has never been a Palestinian state yet!
Also, look at this, for vagueness: “Much has been said over a long period of time about critical issues like border, refugees and Jerusalem.” Yes? And what kind of conclusion does the US think these discussions ought to come to? How about some recognition that a lot of fine preliminary work has been done on all these issues in the years since 1991, so with good will and determination they should not be too hard to resolve?
I should note, though, that both the global and regional balances have undergone significant, though still limited, shifts since the time the Geneva and Nusseibeh-Ayalon formulas emerged back in 2003, so the US and Israel will no longer be so able to defend the interests of the Israeli settlers as they were back then. That is, a politically sustainable outcome reached in 2007-2008 would probably be closer to the “international law” position and the Green Line than Geneva or Nusseibeh-Ayalon were…

Anyway, my bottom line on “Annapolis” today: Let’s wait and see whether it really develops into a worldwide effort to get the whole of the Israeli-Arab conflict resolved.
If it does, that’s good for everybody. Everybody. If it doesn’t, it will be certainly be bad for everyone concerned.

Annapolis: the Israeli political aspect

Two interesting articles in Monday’s HaAretz. This one is headed Rightists target mainstream to fight concessions at Annapolis, and tells us the following:

forced to contend with defeatism as well as internal disputes

There is a lot more interesting material in there, too, including some consideration of what looks like a generational clash within the settler movement. Older leaders are more reported as focused on trying to keep/win the “hearts and minds” of the non-settlers who make up the vast majority of Israel’s population, while the younger settlers have maintained an active posture of battling with the police in various spots throughout the occupied West Bank. (This has been woefully under-reported in the US MSM.)
I guess I had been wondering in my own mind what effect the heavily “dramatized” events of the summer of 2005– when thousands of settler activists from the West Bank rushed to the Gaza settlements and staged some very determined– and yes, nonviolent– mass actions to try to “resist” being evicted from those settlements as per Sharon’s plan of that year. (You can read some of the contemporary discussion of those events on JWN from mid-August 2005, here— also, in many other posts in August and July 2005.)
You could also say that part of Sharon’s plan then had been precisely to see and then broadly publicize those emotional scenes, as he had done earlier with the 1982 evacuation of the settlements in northern Sinai, as a way of “showing” to the world how difficult or perhaps impossible a later evacuation of the West Bank settlements would be…
But how very interesting if the lesson some of the settler leaders took from that whole episode was that even with all the efforts they undertook in 2005, they still failed to sway Israel’s non-settler public opinion in their favor.
(I would note, too, that though it is evidently significant that during the Gaza events, the settlers were overwhelmingly nonviolent, that still does not in itself make their cause just. They were, after all, trying to hang onto settlements that were illegal under international law, all along.)
And the second HaAretz piece I found really interesting was this little article, headlined Study: Israelis’ confidence in IDF, security services at 7-year low.
So I guess public-opinion researchers from two Israeli universities, who have used a measure of their compatriots’ confidence in some public institutions since 2001, have found that the IDF in general got 3.27 points out of a possible 5.00 in this year’s survey, down from 3.56 in 2001. The Mossad and Shin Bet (foreign and domestic security services) meanwhile had a combined score of 3.53 this year, down from 3.81 in 2003.
I am still not sure whether these kinds of findings are generally good the broader cause of peace, or not. I would certainly hope that– especially after the events of summer 2006 demonstrated quite clearly that no amount of technical military superiority can on its own enable Israel to win significant strategic gains against a determined and smart opponent— the fact that Israelis currently have a lowered confidence in their military and security services would incline them more towards finding a negotiated peace with all their neighbors.
However, it is also possible that an embattled Israeli military and political leadership– which both of them are at this point, politically, at home– might seek to “break out of” their sense of being besieged by launching yet another doomed but extremely harmful military adventure.
However, the momentum, for now, is in the direction of peacemaking. That is excellent! Let it be for real! And let Israel’s 7 million people now– finally– increase their understanding that finding a sustainable, respectful peace with all their neighbors is a far, far better way to assure their security than all their 60 years’-worth of reliance on brute force, militarization, nuclear weapons, oppression, and intimidation.

