RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

by Michael Lame, posted on March 5, 2010

Angry rhetoric now characterizes the relationship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, two West Bank burial sites revered by Jews and Muslims alike, were added by Netanyahu to Israel’s new national heritage list. Abbas responded by charging that “Israel’s attempt to steal the Palestinian heritage is part of a larger scheme to take over religious Muslim sites”. Netanyahu countered by issuing a statement accusing Abbas of engaging in a “campaign of lies and hypocrisy”.

What’s wrong with this picture? Such militant language from each leader may be received with approval by his respective domestic audience, but it temporarily poisons the well of reconciliation from which both peoples must eventually drink.

One consequence is heightened tensions and increased distrust between Palestinians and Israelis. Another is a decreased likelihood that the two sides will do a deal in the foreseeable future.

Being a statesman, and not merely a successful politician, requires viewing the future strategically. In the long run, Israelis and Palestinians must find a way to live together, without violence, terror, oppression or provocative language. This is true regardless of what shape the final settlement takes.

Must a leader who wishes to protect his base of support by exhibiting strength use demeaning rhetoric against his or her adversary? One could examine the language of Sadat, Hussein or Rabin for examples of strong Middle Eastern leaders who at crucial moments were willing to speak in a conciliatory fashion.

For an inspiring perspective on the language of leaders, let’s look back to America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln—a war leader and a man of peace.

Lincoln was uncompromisingly aggressive in wartime, refusing to consider any negotiated settlement that would not restore the Union. Yet his language was always amicable and temperate towards the people of the South. Even though he thought slavery was “an unqualified evil”, he did not speak abusively of slave owners. .

Lincoln’s exemplary magnanimity is most evident in the closing passage of the Second Inaugural Address, delivered while the war still raged: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God give us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Can you imagine any Israeli prime minister or PA president speaking thus?

Of course, no analogy is exact. Southerners were citizens of the United States before they seceded and Lincoln always considered them to be Americans who would one day be welcomed back into the Union. In contrast, Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza speak a different language than do the Jews of Israel, both literally and figuratively. Neither people has ever wanted the other, let alone wanted them back.

Despite profound differences between the two situations, Israelis and Palestinians can learn from Lincoln. The president’s determination to defeat a wartime enemy did not lead him to vilify that enemy. On more than one occasion, Lincoln visited and comforted wounded confederate soldiers who had fought against his own troops. His mollifying words and deeds looked past the immediate conflict to a time when the warring parties would live alongside each other in peace.

As this example suggests, one way to change the dynamics of a conflict is to change the language employed. Provocative words can be replaced by words of moderation, respect and compassion. Of course, words alone will not transform the Middle East. But the habits of thinking that shape and are shaped by moderate language can also produce moderate action. Use of a new vocabulary can begin to create a context more conducive to resolving the conflict.

Returning immediately to the negotiating table won’t produce this effect. Negotiations must be preceded by a profound change, perhaps beginning with a shift in the language used by the leadership to address the other side.

Obviously this is a difficult process. Despite cooperation at many levels, Israelis and Palestinians remain in an adversarial, occupier-occupied relationship. Yet it’s possible for them to pursue a policy which serves their interests without impugning their opponents’ motives or character and without disparaging their national aspirations.

The words of leaders matter and the specific words that leaders speak can be of critical importance to their constituents and to their opponents. Now is the time for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to choose words that can help create a new reality in the Middle East.

by Michael Lame, posted on February 19, 2010

A couple weeks ago, within one 24-hour period, two friends on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sent me emails. One message came from Amman, the other from Tel Aviv. Each contained a link to a website.

www.islamonline.net referred me to www.ifamericansknew.org, whose tagline is “what every American needs to know about Israel/Palestine” and which claims to provide “full and accurate information on this critical issue…” Of course, the organization is terribly biased, in this case against Israelis.

The second email linked me to www.mythsandfacts.org and a long article by an Israeli-American polemicist entitled “This Land is My Land”. Of course, the piece is terribly biased, in this case against Palestinians.

