The Trouble With Politeness
Lurking amidst a fairly dull article about regional strategy in the Middle East, Richard Haass and Martin Indyk offer a provocative proposal:
When it comes to settlement activity, the Olmert government reduced new construction beyond the security barrier, but it also gave permission for the construction of thousands of new housing units inside existing settlement blocs and in greater Jerusalem, evoking an outcry from the Palestinians and Arab leaders. Obama will need to seek an understanding with the next Israeli prime minister that all settlement activity will be frozen for a certain time period (say, six to 12 months) while negotiators finalize the borders of a Palestinian state. Once an agreement on borders is reached, settlement activity could resume, but only in the agreed settlement blocs that would be formally annexed to Israel after the other final-status issues have been resolved.
I think there are two problems with the way they put this. One is that as Gershom Gorenberg’s Foreign Policy article on the settlements makes clear, it’s quite politically difficult for Israeli politicians to take on the settler lobby. So to merely “seek an understanding” might well be to lead to the understanding not being achieved. To be maximally effective, I think the United States need to commit itself publicly to this goal as well as raising it privately. Israelis need to understand that their leaders are under pressure from their country’s most important ally and that ordinary Israelis need to choose between the settlers and the United States. Second, a big part of why the U.S. needs to be involved in Israel-Palestine issues is the role the conflict plays in driving perceptions of America in large swathes of the world. So to get the maximum effect out of a serious drive for a freeze on new construction within settlements, we need to be seen as exercising pressure not just pleading behind-the-scenes.
Practical politics, I understand, pushes in the other direction. Lots of Americans who have no particular brief for the settlers are nevertheless very touchy about Israel being subjected to any kind of strong criticism and are very wedded to a narrative in which the failure of Oslo rests 100 percent with the Palestinians. Under the circumstances, speaking bluntly about the settlements is politically risky. But it’s much more likely to work, and much more likely to advance American interests.
Thus far most discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to the Middle East has tended to focus on personalities—Ross vs. Kurtzer in particular—but at the end of the day no envoy can make up for the fact that progress requires political courage.
35 Responses to “The Trouble With Politeness”
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January 14th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Re “but at the end of the day no envoy can make up for the fact that progress requires political courage.”
————-
1) Er.. actually, it requires money. Shitloads of it.
As part of his swan song, DNC Chairman Howard Dean has sent out an email asking us to post questions to the new DNC Chairman, Tim Kaine.
See http://www.democrats.org/page/s/welcomekaine
2) Here’s the question I submitted:
“What can be done to broaden the financial support of the Democratic Party so that our elected officials are less vulnerable to the malign influence of a few billionaires like Israeli Haim Saban and S Daniel Abraham
(the guy who stabbed Howard Dean in the back in the 2004 Iowa Primary)?”
3) Somehow I suspect Kaine won’t be fishing my question out of the hat to read.
But the problem remains — until the Democratic Party can free itself from a dozen or so oligarchs, US Middle East policy will remained fucked, two-faced, and a disaster for the American people.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
This seems right, but if we phrase things as the settlers or the US and they call our bluff, what are the odds of us actually following through? My guess, not very good. Whatever one wants to make of the disagreement about why Rice abstained, it seems pretty clear that Olmert sees calling the bluff of the US to be good politics.
But raising to public consciousness the fact that Israel appeasing the settlers has been a huge barrier to peace is certainly something that needs doing.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I agree with your basic thrust, but I think it may be getting the US electorate wrong – most Americans really don’t have a clue about the settlements, and I don’t think it would be at all hard to convince them that they’re as outrageous as they are. A few minutes with a map – “Israel says that the Palestinian state will someday start here; Israelis keep building new towns out there.” – would do the trick. NOt that it’s impossible to demagogue, obvs., but the vaguely pro-Israel sentiment of Americans isn’t, I don’t think, immune to facts and reason.
The I-P debate is all too dominated by claims of ancient wrongdoing and recent violence, but it’s the ongoing ridiculousness of the settlements that’s primarily driving things, and that’s something that people could get.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Israel can’t take on the settlers, and besides the “established” settlements which would remain chop the West Bank into an incoherent mess.