Golan: Getting it straight

Whoa there, AP! The generally well-regarded US newswire is putting out an extremely tendentious little “fact-box” today, on the situation in the Israeli-occupied Golan. Tendentious and, need I add, one-sided.
For example, here:

• LOCATION: Plateau at southwestern corner of Syria overlooking Sea of Galilee and northern Israel.

Note to AP: The occupied Golan also overlooks a huge stretch of Syria, including the national capital, Damascus. And from the top of Jebel al-Sheikh, the area’s highest mountain– known by the Israelis as Mount Hermon– Israel’s military is also currently able to dominate a large chunk of Lebanon, too.
Guess it depends on whether we have an Israelo-centric view of the Middle East, or not?
Then, the AP has this:

• HISTORY: Syrian soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967. Israel captured the territory in 1967 Mideast war. Israel annexed it in 1981, though no country recognized that.

The last two sentences there are correct. The rest of the graf is unbelievably one-sided. Yes, Syrian soldiers used Golan between 1948 to shell Israeli forces– but those forces were busy consolidating Israel’s military control over areas to the north of the Sea of Galilee that were supposed to have been completely demilitarized under the Armistice Agreement of 1949. UN records from the 1949-1967 period make clear there were infractions from both sides of the Israel-Syria Armistice Line– but more from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Finally, the AP box gives us this:

• DISPUTE: In 2000, Israel-Syria peace talks broke down. Israel offered to withdraw from all the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border that it captured in 1948, including the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

This is simply not true. At Geneva, Ehud Barak notably did not agree to withdraw to the international border, which according to the maps drawn between Syria and Mandate Palestine ran either along the water-line along the northeast quadrant of the Sea of Galilee, (as in this recent BBC map or this CIA map), or in some versions through the Sea of Galilee roughly at the twelve o’clock and three o’clock lines. Anyway, in those days Syria had certain valuable rights as a littoral (coast-line) power on the SoG, including rights to fish, undertake water-borne transport on it, maintain small ports, etc.
In 1994, during the heart of the negotiations that Syria and Israel maintained from 1991 thru 1996, Israeli PM Rabin told the American mediators that in return for an array of other security measures, demilitarization, normalization of relations, economic links etc, he would be prepared to withdraw Israel’s forces to the international border; and in the negotiations that continued between then and the defeat of his successor, Shimon Peres, at the Israeli polls in spring 1996, that was the basis on which the negotiations continued. (In Israel, it became known as the “Rabin deposit.”) During marathon sessions at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in January 1996, the two sides came very close to concluding all the elements of a final peace agreement.
Peres’s success, Bibi Netanyahu, was not interested in proceeding with those talks. The talks resumed only some months after Ehud Barak was elected in 1999. But when he inveigled Bill Clinton into presenting his “final, final offer” to Syrian president Hafez al-Asad in May 2000, the extent of the promised Israeli withdrawal had mysteriously (or not) shrunk from the Rabin Deposit. Now, Barak insisted on Israel maintaining control off a strip some 100 or so metres wide around the whole of the SoG coast-line. Not surprisingly, Asad demurred. Less than a month later he had died of a heart attack…. and a few months after that, as we know, the Palestinians’ second intifada started, and then Barak lost at the polls to Ariel Sharon.
So, friends at AP: Please let’s not keep that very tendentious, and indeed inaccurate, listing of “facts” up on your newswire. The way you present this material matters. It matters both to the way you are viewed around the world– whether as fair-minded and accurate, or neither of those things. And it matters because your material affects the way many Americans (and perhaps other people elsewhere) think about these issues. If you want to make it look like the Syrians have always been wrong and the Israelis blameless, that matters.
By the way, since the Golan issue is now going to be discussed at Annapolis, people might want to take a look at this series of articles I published in Al-Hayat in 1998, on the human geography of the area.
Also, since I see that my 2000 book on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1991-96 is now listed by the publisher, the US Institute of Peace, as out-of-print, you might want to get a used one from Amazon.
I think I’ll contact USIP and see if we can maybe have them put the final chapter of the book up on the web… (Note to certain carping commenters here: I have never had a royalty agreement with USIP for sales of this book, since they had helped fund some of the research for it. So when I mention the book here, it is certainly not from a desire to increase my earnings.)

