The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians finally agree on some thing: Neither side has any confidence that the current talks will bring about a resolution of their conflict.
The gaps between the two sides are so huge that even an optimist like President Bush is seeking not an overall agreement on a two-state solution but only an outline of a possible structure. If that could be accomplished, hard questions would remain. But even the outline of a deal has been made more difficult by the process that’s been followed so far. Instead of a special envoy doing the preparatory work first—to identify the real roadblocks and think of ways round them—we have had joint statements preceding negotiation in the full glare of the publicity that attends anything a president does.
But beyond all that, there is a fundamental reason to have little hope: All past negotiations have gone nowhere primarily because of the manifest Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The record is of almost a century of rejection, beginning with the 1917 Balfour Declaration of the right to a Jewish homeland in Palestine and continuing today. Even when Israel pulled out of Gaza in September 2005, removing its own citizens by force, the Palestinians did not get on with building their own society. They began rocket and mortar attacks on adjacent Jewish communities, to date killing 18 innocent civilians and wounding some 600. More killings and maimings are in prospect with more powerful, more accurate rockets. What incentive has Israel to withdraw from the West Bank when it could become a launching pad for rocket attacks on Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Ben-Gurion Airport—a situation that would render Israel virtually uninhabitable? Israel has no margin of security. It is so small that on most globes you can’t find the name “Israel” on the land of Israel; the name has to be written in the sea.
West Bank hesitance. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair gets it. Appointed last summer as the new special envoy of the Mideast quartet of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and the United States, he has spent more time in the region and gained a much better understanding. "I understand more than when I was the prime minister the difficulties here," he says. "I would hesitate to cede the West Bank to the Palestinians after the nightmare Israel has faced since the Gaza withdrawal." He cuts through the fuzziness that envelops so much discussion and reporting: "Land for peace" in and of itself is not sufficient. No less important, he warns, is "the character of the Palestinian state. ... There won't be a Palestinian state unless it is coherently governed and run, and anyone who tells you different is misleading you."
Blair sees clearly what the Palestinian Authority party is as represented by Fatah: a busted flush of aging and corrupt cronies and local warlords who cannot even travel safely in their own cities. Fatah has failed to produce a generation of credible leaders and now is under explicit threat of being displaced by Hamas. Indeed, without the Israeli Defense Forces, Fatah would evaporate within weeks. It is too weak to enforce the rule of law against terrorists or to make compromises for fear of the radical Islamists. It is only a place card at the table for peace, not a partner.
Still, Israelis would have more confidence in the PA if it stopped preaching the elimination of Israel. Anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment pervade the Palestinian world, with a history of over a century of Arabs killing Jews through massacres and pogroms, well before there was a Jewish state. The highest aspiration of many Palestinian children, as taught to them by their educational, spiritual, and political leaders, is to murder Jews (and other infidels) and to die as a martyr. Will Palestinian moderates ever prevail?
The day after the Annapolis "peace" meeting, the official PA TV broadcast a map in which a Palestinian flag covered not only the West Bank and Gaza but all of Israel from the Jordan River to the sea, along with a drawing of a rifle. The PA's map symbolizes a world without Israel. Just last month it began rebroadcasting an inflammatory fictitious video that begins with a scene of a woman shot dead in the back by Israeli troops. She then ascends to an Islamic paradise to join the "72 virgins" who await any suicide bomber. Next, a young man swears to avenge the woman. He is killed in an attack on the Israelis, and he is then seen joining the group of young women for his eternal reward.
This is the incitement that regularly appears in the Palestinian media--media that are under the personal authority of "peacemaker" Mahmoud Abbas.
Shocking, isn't it? But this is the same Abbas who started the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 with Yasser Arafat after writing a dissertation in which he denied the existence of the Holocaust. What was the PLO trying to liberate? Not the land of the West Bank and Gaza, which came under Israeli control only after the 1967 war. It wanted to "liberate" the Israel that ran to the Mediterranean. So where is the Abbas who will speak--in Arabic--of the legitimate sovereign right of the Jewish state to exist? Where is the Abbas who will prepare the ground for compromise?
