Israel-Palestine: What’s going on?
Keynote presentation by Dr Tony Klug to AGM of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, 23 May 2010
I want to begin by telling you about an extraordinary meeting I attended a few weeks ago just outside Berlin, held over five-days, with the participation of seven Palestinians, seven Israelis, four internationals (of which I was one) plus the facilitators. While quite diverse in their life experiences and personal views, the Palestinians were all broadly Fatah. Of the Israelis, five were from Likud, one from Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitanu party and one from Kadima. All the participants – in their 30s or 40s and drawn from both secular and religious backgrounds - were politically active and more or less influential at a middling political level back home
At first, I was very uncertain about accepting an invitation to participate at all, as I could see little or no prospect of a gathering of this character achieving anything worthwhile. On the contrary, I expected it to deteriorate, after the usual initial sterile niceties, into a dialogue of the deaf and then to sink further into the hurling of mutual abuse. Which is just about how it panned out.
But then, on the fourth day, there was a sudden dramatic change. The Israelis had been pressing for the full plenary session to divide into smaller clusters, while the Palestinians – fearing a trap – preferred to stick with one large group.
Two of the Israelis, separately, drew me aside and asked if I would explain to the Palestinians that for the first time in their lives they felt the pain of the Palestinians, realized it was not a tactic but genuine and wanted to find a way to say sorry and explore how Palestinian human and national rights could be realized without jeopardizing Israel’s own national existence.
On the final day, two of the most outspoken participants, one from each side, jointly presented to the plenary session an outline peace treaty, with some novel arrangements, which they each were prepared, with some trepidation, to commit to. However unlikely the terms, it was a remarkable conclusion to a rollercoaster event, which ended with hugs all around.
I don’t want to exaggerate the significance of what transpired at this event, and it’s possible the impact did not even survive the voyages back home. Yet, it’s unlikely that the journey people travelled at the meeting commenced only there. More likely, I feel, is that at least some of them, particularly on the Israeli side, had already started questioning the durability of the hard-line policies they had inherited and were looking to deepen their understanding and move forward. If so, we may find that what happened over those few days may be replicated in some way in the future and there may need to be space for this.
If that is one tentative emerging current, it sits uneasily alongside another, less subtle, tendency whose purpose appears to be to block any and all understanding. It has been hard not to be struck over the last few weeks by a spate of articles and letters to the national and Jewish press by Israel’s ‘right-or-wrong’ brigade that boldly asserts as facts statements that are simply untrue. Indeed, in most cases, they are the very opposite of the truth.
Writing in the Guardian on 19 March, for example, at the height of the Israeli-US wrangle over settlement building, Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, stated that “for 16 years after the Oslo accords such building was never an issue”, a claim echoed by Alex Brummer in his weekly Jewish Chronicle column a few days later. Yet both the Mitchell Report of 2001 – just eight years after the first Oslo accord - and the Road Map two years later clearly stipulated a freeze of all settlement activity “including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements”. One might add of course that for the Palestinians - seemingly third-party invisible for Mr Pollard - the settlements has always been a major issue and the acid test of whether Israel was serious about a two-state future.
One week later, on 26 March, a letter appeared in the Guardian under the name of Jeff Klein with the solemn charge that the Hamas Charter pledges "to kill all Jews wherever they are and irrespective of their nationality". Now, the Hamas Charter is not a document to be much admired and is permeated by enough crude and explicit antisemitism as it is – most notably its notorious article 22 - without others making up content which is just not there. Klein’s claim of global genocidal intent in the charter is pure invention. He must surely have known it wasn’t true, so why did he claim it?
The following week, on 2 April, the Jewish Chronicle published a letter from someone called Esther Sherman who, after reminding us of “the Arab League’s stated wish for the destruction of the Jewish state”, called on readers to “listen to what Arab rulers are actually saying which is that they will never accept a sovereign Jewish state, with a divided Jerusalem or without it”.
Many poor souls, conscious of past Jewish tragedies and fearful of the future, read these writings and take them at their word. Why shouldn’t they? So let’s do what Ms Sherman has advised and recall what Arab rulers have actually been saying - and doing - over the last 43 years since the Arab League meeting in Khartoum in 1967 which did indeed vow, shortly after the war of that year, that there would be no negotiation, no recognition and no peace with Israel: the famous three ‘noes’. The situation has moved on dramatically in the decades since then, but apparently not for everyone. It seems some people wilfully prefer to remain trapped in a time warp of their own making.
For them, it is as if Egypt did not enter into a full peace treaty with Israel in 1979. That Jordan did not do likewise in 1994. That the PLO did not embrace the two-state formula at its Algiers congress in 1988 and did not enter officially into mutual recognition with Israel in 1993 under the Oslo accord.
The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 is apparently of no consequence either, despite its explicit promise, endorsed by all Arab states and several times reiterated, of full peace and normalization of relations between Israel and every Arab country in exchange for Israel evacuating Arab territory captured in 1967 and accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with, explicitly, east Jerusalem as its capital. The novel use of the construct ‘east’ Jerusalem – rather than just ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘noble Jerusalem’ as in the past - insinuated the prospect of future Arab recognition of west Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a remarkable development that would give the green light for countries around the world to follow suit, fulfilling an Israeli dream since the establishment of the state in 1948.
Yet, to the self-appointed guardians of the Jewish and Israeli good, these are not worthy or relevant facts and certainly not convenient ones. The only facts that matter are those that prove Israel is in constant and imminent danger and that the world is, as always, out to get the Jews. Facts are selected to fill the bill. All others are disregarded. And if you can’t find the supporting facts, no worries: take a cue or use your own initiative to fabricate them.