Annapolis: Saudi and Palestinian dimensions

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said today in Cairo that he will attend the Annapolis meeting. I think this is a good decision. It will allow him to give the extremely helpful, Saudi-initiated “Arab Peace Plan of 2002” a good and serious presentation there.
That AP story by Salah Nasrawi also notes that Prince Saud said that at Annapolis he “would not take part in a ‘theatrical show,’ such as handshakes with Israeli officials, saying the gathering must make serious progress.” That is fine, too. Under his plan, the Arab states would all engage in full normalization of relations with Israel simultaneously with Israel undertaking its withdrawal from all (or nearly all) the lands its army occupied in 1967. (Many Israelis and their friends want to have this recognition/normalization performed upfront. Of course they might want that. But I can’t see why they would reasonably believe that anyone else would support that request.)
Regarding the core issues of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, I see that Amira Hass has another piece in Haaretz today in which she explains why many Palestinians consider the PA’s negotiating stance to be a weak, overly appeasing one. I think this is a further commentary on the Nov. 17th negotiating Draft (note that’s a PDF there) that she had received recently– the one in which the Israeli and Palestinian sides could not even agree whether it should be a “Joint document” or a “Joint statement.” There were also, at that point, many other remaining disagreements between the two sides.
Also in today’s Ha’aretz is an intriguing account by Akiva Eldar of the conclusions reached by members of something called the Aix Group, a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and “international” experts that has been trying to unravel the many economic strands that would be involved in a satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.
The group recommends that Palestinian refugees from 1948 should be allowed to choose their place of permanent residence, but implementation of that should be subject to the sovereign wishes of the state involved; and an alternative package of full compensation would be offered to those not returning to their original homes and properties in what is now Israel. The total amounts of compensation involved would, the group estimated, come to “between $55 and $85 billion.”
Exploratory work like that– based on updated surveys of the extent of Palestinian property claims against Israel, like those recently produced by Prof. Michael Fischbach here in the US– is really helpful. If a Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement is to be sustainable, it must of course be sold to a sizeable majority of the people in both national communities, and must provide a basis for the new Palestinian state that is viable in both economic and political terms.
Maybe a formula like that proposed by the Aix Group, which involves overwhelmingly compensation to the refugees rather than actual physical return, could work out. But I believe it only really has a chance of working provided the territorial base of the Palestinian state is broad enough and coherent enough to accommodate Palestinian aspirations for a viable state. That is, it cannot be eaten into in the West Bank by the massive blocs of illegal Israeli settlements, as solidifying the line of the current Israeli “security” barrier into the final state boundary would do. Most of the areas currently occupied by those settlements would therefore have to come under the authority of the Palestinian state.
In addition, a permanent passage between the West Bank and Gaza needs to be assured. Completely free interaction between Palestine and the world economy– notably, NOT an interaction mediated always through Israel, as in the Oslo formula– needs to be guaranteed. And of course, a workable formula needs to be found for Jerusalem.
Much of the work of brainstorming possible formulas on all these issues has already been done. You can see a survey of proposals on Jerusalem, for example, in the 2004 book on the Israeli-Palestinian question that I worked on, along with a group of fellow Quakers from around the world.
Mainly at this point, what is needed is for the leaderships on both sides to show that they really are committed to finding a robust and sustainable solution that meets the needs of all the people iinvolved– around 8 million-plus Palestinians and 7 million-plus Israelis– sufficiently fairly.
Given that gross population data, an outcome that ends up giving the Palestinian state a land base that is in any significant way inferior to the 23% of Mandate Palestine that makes up the West Bank and Gaza, would seem very far from able to meet this requirement.
So there’s a lot of work to do at the bilateral level. And a lot of hard decisions that the US government will need to take, especially regarding the degree to which it plans to continue underwriting Israeli intransigence in this peacemaking.
There are also numerous other regional issues that need to be addressed. To see my comments on some of them, read my previous post here.

