Category: US foreign policy

I was just thinking a little more about the global-political context within which any soon-foreseeable Palestinian-Israeli final peace might be concluded… That was after writing this blog post yesterday in which I looked briefly at the question of the international auspices under which any peacekeeping/peace-monitoring force might be deployed to the OPTs.
I noted there that the body or bodies directing the PK force would most likely be the body or bodies directing the diplomatic effort to achieve the peace agreement. Which in the present context would be the U.S.-led Quartet.
The Quartet’s three “junior” partners are the E.U., Russia, and– quite anomalously– the U.N. (The U.N. certainly should not be the junior partner of any single member state. It’s supposed to represent the interests of the whole of humanity.) I very much doubt, however, if any of those junior partners would be prepared to supervise, underwrite, or contribute troops to the maintenance of a PK force sent to “keep” any form of peace that does not meet the full requirements of international law.
Most peacekeeping forces around the world are supervised by either the U.N. or by the relevant regional organization like, in West Africa, ECOWAS. One major exception, that is in the Middle East, is the U.S.-led Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) that supervises the U.S.-brokered peace treaty that Egypt and Israel concluded in 1979. The MFO has 12 national contingents, all of them coming from very strongly pro-U.S. nations. Those countries’ governments are happy to contribute forces because they know that this peace is a stable one that is strongly underwritten at the political level by the U.S.– and because it is fully based on the international-law principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. Egypt did not cede one inch of its national territory to Israel in the peace agreement, though it did of course agree to very extensive demilitarization measures, economic terms highly favorable to Israel, etc.
But because that peace is both stable and based on international law, participation in the MFO has never, to my knowledge, come in for any serious criticism from the publics of those nations contributing forces.
So now, let’s come to the challenge of forming and supervising a PK force to keep an Israeli-Palestinian peace…
Which nations are going to contribute troops to this force, and under whose supervision?
In the CNAS study (PDF) I was writing about yesterday, Marc Lynch even posited as one of the “scenarios” he was considering, the idea that the PK force– whose supervisory auspices he studiously avoided discussing– might have to engage in some counter-insurgency missions against Hamas’s very extensive networks in the West Bank!
(Hamas, remember, being the party that won the PA’s 2006 parliamentary elections.)
Truly, how many countries are going to be contributing troops to this PK force?
But also, how many governments or or inter-governmental bodies would be willing to participate– in either a supervisory/legitimizing capacity, or a troop-contributing capacity– in a peacekeeping operation designed to “keep” any peace that would fall far short of the requirements of international law?
I think the answer to that question is that only one seriously-sized government anywhere in the world would be willing to consider doing that, and that is the U.S. But this is really a non-starter. Can anyone imagine the reaction worldwide (and in the region) if the U.S. were to try to dominate a PK force in the OPTs, with a big part of the mandate of the force being to protect Israel’s illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank from the many Palestinians– including the actual owners of many of those lands– who still maintain their claims to them?
We are not in 1979.
Back then, the U.S. stood aside the world and was able to convince everyone else that it could (and perhaps even should) monopolize the entire diplomacy of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Jimmy Carter and his team were also able to persuade the Israeli government of the day that, despite its earlier desire to hang onto much of the Egyptian territory of Sinai, indeed it could not; and it would have to withdraw completely to the international border. Hence that peace agreement met the requirements of international law.
Today’s U.S. president is not nearly as powerful– either within world politics, or even, it seems, in the ongoing tussle of wills with Israel.
For all these reasons, it therefore seems to me quite implausible that the U.S. could hope to replicate the MFO model of 1979 and plan to deploy a U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” type of PK force in the OPTs.
The “willing” are far less numerous, and far less willing, than they used to be. Even NATO, having gotten dragged by Washington into both the war in Afghanistan and the beefed-up UNIFIL operation in Lebanon, now has many members who reportedly pushed back hard against Jim Jones’s late-2008 suggestion that NATO run the post-peace (and perhaps also the peri-peace) PK force in the OPTs.