Now, it’s a truism that you can find anything and everything online, including lies masquerading as facts, half-truths presented as whole-truths, false analogies, faulty reasoning, unwarranted benefits-of-the-doubt, and plenty of wishful thinking.

One common-sense fallacy, espoused frequently by people of goodwill, upon first looking in on a conflict from the outside, is the assumption that the truth must be found somewhere in the middle, as in “I’m sure they’re both right and they’re both wrong.”

Others, who naturally side with the underdog in a controversy, assume that the weaker party is in the right.

The schoolyard rule of thumb is that whoever throws the first punch is the bully and definitely in the wrong.

Many of us, myself included, start from the assumption that my people are in the right, however one defines “my people” – by nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, or alma mater.

All of these assumptions can be recognized and the biases overcome, but to do so takes hard work – both internally, by examining oneself, and externally, by studying the issues and their context.

Wittgenstein wrote that “from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.” Yet perhaps the most important realization about what one sees is that one is seeing it. Absent that insight, one may simply imagine that one is seeing the world as it is, rather than seeing it from a particular vantage point. Since the eye cannot see itself, it is no easy matter to recognize one’s own physical point of view, or, more broadly, one’s own bias.

Even a comprehensive educational program culminating in a PhD in Middle East Studies is unlikely to produce an absence of bias. Scholars, like everyone else, bring their prior bias to their reading and writing. The scholar’s bias is then reinforced by selective facts and figures, with references to documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts, and original source materials.

But the region’s conflicts are real and complex, not simply the products of academic interpretation or biased viewpoints. Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians, as well as other Arabs, have bones to pick with Israel, and vice versa. The basis of their grievances – not only the grievances themselves – deserves our close attention. Our support can be gained by the power of the claims and by compelling reasoning behind the claims. Alternatively, if the claims appear insubstantial or the reasoning seems faulty, our support may be lost.

In presenting their arguments, Arabs and Jews often rely on law – Talmudic, Islamic, Ottoman, British, Israeli, natural or international law – though neither side relies exclusively on jurisprudence to make their case. In the search for authoritative criteria, both sides also bring in other disciplines: history, archaeology, scripture, demography, economy, etc. Appeals are made to one’s humanity, to national interest, to the future of one’s people, to the future of all people.

Each side questions the validity of the criteria employed by its opponents: Is the Tanach or the Qur’an a legitimate authoritative source for determining claims to the land? Is there such a thing as “Palestinian soil” or “Jewish land”? What entitles a group of people to political self-determination? Who should have a place at the table in determining the outcome of the dispute? What sorts of attacks against what kinds of targets are beyond the pale?

Knowledgeable people of goodwill, intelligence, and strong conviction can be found all across the political spectrum and on all sides of Middle East conflict. One need not postulate bad intent to account for Zionist or anti-Zionist sentiments.

In light of the above, consider this recent quote from Jeffrey Goldberg:

“The Middle East is a tragedy precisely because the Israelis have an excellent case, and the Arabs also have an excellent case.”

Should we buy this argument? Do both sides really have an excellent case? Even if some merit can be attributed to the position of each of the parties, does one side’s claim or contention decisively outweigh the other’s?

The answers to these questions may not be true for all time. Your answer ten years ago might be different than your answer today or ten years from today. A once-righteous cause can lose its potency over time. A solution that looked good in the heady days of Oslo may be less attractive now. Conversely, a feeling of hopelessness dating back to the second intifada could conceivably be replaced by a sense of renewed possibility.

I look forward to reading your responses to these questions.

by Michael Lame, posted February 5, 2010

It’s time for President Obama to bring George Mitchell home. No, Mitchell shouldn’t be fired, nor should he resign, as Stephen Walt recently suggested in Foreign Policy. Rather, I would encourage Obama to reassign the former Senate majority leader to duty in the White House.