Annapolis guessing game, prospects

The current guessing game in the US and Israel is over “which of the Arab states will participate, and at which level.”
Actually, for many ardent pro-Israelis inside and outside the two governments, those questions about Arab representation are the sole focus of their concern about Annapolis, rather than, as good sense would dictate: “What is the best way to ensure that this gathering contributes to the speedy conclusion of sustainable final-status peace agreements between Israel and all their neighbors?”
There is very frequently a sort of “scalp-collecting” aspect to the way many Israelis, inside and outside of government, think about the possibility of encounters with Arab state nationals.
But anyway, the biggest questions right now about attendance at Annapolis are those over the responses of Syria and Saudi Arabia These two will be among the Arab states that are sending their foreign ministers to Cairo for an all-Arab confab tomorrow, at which many Arabs hope they will be able to find that long-sought Holy Grail, a “unified Arab position.”
AP’s Zeina Karam has a good report from Damascus today, in which she presents the evidence backing up her lead, which is “Syria is softening its refusal to attend the Annapolis peace conference and already has won dividends.”
And Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi has an interesting report (in Arabic) in today’s paper, explaining the various strands of analysis that have been pursued by government insiders in Damascus.
People seeking a rendering of Hamidi’s article in English are strongly advised not to rely on the version presented by the usually sound young US professor Joshua Landis, who for some reason seems to have pasted in a commentary on the Hamidi report from elsewhere– most likely, the Israeli press– instead of presenting his English-language readers with the promised direct translation of it.
It is Thanksgiving here in the US, so I can only imagine that Landis just quickly used that commentary instead of working on his own translation of the piece. But the result is very inaccurate and misleading.
There is so much finegrained diplomacy going on around the question of the prospects for Annapolis that I don’t have time to assess it all here. I will just quickly note the following:

the lead-up to the Madrid Peace conference of October 31, 1991

“play off” the Syrians against the Palestinians

my 2000 book

Lebanon is currently poised on the brink of constitutional disaster.

all

And now, back to revising Chapter 4 of my current book project…
(Neither Bill nor I have time to cook a turkey today. We’re having our Thanksgiving meal at restaurant. Personally, I feel I have a lot to give thanks for this year. But the performance of the US Congress leaders we all helped elect a year ago is sadly nowhere near the top of that list.)

Any hope for Annapolis?

I would be so happy if the planned Annapolis meeting between Israel and the Palestinians succeeded.
But succeeded at what? At orchestrating a pretty photo-opportunity? No, that would be no particular cause for joy, given the number of times such photo-ops have been staged in the past and– crucially– the role they have played in both substituting for any tangible progress in the peacemaking, and also masking the absence of such progress.
Succeeded at getting one side to make, unreciprocated, a declaration publicly “demanded” from it by the other side?
No, that would not constitute any meaningful success either, since it would augur so poorly for the future success of the peacemaking…
Right now, the only success that counts is the success of peacemaking: That is, visible progress toward the speedy conclusion of final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine— and also, a final peace between Israel and Syria. That’s the prize we should all keep our eyes on.
Yes, it needs to be progress towards a final peace, because both Israelis and Palestinians had the emotion-churning experience in the 1990s of seeing the strong focus on interim agreements, that were described in the deeply flawed Oslo process as being “steps on the path to a final peace,” instead drain energy and momentum out of the search for that final peace.
That was the particular “contribution” to the process made by the failed diplomatist Dennis Ross, who since I first met him in the mid-1980s argued endlessly that the Israelis and Palestinians would need a long interim period in order to “build confidence” before they could muster the political will required to negotiate a final peace. Instead of which, Ross’s shepherding throughout the Clinton years of the implementation of his flawed– and, I might add, extremely self-serving and one-sided– formula led only to the intense disillusionment of nearly a whole generation of the former “peaceniks” on both sides of the Green Line… To a rise in frustrations on both sides… To ever-tighter restrictions on the Palestinians’ freedom of movement… And to the continued expansion of the illegal Israeli settlement project in the occupied West Bank.
For example, look at the post-1993 increase in the settler populations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem columns of this table. Under international law E. Jerusalem is actually a part of the West Bank, so I don’t know why those folks put them in separate columns there. But if you do the math you can see that the population in both columns combined increased from 264.4K in 1993 to 443K in 2005, an increase of 68%. Lucky settlers: gobbling up all those yummy US-taxpayer-assisted subsidies along with the Palestinians’ land and resources!
(Amazingly, some people have even recently been “mentioning” Dennis as a possible high-level foreign-policy official in a post-2009 democratic administration. Does no-one even look at his actual past performance?)
Oh, and the GDP per capita in Israel as a whole skyrocketed during the years after Oslo, thanks to the opening of massive new markets, especially in East Asia and especially for weapons, that was inaugurated by that agreement.
So please, 14 years after Oslo, let’s have no more talk of “interim” agreements.
I am slightly reassured by the fact that the Bushites seem not to have given way to that temptation (yet.) On the other hand, they have not yet projected anything like the degree of vision and commitment that they’ll need if they really want to bring about the signing of the final peace agreement before Bush leave office in January 2009.
So yes, I would be extremely happy if a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland could bring closer the conclusion of a sustainable, that is, “fair enough”, final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine.
(Okay, I’m a little troubled by the symbolism of Annapolis itself, which after all is the location of the officers’ academy for the major instrument of US armed power around the world; but apart from that, I guess it’s a nice enough seaside location…)
I would be happy if Annapolis truly succeeded, because I know how badly the parties to the dispute– but most especially, at this point, the Palestinians– have been suffering. I would be happy because I know that military occupation is always an extremely oppressive and unjust situation, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan has gone for more than 40 years now: far, far too long. I would be happy because the prolongation of the state of occupation has sown fear and violence in far too many hearts both sides of the line. Large proportions of the people on both sides live in a state of fearfulness that is itself injurious to them, and that also leads to their support for continuing acts of violence. All those wounds need to be healed, and they cannot be healed so long as the inequitable situation of one country ruling over the other is ended.
However, like the vast majority of my Israeli and Palestinian friends, I have harbored high hopes of imminent diplomatic success before– and on every previous occasion I’ve seen those hopes dashed. For many people, that can even be a worse experience than not having any hopes at all. To be honest, regarding Annapolis, despite the intensity of my desire that this might– finally!– be the turning point on the road to real success, I also struggle with the analytical side of me that, looking as coolly and objectively as I can at the facts on the ground (including here), does not really see them pointing in a hopeful direction.
Yet.
I am still waiting to be pleasantly surprised and am open to the possibility that might happen.
Among some of the disturbing pieces of recent evidence:

