How NOT to Conduct Foreign Policy
Michael Lame, posted September 22, 2009
George Mitchell successfully facilitated the negotiations between Catholics and Protestants that led to the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland in 1998. He was rightly hailed for completing that difficult assignment. But Northern Ireland is not the Middle East, and the success that George Mitchell found in Belfast has eluded him in Jerusalem – twice.
In October 2000, President Clinton sent Mitchell to the Middle East as the head of a fact-finding committee, with the hope that his efforts could help stem the bloodletting unleashed by the failure of the Camp David talks. But Mitchell failed on his first Middle East go-round. He and the other four committee members eventually issued a thoughtful and well-intentioned report, like so many other reports going back to the 1920s on troubles in the region. They reached conclusions on the causes of the recent fighting and the way to end it. The Mitchell Report (officially the “Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report”) called upon the Palestinian Authority to “make a 100 percent effort to prevent terrorist operations” and called upon the government of Israel to “freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements”.
This report produced no visible results on the ground. The fighting did not stop, nor did the construction of new housing in the West Bank. Mitchell left the region.
Two years later the Bush Administration and the other Quartet members (EU, UN, and Russia) picked up on a Jordanian-proposed process idea which came to be known as the Middle East Road Map. It consisted of actions to be taken by both sides in three phases. “In each phase, the parties are expected to perform their obligations in parallel…” Phase I specified that “Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI [the government of Israel] freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).”
Palestinians and Israelis reluctantly agreed to the Road Map’s terms, although the Israeli government issued a list of 14 reservations about the plan. And so, the Mitchell Report call for a settlement freeze, which might otherwise have been forgotten, received a new lease on life – temporarily. The following year prime minister Sharon announced his Disengagement Plan from Gaza, stealing the thunder of the Road Map and replacing it as the center of international peace-making attention.
For a year, off and on, after the Annapolis conference in late 2007, PA president Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Ehud Olmert negotiated on some of the key issues of the conflict. During that time, ongoing settlement expansion constituted a serious bone of contention between the parties – and rightly so – but it was not the reason those talks failed, nor was it to blame for the lack of agreement at Camp David or subsequently at Taba.
With or without a settlement freeze, critical issues – borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security, water – must still be dealt with. Even with a settlement freeze, the atmosphere in which talks take place will be fraught with skepticism and distrust.
Fast forward to the start of the new Obama Administration. Washington DC is teeming with Middle East experts, scholars, activists, ex-ambassadors, former negotiators and policy planners. Why, from all this genuine wealth of resources in the nation’s capital, did Obama select as his envoy George Mitchell, the former judge and senator who had so noticeably failed to make an impact on Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the beginning of the decade?
For whatever reason, it seems that George Mitchell picked up in 2009 where he left off in 2001, that is, with a call for an Israeli settlement freeze. My suspicion (admittedly an unsubstantiated one) is that Mitchell pushed for the administration’s insistence on a building freeze. And right from the Cairo speech, if not before, Obama spoke of adherence to the Road Map. In other words, the failed and unproductive efforts of recent American Middle East diplomacy were re-established and reinforced as the basis for any future negotiations.
Once the official U.S. position called for a settlement freeze, Abbas could make a similar demand of the Israelis without fear of alienating his new friend in the White House. So the Palestinians insisted that they would not return to the negotiating table until Israel stopped building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
But Netanyahu said no, repeatedly. Mitchell returned to the U.S. this month without having reached an agreement with the Israeli government. This may be only an intermediate step in the negotiations. Perhaps Netanyahu is holding out for a deal-sweetener. Perhaps he is looking for linkage between cooperation with the administration’s Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and coordination on the Iranian issue.
A face-saving formula for a partial, temporary freeze can still be found that will allow Obama and Abbas to descend from the tree they foolishly – or courageously, depending on your politics – climbed up. And I would look for Mitchell to leave his position (or to allow the position to fade into inactivity) in the next few months. Why? Because he will have failed twice to have his policy recommendation implemented. One reason for this double failure is that Mitchell never persuaded the president – neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama – to put his office’s considerable political capital on the line in a confrontation with Israel. [Prediction-making is a dangerous business. If I turn out to be wrong, I’ll say so.]
The Obama Administration got into a fight with the government of Israel when it didn’t need to, and once the confrontation began, it didn’t fight to win. This represents a net loss for the Obama presidency in the Middle East. The mistake was both strategic and substantive, but it is not a fatal error for the new administration. Rather, it is a setback for Obama’s peace-making efforts – months lost, trust with Israel diminished, and an all-too-public false start made in an area of the world that is used to false starts but is tired of them.
Bright ideas on how to address Middle East conflict are frequently hatched in the White House and the State Department, but they rarely come to fruition. Notable exceptions can be found. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy and James Baker’s Madrid conference come to mind. One hopes that the administration will learn from its mistake.
This initial misstep by the Obama team regarding the settlement freeze – first insisting on it and then trying to finesse a way out – will be seriously compounded if the same crew of advisors persuades the president to issue his own “bridging” proposals for closing the gap between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating positions. That approach didn’t work for Clinton and it won’t work for Obama.
The Middle East neither needs nor takes kindly to “parental supervision”. Indeed, the parental analogy too often employed nowadays misrepresents all the parties. Arabs and Jews are not children. The United States is not a model adult (nor is Europe) and its parenting skills are in question around the world.
An imposed settlement obviously appeals to the imposer but not necessarily to those imposed upon. And the outside party that twists arms to get an agreement doesn’t have to live with the provisions of that agreement on a day-to-day basis or with its unintended consequences.
Peace between Palestinians and Israelis, just as peace between Syrians or Lebanese and Israelis, will only last if the direct parties to the dispute take responsibility for ending it. If, instead, the solution is imposed from outside the region, then the parties will be able to blame the Quartet or its members for dictating an undesirable solution. If the local parties are allowed to pose as victims of Great Power bullying, the stage will be set for attempts to rectify the perceived injustice, and those attempts may well unleash another round of explosive violence in the Middle East.
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