The latest attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been launched with remarkably little fanfare.
Chief negotiators for the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority met in Washington last Monday and Tuesday (July 29 and 30) and agreed to begin formal talks about the substantive issues within two weeks. They set a nine month time limit and will alternate between Ramallah and Jerusalem as sites of the talks.
The U.S. government, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, has been actively negotiating with the Israelis and Palestinians for the past several months to set the stage for renewed talks.
Compared to the 2010 effort, the U.S. role in creating the conditions for talks to begin has been quite different this time around,. And the biggest difference has been lack of public involvement by President Obama. In 2010 the President was a prominent player in the process, appointing George Mitchell as his special envoy, calling on both sides to come to the table and getting into a very public spat with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli government over a potential freeze on settlement activities in the West Bank. The talks did not ever get started.
This time there was no public announcement of a new push in the Middle East, no high level meetings in Washington with the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, and no visible attempt to get both sides to agree to try to agree on the preliminaries. Instead there have been a series of events that have been seemingly unrelated to each other and unrelated to potential talks. For example, the Arab League revised their official peace plan to include the possibility of adjustments to the 1967 borders of Israel ... which gives the Palestinian Authority a tacit blessing to agree to some territorial adjustments. The Palestinian Authority shifted its rhetorical position and stopped mentioning a freeze on settlements as a precondition to negotiations. Israel stopped mentioning the necessity of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
The first public indication that serious steps were being taken was the Israeli decision to release 104 Palestinians who had been convicted of a variety of terrorist offenses, many of whom had been incarcerated in Israel for 20 years or more. That decision came amidst a flood of rumors about impending talks and was seen as a major good will gesture by the Israelis. No one has agreed to any other concessions, but somehow people seem to have gotten the idea that Israel will ease up on settlement construction and the Palestinians will drop efforts to get enhanced United Nations recognition this Fall. (For a quick refresher on what enhanced UN recognition might mean as well as a review of the political situation in the Middle East two years ago, check out an earlier blog entry Palestinians at the UN ... does it matter?
The first step in any negotiation is agreeing to talk about talks and the first success was getting the sides to agree to talk about the issues. While this is a major step forward, no one needs Yogi Berra’s reminder that it ain’t over until it’s over. Polls indicate that a majority of Israelis and a larger majority of Palestinians expect the talks to come to nothing. Even Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister has said the talks will be useless. Many pessimists are already deciding whether to say “I told you so” with a regretful or gloating tone.
One might even ask, what’s the point? Why go through all the hassle and expense of having negotiations if they are guaranteed to fail? The next step after talks fail is always the blame game, with each participant assuring the world that they were the very essence of reason and sweet charity and it was the other side that was completely unreasonable and intransigent. Why waste nine months in meaningless charades?
A contrarian point of view (and being optimistic about peace in the Middle East is about as contrarian as you can get) would argue that if you compare the internal political dynamics of both Israel and the Palestinians with the situation three years ago there are some notable differences that make successful talks more likely.
ISRAEL
Binyamin Netanyahu won reelection as Prime Minister last January but the coalition of parties included in his government lost a total of 11 seats in the Israeli parliament. Netanyahu’s Likud party did not have the necessary Knesset majority so he put together a new coalition government, one that included a centrist and even a small liberal party and excluded the most hard line right wing parties that had played a large role in his old coalition. The center of gravity in the Israeli government has shifted toward the center of the political spectrum and is far more supportive of the possibility that hard choices and real pain could lead to progress toward peace. (The decision to release the Palestinian prisoners, many of whom have been convected of murdering Israeli citizens in terror attacks, is immensely unpopular in Israel and would have been unthinkable in the past.)
One example of the difference the change in the composition of the ruling coalition has made is that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Justice Minister and a well known moderate politician is the chief negotiator in the talks. A second example of the impact of the change in is the fact that it is the deputy foreign minister who is dismissing the talks; in 2010 it was the then Foreign Minister, leader of one of the most hard line right wing parties in the cabinet, who publicly scoffed at negotiations.
