RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

by Michael Lame, posted on June 22, 2010

Last week I returned home following a visit to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul. After clearing customs at the Philadelphia international airport, I waited in the security line in order to fly back to Washington DC. Philadelphia’s domestic security screening process seemed much slower than that of other U.S. airports I have flown through recently. So, after my pat-down search (I’m still not sure to what I owed the honor; perhaps I should have shaved in Istanbul before returning to the States), I asked to speak to a supervisor, who appeared within a minute or two. I told him my impression that the Philly screening operation took considerably longer on a per-person basis than that in other airports. I asked him if the goals of the TSA included reducing the screening time per passenger. He said No, they would like to do it fast, but the TSA’s mandate is to provide security. That’s its goal.

When any entity or organization has a clear primary responsibility, no one should count on it to deliver additional benefits unless they are specifically committed to and connected to the primary area of responsibility. The Transportation Security Administration, which runs the airport security bureaucracy, is a case in point. Its central focus is stated in its name: Security. TSA’s official mission, according to its website, is that it “protects the Nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.”

TSA has but a single mission, and disrupting travelers’ lives as little as possible is not part of that mission. This explains the many inconveniences and inefficiencies of the current system. Here’s one of them:

After going through security screening, I typically carry my shoes in one hand and my computer bag in the other, searching for someplace to sit down so I can put my shoes back on and tie my shoelaces. (Not everyone wears loafers.) Each time I am required to walk through an airport in my socks I experience it as a slight indignity. During the first several decades of my life, until Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, came along in December 2001, I never had to remove my shoes in an airport, and I still resent it. This new airport shoe fetish seems to be specifically American. I’m required to remove my shoes whenever I fly in, to or from the U.S., but usually not in Europe or Asia.

Almost nine years after 9/11, many U.S. airports still do not provide chairs or benches located next to the security screening areas for the specific purpose of allowing travelers to sit down while putting their shoes back on. I blame the federal government for being so inconsiderate of my tender feet.

But TSA personnel are not in the comfort biz or the let’s-get-this-done-as-quickly-and-with-as-much-dignity-intact-as-possible biz. They’re in the security biz, or at least in the security appearance biz. Why should we expect a security organization to care about anything other than security?

My encounter at the Philadelphia airport reminded me of a conversation I had a few days earlier in a popular coffee joint on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem. The Israeli I was meeting with gave an example of how in Israel an individual willing to push a bit can make a difference. He had noticed that the army checkpoint on the road north of Bethlehem was functioning at only 20% capacity, that is, only two of ten stations were manned for the security screening of West Bank Palestinians who wanted to enter Jerusalem.

[For my purposes here, I am setting aside the question of whether Palestinians living in the West Bank should be able to travel freely to Jerusalem without being stopped and screened by Israelis or anyone else. Nor am I addressing the very real security concerns of Palestinians.]

This Good Samaritan then monitored the checkpoint for several days to ensure that his observation was not a momentary fluke. Next, he wrote a letter to a powerful minister in the Israeli government, an acquaintance of his, and sent copies of the letter to several other ministers. Within two weeks, all ten of the checkpoint stations functioned and continued to do so thereafter, according to his periodic checks. As a result, Palestinians’ wait-time in line was significantly reduced, from hours to a matter of minutes.

His example of how one person can make a difference conveyed a different message to me, management consultant that I am. It spoke to me of a systemic problem. Who in the Israeli government, I asked, is responsible for maintaining and improving relations with Palestinians? They are, after all, Israelis’ neighbors – past, present, and future, regardless of any eventual political resolution. His answer was that the checkpoints are the responsibility of the Minister of Defense. Now it made sense to me that not all the stations had previously functioned. Why would a Minister of Defense care?

From a security perspective, the wait-time of persons being screened is largely irrelevant. Having Palestinians wait in two long lines possibly provides even better security than having them wait in ten short lines. And if there is a terrorist in the line, a long wait might cause him to become nervous and give himself away. But from a Palestinian perspective, it’s a very different story, one of indifference, disrespect, and possibly of intentional infliction of discomfort and distress.

I am an impatient fellow. I hate to wait in lines of any kind – at movie theaters, banks, and especially at airports. I dislike the TSA not only for its inefficiency and thoughtlessness regarding travelers but also for what I believe to be bogus security measures designed to show that the agency is doing something to respond to previous security failures. And all of that slows down the process and lengthens the wait. But as much as I dislike the TSA in practice, I recognize the legitimacy of its purpose. It was set up ostensibly to protect Americans like me. And if it succeeds in stopping or dissuading even one would-be suicide bomber from boarding a plane, I will applaud that result.