The Two State solution is done, and ironically, it was the Israelis who killed it.
We really need to move beyond the Two State solution to what remain as viable alternatives:
1) Status quo forever; Israel as South Africa.
2) Ethnic cleansing/genocide; Israel takes the whole enchilada.
3) The One State solution; Israel is no longer a Jewish-majority state; likely civil war/internal guerilla war for the foreseeable future.
What alternatives am I missing here? I truly believe that one of the above is Israel’s future. Most likely #1 for another decade or two, then #2 or #3 when the powderkeg blows.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
The “settlement activity,” as it is so politely termed, has continued through every stage of the so-called peace process. It will not magically be stopped for Obama. There is no real pressure he will able to bring to bear that will be any kind of counter weight to the local political pressure that the settlers and other extremists in Israel will bring. Any attempt to stop the settlements will be deemed a new holocaust, and that will be the end of the debate. Give it up.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Well there are more problems with the quoted language than that:
Once an agreement on borders is reached, settlement activity could resume, but only in the agreed settlement blocs that would be formally annexed to Israel
I think that it’s pretty clear that ant two state settlement (to the doubtful extent that one is still possible or even desirable) will have to mean the evacuation of all, or substantially all, of the settlements (just as the Palestinians will have to give up the right of return). So there will be no formal annexations (at least as part of a mutual settlement).
January 14th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Solution is really quite simple.
Form two multi-ethnic states based on 1967 boundaries.
Israel would continue to be a Jewish-majority state with Muslim and Christian minority.
The new Palestinian state composed of the West Bank and Gaza would be a majority Arab/Muslim state with a Christian and Jewish minority.
All settlers would be allowed to continue living in the West Bank provided they become citizens of the new Palestinian state and thereafter be subject to Palestinian law, pay taxes to the Palestinian government, carry Palestinian passports, be protected by Palestinian police, etc. etc. Their status as a minority would be exactly the same as it is for Arab Israelis.
Settlers would then be faced with a choice. Do they want to move and be Israelis? Or do they want to hang onto their settlements and become citizens of the new Palestinian state?
January 14th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Deeds,
Why doesn’t your model include ethnic cleansing of the Jews?
January 14th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
There are lots of problems with creating “facts on the ground” as one Isreali PM called this a long long time ago. Butv there are also a few fake ones, or rather one’s which are amenable to ordinary procedures. Some of the settlements around Jerualem are essentially bedroon communities; there is no particular reason why they couldn’t be handed over to Palestinian jurisdiction as long as the folks living in these places were willing to live under Palestinian law.
Otherwise the problem is pretty simple. The requisite portions of the Geneva Conventions forbid moving so much as a single onto so little of as a square inch of soil outside a countries borders on a permenent basis. So Isreal has no legal basis for retaining any of the settlements, period, or for establishing security cordons across the West Bank as Ehud Barak proposed doing.
This does leave the thorny issue of what to do about those settlers who simply refuse to live under Palestinian jurisdiction. But any susytainable solution is going to have to reckon with these folks in some fashion in the future anyway.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Kent (@7) said it better than I did.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
If this is an accurate description of the Obama-Clinton vision for the Palestinian-Israeli peace plan, it is frightening – frighteningly delusional, that is. Annexing substantial parts of the West Bank for the settlers does not a viable Palestinian state make. Rather, this is a recipe for permanent ghettoization and radicalisation of the Palestinian people – I can’t see how it will be accepted by the other party.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
This sort of peace-process-as-usual nonsense from Haass and Indyk is never going anywhere. Israel is a rich and powerful state, packing nuclear weapons. It has even richer and more powerful friends. The Palestinian community is poor, fragmented and weak. This does not provide any kind of promising foundation for conflict resolution based on a process of “negotiation” between the two contending parties. It never has, which is why the United States and Israel continue to lean in the direction of such “peace processes”.