averring

Israel’s introduction of this new “as a Jewish state” rubric has generally been understood in the US MSM as underlining Israel’s refusal to allow any of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, or their descendants, to return to their ancestral properties in what has been Israel for 59 years. But it is also a rubric of great significance within Israeli society, since many of the 25% or so of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish– most of them ethnic Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the rest Russians– prefer the idea, common in democratic countries, that Israel should be “the state of its citizens.”
Anyway, for Olmert to require Mahmoud Abbas to jump through this recently introduced hoop even before serious negotiations can start, is not a good sign. And why do we hear nothing from the party that seeks to present itself as a “neutral” mediator in these talks, telling Olmert and the Israelis that the introduction of this hoop is very unhelpful indeed?
(I wonder what would happen if Abbas stated publicly that he would require Israel to recognize Palestine’s “right to exist as a Muslim state” before he would even negotiate?)
Anyway, a mediator in such a situation could, if truly committed to moving rapidly toward a sustainable final peace agreement, certainly find ways to “mediate” and find creative ways to sequence and link all the cross-cutting demands and concerns voiced by the two sides.
And I guess that is the final, and perhaps biggest, cause for my current concern: I am not yet seeing anything from the Bush administration that indicates any such degree of commitment.
I realize the “structure” of this negotiation would be hard for any mediator to deal with. There is one very strong party currently sitting on the neck of a very weak party. Both the contending parties, moreover, have considerable bodies of supporters elsewhere… But the particular challenge for Washington is that the weak party’s main external supporters are in a part of the world that is very important to the US– while the strong party’s main external supporters are within the US political system itself.
And this, in a US election year in which, though George W. Bush himself is not a candidate, still his party will presumably not want him to gratuitously diminish their chances of success.
So maybe, as I’ve argued for a long time now, the US really is just about the most unsuitable choice one could imagine for a successful “mediator” in this situation. In which case, the decent thing to do would be to resign from the task and hand it over to a party that can get the job done both speedily and sustainably.
But so long as they hang onto the task, I guess I shall just have to wait for them to prove me wrong…