A second significant difference between 2013 and 2010 is in the West Bank and Gaza. Two things have made the occupation of much of the West Bank more difficult for Israel. One is the growing international movement against Israeli settlers, including organized boycotts of Israeli products produced in the West Bank. The other is the increased number of so-called “price tag” actions by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villagers. These have ranged from desecration of mosques to destruction of olive orchards and open confrontations between Israeli soldiers and ideologically motivated settlers. The situation in Gaza, which we’ll discuss below, has changed dramatically in the past two years, in ways that make it easier for Israel to consider negotiations.
THE PALESTINIANS
There has been a sea change in the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Two years ago, in the aftermath of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, (for a reminder of what that was all about, see On The Recent Violence in the Middle East ) Hamas was riding high and the Palestinian Authority looked near collapse. The emergence of a Muslim Brotherhood dominated government in Egypt seemed to boost Hamas stock even further. But the civil war in Syria dramatically weakened the Assam regime’s ability to act as a Hamas ally, the coup* in Egypt that removed President Morsi and the Brotherhood from power, and growing discontent with Hamas’ failure to provide a minimal standard of living and jobs in the Gaza Strip, have all seriously undermined Hamas support. (Even Hamas’ glorious image as the valiant leaders of armed resistance against Israel has been tarnished since it has cracked down on anyone who has been tempted to launch rockets over the border in Israel. “Real” resistance fighters see Hamas as having struck an implicit bargain with Israel to give up armed attacks for economic benefits.) Significant economic growth in the West Bank and a more efficient and less corrupt administration, have made the Palestinian Authority more popular and stronger in the West Bank and make it look better in contrast to Hamas’ performance in the Gaza Strip.
All of this gives the Palestinian Authority more political wiggle room and a better chance of selling an agreement to the citizens of the West Bank and the larger Arab world.
*I am well aware that no one in the U.S. government uses this word because it would mean the administration would be legally obliged to cut off all funding for Egypt, which would leave no leverage over the Egyptian miliary. Sometimes something can look like a duck, walk like a duck, and quack like a duck, but not necessarily be a duck.
And the ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES is different. President Obama was the highly visible driving force and face of the 2010 initiative. He tried to push the Israelis into meeting the Palestinian demand for a moratorium on West Bank settlement activity and got a very public slap in the face when Israel announced a major increase in settlement activity while Vice President Biden was visiting Tel Aviv. Obama and Netanyahu have had a frosty personal relationship from the beginning and Netanyahu’s open preference for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election has been a further complication.
This time Obama is very much in the background. Secretary of State John Kerry is getting the credit for the serious politicking that had gotten the talks started and former Ambassador Indyk will probably be the American official most closely involved with the talks as they develop. There has been far less media coverage and White House positioning which reduces the temptation of either side to play to public opinion here or in the Middle East. All other things being equal, it is easier to explore possibilities and make concessions outside the glare of the limelight.
The logic of the situation and the current political dynamics justify a modest optimism. But the shadow of past failure and the cautionary tale of the frog and the scorpion should give even the most robust optimist pause.
THE FROG AND THE SCORPION
A scorpion was crawling across the Sinai desert under a brutal noonday sun when he came to the Suez Canal. He spotted a frog sunning itself on the bank. Since he wanted to cross the canal, and couldn’t swim, he asked the frog to give him a ride on his back. The frog initially refused, on the quite prudent grounds that the scorpion would sting him. The scorpion argued persuasively that it would be unreasonable for him to sting the frog in the middle of the canal because they would both die. So he got on the frog’s back and they started across. In the middle of the canal the scorpion felt the urge to sting and it grew and grew until he could no longer resist and he sank his deadly venom deep into the frog who began to sink beneath the water. “Why, why did you do it?” cried the frog with his dying breath. And with his last gasps, the drowning scorpion replied, “This is the Middle East.”
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