Zuckerman: Palestinians Start to Show Progress

The Jews of Israel are facing a cruel dilemma. They came home to find peace and safety in their homeland of Israel; to find an end to that vulnerable status of a perpetual wandering minority; an end to exile, alienation, and powerlessness; and the beginning of a normal national existence. Instead, they found neighbors who were not reconciled to their living again together in this tiny piece of land the Jews have regarded as home for 4,000 years. How do you share a home with someone who says, "You have no right to be here"?

The Arab assault on the Jews that began immediately and has continued for more than half a century made it clear the Jews could not control 2 million Arabs without eroding the moral character of their tiny state and, with that, its support in the world. So leader after leader decided to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine and any pretense that Israel could become a binational state in which one people ruled another. After Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres promoted the Oslo agreements, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert, prime ministers all, made dramatic proposals in search of a live-and-let-live relationship with the Palestinians—and all were rejected. They offered to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza in words and withdrew from them in deeds. Did this bring peace? No, it brought terrorist attacks by suicide bombers who menaced any kind of normal life within Israel. Prime Minister Sharon voluntarily withdrew every last Jewish settler and soldier from Gaza. It meant forcing close to 10,000 Jews out of their homes. Did it bring peace? Did the Gazans say, "Good riddance," and get on with building their own society? No, they hunted the Jews who had left. They turned Gaza into a launching pad for thousands of rockets against the Jewish people. Never even for one day did they cease. This was true even before Hamas seized control. Then, when Hamas did take control, the terrorism escalated.

In yet another effort to find peace, the Israelis risked their own security by dismantling security barriers and checkpoints—down from 147 to 14 in the West Bank—and so providing mobility for people in commerce. They have "not been getting much credit for it," in the words of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but the economic results are dramatic. Wages in the West Bank were up 24 percent in 2008 over 2007; agricultural exports from the Palestinian Authority to Israel increased from 30,000 tons in 2007 to 92,000 tons in 2008; the number of permits for Palestinians to work in Israel rose from 21,000 to 23,000.

The trouble has been the absence of any responsible governance among the Palestinians—no capacity to deal with terrorism and violence, no command-and-control structure, no political backing for Palestinian officers to go after sensitive targets, and no legal apparatus to try those who might be arrested. Terrorist operatives have gone in one door one day and out the next. So when successive American administrations have pushed for negotiation between the parties, the Americans have all discovered, as the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea put it, "that they want an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement more than the Israelis and the Palestinians want it."

Poor beginning. The Obama administration began unwisely. The president made an uncompromising demand for a full freeze on construction in the settlements, imposing no requirement on the Arabs. That missed the real point of contention. According to a recent poll of Palestinians, halting construction in the settlements is not important to them. The evacuation of the settlement outposts is much more important to them. For the Israeli public, the settlement issue was a nonstarter without a compensating concession by the Palestinians. In any event, the previous Olmert government had greatly reduced permits for construction settlements, and very few permits remain.

Now the administration has initiated a more promising policy. At September's three-way summit in New York, it achieved an agreement by all parties to commence negotiations with no preconditions. Everything is on the table.

Israel is now committed fully to two states for two peoples. At the United Nations, Obama voiced his unreserved support for Israel as the state of the Jewish people, one of the core issues. The peace negotiations were to begin in a matter of weeks.

Obama's previous efforts had been rebuffed. His speech in Cairo in June, which he thought would open a door to the Muslim world, did not gain any takers. The Arab rulers refused to enter the room, and most kept their distance. According to a recent poll released by the International Peace Institute, public hostility to the United States and to Obama remained high, and it appeared that only 1 in 6 Palestinians has a positive opinion of America, and only 1 in 4 has a positive opinion of Obama. The only one who responded to Obama was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who made public his commitment to have two states for two peoples. Here we had a government built around right-wing parties yet able to pass a resolution supporting the two-state solution.