But imagine being a West Bank Palestinian stuck in a long checkpoint line which was not at all set up for your benefit. In fact, Palestinians are the suspects at such checkpoints. Any minor indignity I might suffer walking through an airport in my stocking feet is truly insignificant compared to what routinely occurs in the security checks that thousands of Palestinians are subjected to on a daily basis on their way to and from work, school, or shopping.

To make people wait indefinitely, to treat them disrespectfully, to lord it over those who have no power – these are all likely outcomes of any long-term occupation, though they are not inevitable outcomes.

Security checks exist for a reason, a valid reason, and that must always be kept in mind. But how the checks are conducted is only partly a matter of security. Other factors play important roles – the personality of those doing the checking, their attitude towards the people being checked, the humanity and the efficiency of the security process, and perhaps most importantly of all, how those supervising the process are evaluated. If the totality of the evaluation depends on not letting a single potential threat go undetected, then even extreme measures like strip-searching everyone in line, from the five-year-old to the ninety-five-year-old, can be justified on security grounds. To refrain from employing such extreme measures involves considerations other than security. Since not everyone is strip-searched, additional factors must be involved.

Note: there is already much evidence of recent improvement in the daily life of Palestinians within their population centers in the West Bank. [See, for example, http://www.jpost.com/Features/FrontLines/Article.aspx?id=178097.] That improvement results from a combination of factors, including the work of the Abbas-Fayyad government, foreign aid, U.S. training, and Netanyahu’s interest in “economic peace”. The bulk of that internal development, however, is distinct from the day-to-day interactions between organs of the state of Israel and West Bank Palestinians. These interactions include requests for permits of all kinds – entrance permits, travel permits, vehicle travel permits, work permits, building permits, etc. Other issues fraught with political implications include house demolitions, water usage, sewage, import-export, and access to health care. Numerous Israelis, both in and out of uniform, hold the power to grant or deny benefits, goods and services to the Palestinian population. Some Israelis wield that power benignly. Others wield it maliciously.

Yet as long as the Ministry of Defense remains the Israeli government agency responsible for most official interactions with individual West Bank Palestinians, there is little hope of systemic improvement in how Israelis treat Palestinians. This is so not because Defense Ministry officials and IDF soldiers are uniformly hostile to Palestinians – some are; some are not – but rather for the simple organizational imperative that in cases of conflict among goals, an organization’s primary goal undercuts all others. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are responsible for safeguarding Israel’s existence, security, and sovereign rights,” according to an Israeli government website. The business of the Israel Defense Forces is defense, not customer relations. True to its mission, the IDF will look at Palestinians more in terms of assessing and managing risk than in terms of facilitating the activities of civilians.

A carefully formulated mission statement that no one reads is worthless, but a clear mission that someone is accountable for delivering on can make a huge difference. Absent a clear TSA mission to reduce airport wait time, we should not expect increased efficiencies. Absent a clear mission to improve relations with the civilian population, we should not expect a Palestinian-friendly Israeli security presence along the green line, at checkpoints or elsewhere in the West Bank.

Thirty government ministers now sit in Israel’s largest-ever cabinet, yet there is no Minister for Palestinian Affairs. Since 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian population in those areas has increased to more than 3½ million people. Although they are not citizens of Israel, their lives are circumscribed by Israeli decisions. Yet there has never been an Israeli Ministry of Palestinian Relations. To appoint a minister without a budget, a staff, and real power would only be window-dressing in any case. But who knows what might be accomplished if a senior Israeli politician was provided with a staffed and funded ministry, a proactive mission and a mandate to improve Israeli-Palestinian relations on the ground?

So long as a pathway to ending the conflict remains elusive and obscure, we might do well to examine ways of improving life under occupation. If that is indeed what Netanyahu wants, then let him designate a point-person and announce a clear mission. And please, don’t make people walk around in their socks.

by Michael Lame, posted April 5, 2010

Before addressing once more the larger topic of international law and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, allow me to refute a few specific, egregious claims made by Michael Thomas in his first two blog posts.