But why are Esther Sherman, Jeff Klein, Alex Brummer and Stephen Pollard so rattled? And others too, like Melanie Phillips – who brazenly misrepresented the position of the Palestinians to the readers of the Jewish Chronicle in writing that they “ repeat they will never accept the existence of a Jewish state”; and like Tom Gross – who, among other wildly exaggerated claims in a Wall Street Journal article, wrote that Netanyahu’s government has removed all Israeli checkpoints; and like Eli Wiesel – who made the blatantly false statement in an open letter to President Obama that “Jews, Christians and Muslims are able to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem”. Why are they and many others all suddenly in headlong panic that they have resorted to telling great big fibs?
The answer may be that they have read the runes correctly and are desperately struggling to preserve the privileged US-Israel relationship while fearing that it is giving way, slowly but steadily, to a more even-handed approach. This is the third emerging current I want to focus on here. There are of course myriad other currents, which could occupy us all day.
The jury is said still to be out over whether the spat following the announcement - while US vice-president Joe Biden was on an official visit to Israel - of a further 1,600 housing units for orthodox Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem was the worst crisis in relations for 35 years or a storm-in-a-teacup which would quickly blow over.
In my view, this was a crisis waiting to happen – one might almost say looking to happen. Even if we accept that the particular issue that triggered it was a matter of bad timing with no Machiavellian intent on anyone’s part, the intensity and immediacy of the repercussions suggest that a political volcano had been bubbling beneath the surface of the American body-politic for some time.
In past years, we would have expected the embarrassed visiting US dignitary to shrug of such an incident with a mumbled reprimand about unfortunate carelessness which should not occur again. Just compare such a more usual reaction with what happened on this occasion.
First, Netanyahu quickly had to deal with a 40-minute telephone lecture from Secretary of State Clinton, in which she presented him with a slate of demands, which we can reasonably assume were not concocted on the hoof but had been brewing for some time.
Second, take the vice-president himself, reputed to be Israel’s closest political friend in Washington. Not only did he use unprecedented undiplomatic language in condemning the decision to build the houses but - while reiterating the United States’ “absolute, total and unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security” - he went on to state that the US administration would hold both Israelis and Palestinians “accountable for any statements or actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks.” The significance of this statement, putting Israelis and Palestinians on a similar footing, will not have been lost on the Israeli prime minister or his cohorts.
On the substance of a future peace settlement, Biden told a student audience in Israel that the US intends to reconcile “the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines … and Israel’s goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders…”, again placing Palestinian aspirations and Israel’s security on an equal footing.
Biden went on to link Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, including settlement construction, with the core interests of the US in the wider region, basing his remarks on a briefing to the Pentagon two months earlier - well before the ‘spat’ - by General Petraeus, the commander of US Central Command, which oversees American security interests in the Middle East. Petraeus, a reputed hero of AIPAC, the right-wing pro-Israel lobby, and so rather worrying for them, was concerned that Centcom's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace and that this was undermining America’s Arab allies.
These were just a few of the reactions. As we can see, the so-called insult opened a tap with a head of steam behind it. The flow will no doubt be managed and the wind will calm down from time to time. But it won’t be so easily snuffed out now that the genie is out of the bottle (apologies for mixing so many metaphors).
But why now compared with, say, ten years ago? This is the key question. And the answer is not a mystery. Ten years ago the US was not militarily engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Tens of thousands of American lives and vital US strategies in these countries were not then at risk. They are now. And they need Arab support for these regional battles as well as for the burgeoning conflicts with Iran.
When President Obama went eyeball-to-eyeball with Netanyahu last year over his demand for a complete settlements freeze, Obama blinked first. He cannot afford to back down again, for his credibility – both domestically and internationally – would be shot through. So I expect him to tough it out from now on and keep up the pressure.
On the other hand, Netanyahu will also find it difficult, for political, ideological and probably egotistical reasons, to back down. So I expect we’re going to see a series of confrontations over the next year or two. Obama will have his mettle severely tested but both he and his senior colleagues now seem to have the bit between their teeth.
So, what next?
I put forward a proposal in a pamphlet last year, ‘Visions of the Endgame’, that would involve three principal moves. In brief, the first would be an invitation from the US President - or possibly the Quartet - to the main parties to tender their realistic visions of the endgame, within the parameters of the international consensus, by a fixed deadline.
In the second move, the US presidency or the Quartet would formulate a definitive international plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and resolve the wider Arab-Israeli issues, drawing on the submissions tendered - if any - but also on other sources including past agreements and near agreements. Ideally, the definitive plan would be ratified by the UN Security Council.
The third step would comprise powerful inducements – rewards and penalties - to entice each of the parties to meet their respective interim targets along a fixed timetable towards the final destination. This would constitute the principal enforcement mechanism, the absence of which has been a major impediment to progress in the past. Given the crucial role of public opinion on both sides, the inducements – positive and negative - would be made known to the respective populations well in advance.
The good news is that the US administration seems at last to have dropped the old flawed ideas of incrementalism and phoney confidence-building measures between an occupying authority and an occupied people. It also seems finally to have grasped that the Middle East is not Northern Ireland. But still it appears to be investing in sham negotiations.
Where the present indirect negotiations - or proxy talks - will lead to will, in my view, depend partly on whether, as claimed, they are conceived as a step towards the cul-de-sac of direct negotiations between two hugely unequal parties – in which case I believe they will, once again, be a complete waste of time - or are used by the Americans to advance a process along similar lines to those I have sketched out. This would mean using them as the initial step to dig out the parties’ respective visions of the endgame and to help shape them.
The Middle East has a habit of surprising us, so the wise thing, I suppose, is to suspend judgment for now. But it is worth noting that President Obama does appear to be genuinely committed to ending the occupation, drawing the conflict to a close and achieving a Palestinian state alongside Israel. And he seems to have the wind with him. I’m not sure I would bet with confidence against him.