The international community’s chief interests in this conflict lie in the enforcement of justice and international law, and in the establishment of a sustainable peace – which itself can only be based on justice. You can’t get justice out of a bilateral negotiation between a powerful state and the immiserated rabble that state is stepping on. You certainly can’t get justice out of a similar negotiation in which the powerful state is joined by its hyper-powerful tag team partner: i.e. the Camp David approach. These approaches are as primitive and idiotic as hoping for a just and sustainable resolution of an antitrust dispute between Home Depot and Al’s Otter Creek Lumber & Tile to be resolved by a sitdown between the giant corporation and the local shop. Unless some powerful third party, like a court system, participates with the aim of upholding the law and the rights of both parties, and seeing justice down, the sitdown will just turn into an opportunity for Home Depot to dictate terms to Al, and hand him the pistol he is to put into his mouth.
No just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can come about via negotiations between the weak Palestinian community and the much stronger power that has been systematically dismantling that community for many decades, and that continues to dismantle it as I write. The only things that can emerge from such negotiations different varieties of humiliating surrender agreements.
If the United States and other countries are really serious about ending this conflict on terms we all won’t look back on with disgust and shame, and that won’t provide a casebook full of awful and destructive precedents for future international conflicts, they need to work with international partners and international jurists to decide in very substantial detail on the shape of an appropriate solution, down to the neighborhood level, then codify that solution as a UN Security Council resolution, and take that resolution to the two parties as part of a united international front, and present it as a mandate, not a suggestion. The mandated solution must be backed up with a timetable and sanctions that all Security Council members agree to implement and enforce on any party that does not fulfill the terms of the resolution.
The Haass and Indyk approach is just a perpetuation of a diplomatic game designed to help third parties pretend they are doing something, so they will not get blamed for the continuing dispossession that will almost certainly occur as Israel continues its gradual but inexorable acre-by-acre drive for total conquest of what was once the Palestine Mandate.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Martin Indyk is a joke. He has been intellectually ridiculed by Norman Finkelstein on numerous occasions. Last time, a few days ago on democracynow.org.
Watch a few clips of him on youtube talking. Seriously he’s so outrageously stupid that even a 5 year old retarded kid from Kentucky wouldn’t buy his views and theories.
AIPAC hack at best.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
There can be no viable Palestinian state so long as Israeli settlements remain. The settlers have claimed the best land, almost all the water in the western aquifer, and the entire western bank of the Jordan river.
This means that the Bantustan that the Palestinians would have to live on would be completely surrounded by Israel. Therefore, all imports and exports from Palestine would have to go through Israel. The Israelis would tax the hell out any Palestinian trade and flat out ban any imports of machinery that might help Palestine become industrialized.
A Palestinian state consisting only of the land that the settlers haven’t grabbed for themselves wouldn’t be a state in the ordinary sense of the word. It would be a permanently impoverished cross between a ghetto and an open-air prison.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Anon says:
“Deeds,
Why doesn’t your model include ethnic cleansing of the Jews?”
I was trying to lay out the most realistic scenarios. I guess some sort of nuclear attack in Israel is possible, but even as horrific as that would be, with huge loss of life, I don’t think it would end the existence of Israel. So, I guess that’s a #4 alternative.
I just don’t see how Israel would be ethnically cleansed. The Arab states have fought multiple failed wars against Israel and are even more out-gunned now.
January 14th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I agree with Deeds as to his first three options, two-state solution is not going to happen.
But sometimes I wonder why Israel didn’t they go ahead and implement #2 while Bush was their bitch, the US, which is the only one that matters, might huff and puff, and might even cut the military aid, but they don’t really need that (as much as they like somebody else paying for they military), they got the nukes, so really nobody else was going to mess with them and risk they own population.
As for diplomatic isolation, they might have to wait 10 or 20 years, but thats small price.
January 14th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
But sometimes I wonder why Israel didn’t they go ahead and implement #2 while Bush was their bitch, the US, which is the only one that matters, might huff and puff, and might even cut the military aid, but they don’t really need that (as much as they like somebody else paying for they military), they got the nukes, so really nobody else was going to mess with them and risk they own population.
You can’t understand why they didn’t commit genocide? Because it’s genocide! You’re trying to find all these geopolitical reasons – diplomatic isolation, Bush, Iranaian nukes, etc. when the obvious answer is probably the best. They’re not genocidal.