I advocate this for two reasons. First, the likelihood of success in his current position is small and getting smaller. Second, he is needed more at home than abroad to help address a matter of national importance which is even more pressing than Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why Leave

In the last month, George Mitchell and Barack Obama have each made fascinating and revealing statements about the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace. President Obama, in an interview with Time magazine on January 15, said the following:

[T]he Middle East peace process has not moved forward. And I think it’s fair to say that for all our efforts at early engagement, it is not where I want it to be. . . This is just really hard. Even for a guy like George Mitchell, who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This is as intractable a problem as you get…

Both sides — the Israelis and the Palestinians — have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that…

[W]hat we did this year didn’t produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high. Moving forward, though, we are going to continue to work with both parties to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a two-state solution in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty…

Let’s parse this a bit. Obama provides a fair analysis of reasons for the continuing gridlock in the non-negotiations. He then claims that, despite the internal dissensions among Israelis and Palestinians, the US can help the two parties recognize what their own “deep-seated interest” really is, which apparently they are too myopic to see clearly on their own. But what he offers is basically more of the same – “to continue to work with both parties”.

The Obama administration did put forward two new ideas in 2009: a total Israeli construction freeze and an opening up by Arab countries to Israel. The freeze idea was embraced by the Palestinian Authority and rejected by the Israeli government, while Arab countries declined to expand commercial or other ties with Israel at this time. The upshot is a temporary partial freeze with no reciprocal moves and no negotiations.

To better understand the US approach,  I recommend watching or reading Charlie Rose’s January 6th interview with George Mitchell. It’s quite revealing of the administration’s strategy and of its blind spots.

Understandably enough, Mitchell’s primary point of reference for how to conduct a tough negotiation is the work he did on Northern Ireland in the 1990s. He speaks several times in the interview of the five years that he labored on it. His take-away from those years of struggle and apparent success is that you keep negotiating and you don’t give up.

I wrote “apparent success” because the ultimate question in dispute for Northern Ireland has not been resolved: Will the six counties of the North join the Republic of Ireland or remain separate from it? The great accomplishment of the negotiations Mitchell chaired was to kick that can down the road while removing violence from the equation.

But is Mitchell correct in considering Northern Ireland an analog of the Middle East? And if so, is the approach he employed with unionists and nationalists – to keep on slogging through the negotiating process with a commitment to eventual success – the most productive way to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The answer to both questions is unclear.

Every analogy reveals as well as conceals. Certainly both conflicts are old and deep, but there are overlapping regional and global dimensions to conflict in “the holy land” that simply are not present in Northern Ireland.

Mitchell hopes for a more permanent result to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute than he found for Northern Ireland. He says he believes that two years or less of intensive negotiations will yield the result that this administration seeks and that the president spoke of: an independent and economically-viable Palestine living in peace alongside a secure and regionally-accepted Israel.

Of course, the two-year clock won’t start ticking until negotiations begin, and even getting to that point seems problematic. The current PA position is that Israel must suspend all building activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem before it will return to talks. But as Mitchell acknowledges in his interview, “The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in, or construction in East Jerusalem. They don’t regard that as a settlement because they think it’s part of Israel.” Supposedly Mitchell is now offering the Palestinians a package of inducements to restart negotiations without a Jerusalem building ban. We shall see if that works.

The Missing Factor

No current conflict in the world has been more studied, written about, and negotiated over than this New Jersey-size stretch of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps two more years of negotiating will do the trick, but there is no good reason to believe that it will. And, in the absence of an external factor to push the parties towards a breakthrough, negotiation fatigue is likely to set in.

Some fundamental aspects of the political dynamic need to change in order for negotiations to succeed or even to be replaced by a more coercive process. There are several candidates for “the missing factor”: different or additional parties to the negotiation, such as Hamas, Egypt, or Jordan; more carrots and/or sticks offered; a larger frame of reference for the process; a looming threat that frightens parties on both sides; a decisive military victory or defeat; a political or social transformation of one or more parties; a new consensus on either side; a redefinition of issues. But there needs to be something, something big, perhaps something unforeseen that is added to the equation before we can assume that negotiations, no matter how long they last or how effectively they are facilitated, will be more likely to succeed than to fail.

