Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace by Nathan Thrall
Scattered over the
land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of
failed peace plans, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions
and state-building programmes, most of them designed to partition this
long-contested territory into two independent states, Israel and Palestine.
The collapse of these initiatives has been as predictable as the confidence
with which US presidents have launched new ones, and the current administration
is no exception.
In the quarter century
since Israelis and Palestinians first started negotiating under US auspices in
1991, there has been no shortage of explanations for why each particular round
of talks failed. The rationalisations appear and reappear in the speeches of
presidents, the reports of thinktanks and the memoirs of former officials and
negotiators: bad timing; artificial deadlines; insufficient preparation; scant
attention from the US president; want of support from regional states; inadequate
confidence-building measures; coalition politics; or leaders devoid of courage.
Among the most common
refrains are that extremists were allowed to set the agenda and there was a
neglect of bottom-up economic development and state-building. And then there
are those who point at negative messaging, insurmountable scepticism or the
absence of personal chemistry (a particularly fanciful explanation for anyone
who has witnessed the warm familiarity of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators
as they reunite in luxury hotels and reminisce about old jokes and ex-comrades
over breakfast buffets and post-meeting toasts). If none of the above works,
there is always the worst cliche of them all – lack of trust. Postmortem accounts
vary in their apportioning of blame. But nearly all of them share a deep-seated
belief that both societies desire a two-state agreement, and therefore need
only the right conditions – together with a bit of nudging, trust-building and perhaps
a few more positive inducements – to take the final step.
In this view, the
Oslo accords of the mid-1990s would have led to peace had it not been
for the tragic assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin in 1995. The 1998 Wye River Memorandum and its commitment to
further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank would have been implemented if
only the Israeli Labor party had joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to back
the agreement. The Camp David summit in July 2000 would have succeeded if the
US had been less sensitive to Israeli domestic concerns, insisted on a written
Israeli proposal, consulted the Arab states at an earlier phase, and taken the
more firm and balanced position adopted half a year later, in December 2000,
when President Clinton outlined parameters for an agreement. Both parties could
have accepted the Clinton parameters with only minimal reservations had the
proposal not been presented so fleetingly, as a one-time offer that would
disappear when Clinton stepped down less than a month later.
The negotiations
in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 were on the brink of agreement but failed
because time ran out, with Clinton just out of office, and Ehud Barak facing
almost certain electoral defeat to Ariel Sharon. The two major peace plans of
2003 – the US-sponsored road map to
peace in the Middle East and the unofficial Geneva accord – could have
been embraced had it not been for a bloody intifada and a hawkish Likud prime
minister in power.
And on it goes: direct
negotiations between the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Netanyahu in
2010 could have lasted more than 13 days if only Israel had agreed to
temporarily halt construction of some illegal settlements in exchange for an
extra $3bn package from the United States. Several years of secret back-channel
negotiations between the envoys of Netanyahu and Abbas could have made history
if only they hadn’t been forced to conclude prematurely in late 2013, because
of an artificial deadline imposed by separate talks led by secretary of state John Kerry. And,
finally, the Kerry negotiations of 2013–2014 could have led to a framework
agreement if the secretary of state had spent even a sixth as much time
negotiating the text with the Palestinians as he did with the Israelis, and if
he hadn’t made inconsistent promises to the two sides regarding the guidelines
for the talks, the release of Palestinian prisoners, curtailing Israeli
settlement construction, and the presence of US mediators in the negotiating
room.
Each of these rounds
of diplomacy began with vows to succeed where predecessors had failed. Each
included affirmations of the urgency of peace or warnings of the closing
window, perhaps even the last chance, for a two-state solution. Each ended with
a list of tactical mistakes and unforeseen developments that resulted in
failure. And, just as surely, each neglected to offer the most logical and
parsimonious explanation for failure: no agreement was reached because at least
one of the parties preferred to maintain the impasse... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/16/the-real-reason-the-israel-palestine-peace-process-always-fails