January 14th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
What about a 3-state solution: Israel, the West Bank and Gaza each as a separate country ?
January 14th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Lots of Americans who have no particular brief for the settlers are nevertheless very touchy about Israel being subjected to any kind of strong criticism and are very wedded to a narrative in which the failure of Oslo rests 100 percent with the Palestinians.
I expect that most of the Americans who think like that vote Republican anyway, so Obama is unlikely to lose their vote.
January 14th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
@3 JRoth: I agree with your basic thrust, but I think it may be getting the US electorate wrong – most Americans really don’t have a clue about the settlements, and I don’t think it would be at all hard to convince them that they’re as outrageous as they are. A few minutes with a map – “Israel says that the Palestinian state will someday start here; Israelis keep building new towns out there.” – would do the trick. NOt that it’s impossible to demagogue, obvs., but the vaguely pro-Israel sentiment of Americans isn’t, I don’t think, immune to facts and reason.
Obama could probably sell snow to Eskimos, so I don’t see him having enormous diffulty persuading the American public that some Israeli positions/actions are wrong. (A point I co-incidently just made on my own blog)
January 14th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Hmmmm. A Palestinian peace process which calls for the surrender of any right of return, and the balkanization of the West Bank with the negotiated surrender of more pieces of the West Bank, leaving an even more impoverished Palestinian pseudo-state, carved into chunks, surrounded, isolated and deprived of water sources.
Oh yeah, that will work so well.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Matt: “Thus far most discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to the Middle East has tended to focus on personalities—Ross vs. Kurtzer in particular—but at the end of the day no envoy can make up for the fact that progress requires political courage.”
Correct. But where do you see that coming from in the Obama administration if his choices for everybody involved in the Middle East diplomacy are either hard-core pro-Israeli neocons – such as his choice for envoy or his Chief of Staff – or people owned by AIPAC – such as his Secretary of State?
So it seems a bit naive to suggest that we’re going to see any political courage out of Obama.
Dan Kervick has it absolutely right. The international community – via the UN and backed up by US military and international community economic might – needs to RAM a solution down Israel’s (and Hamas’) throat.
This is precisely why I advocate the UN simply reversing its 1947 decision to partition Palestine and declaring the state of Israel to be dissolved de jure.
Then follow it up by establishing the entire area of Palestine as a UN Protectorate until a new state can be constructed which includes all Palestinians and Jews and other residents of the area.
This sidelines the leaders of Hamas and Fatah and Israel and enables a new state to be constructed based on more moderate and reconcilable views.
As an aside, it enables the dismantling of Israel’s nuclear arsenal which will go a long way to enabling re-establishing relations between the US and Iran and eliminating the manufactured “crisis” over Iran’s nuclear energy program.
This is a radical program that would completely solve the problem. And considering that everybody thinks it’s fine to plow into Iraq and Afghanistan, overthrow two governments, kill a million people, then turn around and rebuild both countries, then threaten to do the same to Iran, I find it hard to comprehend why it’s impossible to suggest doing something considerably less violent but equally as radical to Israel – simply reversing the decision that created the situation.
However, this simply isn’t going to happen because Obama does not have the political courage to take on Israel. No US politician outside of maybe Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich could. It simply isn’t possible at this point.
It has nothing to do with what the US population thinks or believes, either. It has everything to do with who has the money and influence in the US political system. And that isn’t the Palestinians or the Arabs, regardless of Saudi Arabia’s direct influence on the Bush Family and others.
Face facts. If Obama was going to do something correct and efficient about the Palestinian situation, he would have said so in his speeches during the campaign.
He didn’t. So he won’t. It’s that simple.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Re Farid
Gee, Norman Finkelstein. When is Mr. Farid going to get around to David Duke and Don Black? Unlike the lying piece of filth Finkelstein, Duke and Black are at least honest anti-semites. Unlike Finkelstein, they admit that, like needledick Farid, they just don’t like Jews.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Settlements today, settlements tomorrow, settlements to the far horizon.
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