More time, more energy, more trips back and forth won’t do it. In any case, shuttle diplomacy is a young man’s game, or at least a middle-aged man’s (or woman’s) game. In the mid-1970s, Henry Kissinger shuttled back and forth between Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus when he was in his early fifties. Dennis Ross, still in his forties, flew endlessly around the Middle East on behalf of President Clinton. Warren Christopher, who, from all appearances, was born old, shuttled back and forth between Israel and Syria in 1993 in his late sixties. George Mitchell, still spry at 76, cannot keep up the pace forever of hopping back and forth between Jerusalem, Ramallah, Cairo, and DC, especially with so little to show for his efforts.

Come home, George

The new White House job I envision for Mitchell would be that of senior political counselor, a sort of latter-day Clark Clifford. This administration is sorely in need of a seasoned statesman with a pre-Clinton-era pedigree, a venerated pol among all the rambunctious and hard-charging Chicagoans who now surround the president and feed him advice of questionable merit.

Although I stopped being an Obama fan some time ago, still I am concerned that our high-flying president is rapidly losing altitude. Both at home and abroad, Obama’s first year in office has been characterized by too many zigs and zags, too many full-throated but half-hearted calls to arms, too many conflicting messages, too little follow through.

Even if Obama only serves a single term, neither the United States nor the world can afford a weak presidency for the next three years. Something must be done to stop the slide. A president of either party requires some semblance of credibility with the American people as a whole for our democracy to function properly. And around the world, our nation’s friends need to know we can be counted on and our foes – yes, we do still have foes – need to know that the US remains a force to be reckoned with.

So the President needs senior advisors – “wise men” and wise women – who can tell him, respectfully, when he’s off course. He needs at least one person of political sagacity he can turn to, someone beyond ambition and impervious to flattery, someone of independent judgment and strong moral fiber, someone who understands domestic politics as well as the wider world. Few fit that bill as well as George Mitchell.

Of course, more will be required to put the Obama presidency back on track than the sage advice of a Nestor. Yet Mitchell could play a useful cautionary role, especially if he returns with an increased awareness of the dangers as well as the opportunities facing America in the wider Middle East.

2010 will likely be a year of decision regarding the most critical problem-area in the Middle East today, Iran – a year of decision for the Iranian people, the Israeli military, and the U.S. government. From across the political spectrum, America needs the best people with the best ideas available to the President to deal with the tough choices he will have to make this year.

by Michael Lame, posted January 19, 2010

Punishing the Gazans

I attended a panel discussion on Gaza at the Brookings Institution last week. The panelists eloquently depicted the suffering of the more than one million Palestinians living in Gaza under the siege-like restrictions imposed by the Israelis and Egyptians.

One of the panelists pointed out that this is a clear-cut case of collective punishment, since all the people of Gaza are adversely affected – not just the Hamas establishment and Islamic Jihad militants. Many varieties of foodstuffs cannot be imported. Building materials for reconstruction are prohibited. Movement of people in and out of the Gaza Strip is severely restricted. Unemployment is rampant, as is malnutrition.

Since collective punishment is widely assumed to be unethical, the Brookings panel members duly condemned the Israelis for imposing the closure and urged the US government to insist that its ally raise the siege.

But that’s not really the end of the story. Let’s ask ourselves: Is collective punishment always wrong? Or should we even entertain this question, given that according to international humanitarian law, i.e., the laws of war, collective punishment is a war crime?

Geneva Conventions

What exactly is “collective punishment”? The term does not appear in the Hague Conventions or in the original Geneva Conventions. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted on August 12, 1949, states that:

“No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. . . Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”

Here we have “punished” in one sentence and “collective penalties” in the next. In 1977, Article 4 of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions put these words together and specifically prohibited “collective punishments”, though the term was not defined in that document. Note: Neither the United States nor Israel has ratified this protocol, though both are signatories to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

“Collective punishment” generally refers to taking action against an entire group in response to the behavior of one or more individuals. Moreover, the offending individuals are not necessarily members of the group being punished. Collective punishment, then, consists of penalizing all members of a group, whether innocent or guilty of any hostile act.

The Geneva Conventions’ prohibition on collective punishment is limited in its application to war between countries as well as to people living under occupation. Additional Protocol II specifically concerns civilians in “non-international armed conflicts”, such as an insurrection (or an intifada).