The reality on the ground is as grim as the rhetoric. In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israelis found a broad-scope terrorist operation with an explosives laboratory and weapons. Then Fatah activists murdered two off-duty Israeli soldiers in the Hebron hills on a hike. The killers, who said they were celebrating Fatah's 43rd anniversary, were given refuge by the PA. It then put out a deliberately misleading statement to suggest the soldiers died as the result of an argument that deteriorated into a clash, instead of the coldblooded murders that they were.
We are further from peace than at the time of President Clinton's Camp David II in 2000. Indeed, compromise will have to overcome Palestinian objections to the retention of the large towns settled by tens of thousands of Israelis adjacent to and protective of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The United States now supports their inclusion in Israel's final boundaries. To be meaningful, this commitment necessarily involves more than being connected to Israel by untenable thin stalks of access roads through Palestinian territory. Nor should Jerusalem be turned into a crazy quilt of Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Everyone knows that were Israel and the PA ever to cease cooperating fully, let alone regress to hostilities, Jerusalem and these new communities would be paralyzed and in mortal danger. U.N. Resolution 242, which ended the 1967 war, did not require Israel to withdraw from all the territories that it had occupied as the result of the war. But there is still no agreement on the percentage of lands that are to be annexed or swapped by Israel. Nor is there an agreement on Jerusalem or on the nature of Palestinian demilitarization or on the desire of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to relocate to Israel, which would undermine Israel as a Jewish state. In a word, there is fundamental disagreement on the premises that would underlie the establishment of two states for the Palestinians and for the Jewish people.
Worth supporting. Nevertheless, and in part because of the weakness of Abbas and of the PA and the risk that Abbas will be replaced by an even more radical Hamas, the ongoing talks deserve the support of America. The risk that must be accepted is that if the current negotiations fail, they will be seen by the Palestinian and the Israeli publics as evidence of the inability to solve this conflict by negotiation and compromise and will thus strengthen and embolden Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel. Expectations should be lowered, and negotiations should be held outside the public limelight, not with grandstanding but with a focus on measures that each side is capable of taking to make a difference.
Here are some practical suggestions:
- The Israelis evacuate settlers from all the unauthorized outposts. This is their obligation, and it must be fulfilled.
- Israel removes isolated settlements or relocates them with the encouragement of compensation and the prospect of more security.
- Israel completes the security fence. Having settlers closer to the completed fence would facilitate a movement of Israeli troops steadily westward away from the Palestinian centers, in tandem with efforts to safeguard central Israel from Palestinian rocket fire and terrorism. This would also enable antiterrorism measures now taken--such as roadblocks, barriers, and inspections-- to be scaled back, making it easier to link up Palestinian towns and cities.
- Israel cooperates with the quartet and envoy Blair to develop the Palestinian economy in the hope it will motivate more Palestinians to focus on building their own state rather than on destroying the Israeli state. Here, expectations should be moderated by the fact that economic improvement to date has not changed the politics of terrorism, which have been driven not by the have-nots but rather by the want-mores, by those who have a higher education and living standard than most Palestinians.
- On the Palestinian side, the overriding requirement is that Abbas shuts off all and every incitement to hatred and violence.
Over time, these five steps have the chance of transforming conditions on the ground. Certainly, we would soon know whether the territories controlled by Palestinians can avoid again becoming hothouses for terrorism.
There is much room for skepticism on that last requirement. With Gaza now under the control of the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas, it is hard to envisage how Fatah could regain authority. Yet stopping the violence there is essential. A truce that applies only to the West Bank is inconsistent. As President Bush acknowledged, what is on the table is the establishment of two states for two peoples and not three states for two peoples.
For sure, the challenges to a successful outcome are truly daunting and will not be overcome if the facts and the history are forgotten. The amnesia that marks most debates about the Mideast brings to mind the observation of the physicist Leo Szilard, who announced to a friend, Hans Bethe, that he was thinking of keeping a diary. "I don't intend to publish it. I am really going to record the facts for the information of God." Bethe asked, "Don't you think God knows the facts?" "Yes," said Szilard. "He knows the facts. But he does not know this version of the facts."