I think everyone is agreed that if there is to be a two-state outcome in the foreseeable future–a HUGE ‘if’ there– then the Palestinian state that thereby emerges would be substantially demilitarized. (Personally, I think that in the context of a comprehensive peace, that includes the Syrian-Israeli and Lebanese-Israeli tracks as well, then Israel should emerge substantially demilitarized, as well… But that’s a slightly different issue.)
But if the Palestinian state is demilitarized, then the citizens of that state of course need considerable reassurances that they won’t be subjected to resumed forms of Israeli aggression. They would thus probably need some form of international force to help provide that reassurance– as well as to help police their side of the border against any attempts by Palestinian militants to breach it.
Probably the best kind of force for that purpose would be one in which both the Palestinian citizens themselves, and the “international community”, and Israel, all have high confidence. A Turkish-led force is one model that immediately comes to mind. A U.N. force is another. (After all, UNDOF and UNTSO have very successfully kept Israel’s 1974 ceasefire line with Syria quite quiet for the past 36 years.) Actually, a Turkish-led U.N. force would seem to me to be the best of all possible options.
Bottom line here: Any PK force that goes into Palestine in the context of an Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace has to have a high degree of international legitimacy, both in its institutional structure and in the content of the peace that it’s keeping. The model of a U.S.-led force, that worked in 1979, is incapable of working today. It’s the U.N. or nothing.
Therefore, if the folks in the Obama administration truly want to see a stable, two-state peace emerge, then they will need to find a way to hand the peace-making baton over to the U.N. as rapidly as possible.
But maybe they don’t want it that strongly?

It is such a shibboleth in U.S. foreign-policy discourse these days– to say that such-and-such an issue on the final-status agenda between Israelis and Palestinians “must be solved through direct negotiations between the parties”. But why? Why on earth should the Palestinian representatives be forced into a position of being shut in a room one-on-one with representatives of their Israeli occupiers/dispossessors, with that highly unequal “negotiation” being the only one that’s allowed?
I mean, after Saddam Hussein had occupied and politicided Kuwait in 1990, did anyone in the U.S. and elsewhere say to the Kuwaiti Emir that if he wanted his people’s rights restored he should sit one-on-one in room with Saddam, with that negotiation being the only one that was allowed??
Of course not.
So why should Washington be continuously trying to force the Palestinian negotiators to resolve their issues with Israel through direct negotiations with the very state and government that has occupied and continues on a daily basis to spatiocide them?
Look, I think I understand where this demand– which was originally an Israeli demand– that the various Arab parties should sit down and negotiate peace with them directly, face-to-face, came from. It came from the sense that many in earlier generations of Israelis had, that they were upset at the refusal of their Arab neighbors to give their state due recognition as a neighboring state in the region; and they said that it would give them a lot of useful reassurance if they could gain the “recognition” of having their Arab neighbors deal directly and respectfully with them.
I have two comments on that:

1. The PLO already gave the State of Israel full recognition, in the letters that were exchanged at the time of Oslo in 1993. And after that, PLO leaders sat down with the Israelis to negotiate both a final peace and numerous ‘interim’ agreements, on too many occasions to count. But none of those ‘direct negotiations’ led to anything like a workable final peace. Indeed, from the Palestinian point of view, the situation on the ground continued to get progressively worse after Oslo, as with every year that passed the Israeli authorities continued to gobble up more and more Palestinian land for their settler colonies.
2. The Israeli leaders, and increasing portions of the Israeli public, don’t actually seem to give a toss these days about either the “acceptance” of their Palestinian or other Arab neighbors, or even the alleged “value” of direct negotiations with them. Right now, this seems to have become much more an American shibboleth and demand, than it is an Israeli one.