Just as generals are said to always fight the previous war, so human rights activists try to protect people from the horrors experienced in the last armed conflict. The Geneva Conventions were written in the wake of the Second World War, with the particular atrocities of that conflict fresh in the drafters’ minds.

WWII examples of collective punishment and reprisals include the infamous 1942 case of Lidice, a Czech village that was obliterated, its entire adult male population executed, and its women and children sent to concentration camps. All this was in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking murderous Nazi official. The assassins had no connection to the village.

The designation “collective punishment”, in principle and practice, may be applied more broadly and less lethally than in such WWII examples.

War itself is collective punishment. It adversely affects entire populations, regardless of their political affiliation or personal responsibility for any governmental acts of aggression. And war doesn’t just kill individuals. It kills groups. It kills collectively. Even a just war collectively punishes the innocent along with the guilty.

Is collective punishment ever justified?

Sanctions are collective punishment (though not within the confines of the Geneva Conventions). The world community supported sanctions against South Africa in order to end apartheid. Those sanctions hurt the South African economy, causing a deep recession. As every American knows in today’s difficult economic situation, when the economy suffers, people suffer. South Africans, black and white, were adversely affected by the sanctions and boycotts. But given the great evil that apartheid was considered to be, the world was willing to countenance the economic dislocation caused to the people of South Africa.

Collective punishment can refer to the treatment of an entire population, as in the current siege-like restrictions placed on Gaza, or to an entire country, as in the decades-old Arab boycott or in the new international campaign for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. These Middle East examples again raise the question of whether this can be a morally acceptable tactic to use in attempting to change a political actor’s behavior.

One justification for such action is summed up neatly by Shakespeare when Bassanio urges the court in The Merchant of Venice, “To do a great right, do a little wrong…”

Since collective punishment can take many different forms in many different contexts, one can support it or oppose it on a case-by-case basis. For example, some might support collectively punishing an entire community which they consider to be oppressive, such as apartheid-era South Africa or today’s Sudan, while opposing the collective punishment of what they consider oppressed communities, such as the Palestinians.

Even after the 1977 additions, the Geneva Conventions are just that – conventions, political agreements on customs, practices, and usages, rather than definitive moral pronouncements. No matter how much such documents written in The Hague and Geneva might be revered, they are not sacred texts but rather the fallible and mutable work of the human heart and mind. Therefore these documents can be questioned, challenged, disputed, and at times even ignored.

If and when Israelis and Palestinians reach a mutually acceptable agreement, it may or may not conform to UN Security Council resolutions or other sources of international law. The only question that will matter at that point is whether the two sides are willing to live with their agreement.

I suggest that collective punishment should not automatically be ruled out as a justified means of applying pressure, whether inside or outside of the Geneva Convention parameters. Before employing it, one must examine several factors: the legitimacy of the purpose; the particular form employed, the severity of the effect, the length of the application, and the likelihood of success.

If an instance of collective punishment is justifiable, then it ought to be possible to publically communicate that in a persuasive fashion. If no one can clearly articulate why collective punishment is being applied and what the intended result is, then chances are it is indefensible. In this particular case the burden is on Israel to show convincingly why the restrictions on Gaza exist and how long they will continue.

Ending the Gazan stalemate

A way must be found to normalize life for the Gazans, without further endangering the Israelis. In this case, both sides want something they don’t currently have.

Israelis want Gilad Shalit returned. They want the risk of future rocket attacks reduced, if not eliminated. And they want a Gazan interlocutor willing to accept Israel.

Gazans want the economic and travel restrictions permanently lifted, a chance to rebuild from the damage done a year ago in Operation Cast Lead, the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, an open passageway to the West Bank, the world’s acceptance of the political leaders they choose, and independence.

Regardless of the Geneva Conventions, neither side is likely to alter its behavior without at least some of its wants being met. If George Mitchell can help the Palestinians and Israelis mutually achieve some of their goals regarding Gaza, then this awful stalemate may come to an end. Such a limited achievement will not resolve the conflict but it could put an end to the collective punishment of people in Gaza.