So on the one hand it’s moderately good news when Hillary Clinton or someone says that Israel should absolutely not be building new settler housing in East Jerusalem. But it is really pretty appalling that in the next breath she will say something like, “because the final status of East Jerusalem should still be on the agenda of the direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Like downtown Kuwait City? They expected the Kuwaiti Emir to sit down and negotiate that with Saddam, with no other factors intervening?
Okay, I am a realist, and I understand it is highly unlikely that anyone in the international community as it’s currently configured is going to do for Palestine what the international community did for Kuwait in August 1990. The U.S. and U.N are not, this time around, about to assemble a massive international military force and end the Israeli occupation through brute force.
But there is still such a thing as international law, and international legitimacy; and they, surely, should be the guide to the final outcome in Jerusalem and the rest of the OPTs and OSTs, just as much as they were in Kuwait, 20 years ago.
International legitimacy: “The inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”, as stressed in resolution 242 and reiterated in 338. International law: The outright ban on any occupying power moving parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. Etc., etc.
The whole concept of ‘direct negotiations’ between Israelis and Palestinians has been given an extraordinarily long run for its money. It started in the backdoor negotiations that led to Oslo, and continued in one way or another until, really, Sharon turned his back on the whole idea of negotiating with the PLO/PA, back in 2003-05. I guess Olmert and Condi Rice tried to kick some life back into the concept at Annapolis. But that whole sorry experience just proved how dead the horse was by then.
It strikes me that the continued insistence on just trying to resolve this conflict through direct negotiations, without any application of international law or international legitimacy, or any real support from outside for those important pillars of the international system, is a recipe for either the Israeli sumo kings ramming a highly inequitable (and therefore unsustainable) “peace agreement” down the throats of the Palestinian negotiators– or, for continued deadlock and conflict, under the cover of which Israel’s settlement construction program will continue apace.
For an “unsustainable” agreement achieved in just this way, think back to Israel’s short-lived peace with Lebanon, 1983.
… It strikes me, too, that this fondness that ways too many members of the US political elite have for “direct negotiations” stems to some degree from a fuzzy but dangerous misreading of what happened in South Africa. There is always this stress on “where’s the Palestinian Mandela?”, isn’t there? And this idea that through the sheer force of his personality, vision, and whatever else, Mandela was quite “miraculously” able to soften the Afrikaners’ hearts and persuade them to see the error of their ways, “allow” full political rights to the disfranchized 85% of the citizens who were not “White”, and join in singing Kumbaya, etc.
Baloney.
The Afrikaners found themselves “persuaded” to negotiate as a result of many factors. Among them: the fact that they’d suffered a damaging military setback in Angola, as a result of the over-extension of their forces there; the fact that the ANC’s mass-civilian arm, the UDF, had sustained a huge, rolling intifada throughout just about the whole of the country over a number of years, making massive tracts of it quite ungovernable; and the ANC still sustained a modest military capability (which had been founded, remember, by that very same Nelson Mandela, a man with a nuanced view of the relationship between mass movements and military threats)… PLUS, back in the 1970s the UN had declared apartheid to be a “crime against humanity”, and by the end of the 1980s, South Africa’s “Whites” were certainly feeling the effect of having been systematically shunned for several years by many of the international constituencies they cared most about.
So it wasn’t the sheer “magic” of Nelson Mandela sitting in the conference room near Pollsmoor prison with Pik Botha and F.W. de Klerk that led to the unraveling of the settler-colonial project in South Africa. It was Nelson Mandela, backed up by a powerful and disciplined ANC movement– and also, by that time, by just about the whole moral and economic power of the international community.
If F.W. De Klerk and his minions had had full and continuing access to U.S. arsenals and U.S. and E.U. free trade agreements in 1989-90, do you think De Klerk would have been suddenly “transformed” by having one-on-one meetings with Mandela??
So why do we imagine that Benjamin Netanyahu or any other Israeli leaders would be any different?
Get real, America. Stop engaging in all these fuzzy misreadings of what went on in South Africa. And let’s get back to upholding the real and very necessary principles of international law and international legitimacy– and using all the instruments of our national power to back them up.