1) Michael Thomas states that the young state of Israel “adopted its own war crimes statute (with the unseemly addition of an offense of crimes against Jews only).” Here are some relevant facts:

On March 29, 1950, the Knesset passed the Crime of Genocide (prevention and punishment) Law, which defines genocide as the commission of various acts “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious…group”.

On August 1, 1950, the Knesset passed the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, which defined “a crime against the Jewish people” as the commission of various acts “with intent to destroy the Jewish people in whole or in part”. This law applied only to acts committed “during the period of the Nazi regime” or “during the period of the Second World War”. The State of Israel later employed this law in the prosecution of Adolph Eichmann.

One third of the world’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The state of Israel was created, in part, to safeguard the Jewish people (and not just the Jews of Israel) from the possibility of a future holocaust. Given the history of the Jews and the purpose of the Jewish state, I see nothing in the least bit “unseemly” in the passage of an Israeli law to bring Nazis and Nazi collaborators to justice for their crimes against the Jews.

2) Michael Thomas claims that a legal opinion presented in a letter written by a State Department attorney in 1978 claiming that the Israeli settlements beyond the green line violate the Fourth Geneva Convention “has never been withdrawn or overturned”.  Wrong.

The positions of a US administration on international matters are those positions taken by the President. Herbert Halsell, the lawyer in question, may have represented his Foggy Bottom and White House bosses, Cyrus Vance and Jimmy Carter, but he certainly didn’t represent subsequent administrations, nor are they bound by his legal reasoning. Just two weeks after taking the oath of office, on February 3, 1981, President Reagan specifically repudiated the earlier finding as he declared, “I disagreed when the previous administration referred to them [settlements] as illegal. They’re not illegal.”

Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schultz, told Congress on September 9, 1982 that “the status of Israeli settlements must be determined in the course of the final status negotiations.” Presidents from Reagan on have claimed that the West Bank settlements are “unhelpful” or “an obstacle to peace” but not one, not even Obama, has claimed that they are illegal.

3) Michael Thomas writes that “Nearly everyone, including some hard-line Zionists, understands that the settlers’ project has nearly fulfilled its potential for killing the idea of a Palestinian state, and that without such a state there is no credible alternative future for Israel that is safe and stable.” In that one sentence, two debatable interpretations masquerade as facts. “Nearly everyone…understands” is a sleight-of-hand way to pretend that a seriously controversial matter has already been settled in favor of the author’s point of view.

Commonplace as a trope in Middle East debates is the refrain that “the window of opportunity for a two-state solution is closing”. Meron Benvenisti claims that it closed twenty years ago. Others say it’s about to close. A poll conducted only last month showed that 71% of Israelis and 57% of Palestinians support a two-state solution. Obviously someone forgot to tell the majority of Israelis and Palestinians that the idea of a Palestinian state has already been killed off. Or perhaps the West Bank settlement project which today seems irreversible can indeed be slowed, stopped, channeled, or even reversed.

If Israelis and Palestinians make a deal resulting in the establishment of a Palestinian state, some but not all of the West Bank settlements will likely be included in newly-drawn boundaries for the state of Israel (probably in exchange for land inside the green line). Those settlements not included will be abandoned, forcibly evacuated, or remain as part of the new state of Palestine. A million Arabs are citizens of Israel. Why shouldn’t a couple hundred thousand Jews be citizens of Palestine?

Without a Palestinian state, Michael Thomas claims, “there is no credible alternative future for Israel that is safe and stable.” One way people try to shape a debate is by insisting that THERE IS ONLY ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM, whatever the problem, and the sole solution is, oddly enough, the one they propose! But in complex human affairs, there is usually more than one way to solve a problem, and typically even the best solution to a long-standing conflict will create a new set of problems.

The same poll that showed majority support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, also showed that 24% of Israelis and 29% of Palestinians support a single binational state, while 30% of Israelis and 26% of Palestinians support a confederation between Israel and Palestine. One could add to this list of possibilities variations on a “Jordanian option” of the West Bank reuniting with Jordan, either as one state or in a confederation. Separate futures for Gaza and the West Bank should also be considered, as well as the possibility of a long-term autonomy or UN trusteeship for the West Bank and Gaza. Strong arguments can be made against each of the above possible options, including the two-state solution.

The currently preferred option among Israelis and Palestinians is indeed the two-state solution. It was not always thus and at some point a different proposal might capture the imagination of one or both peoples. Just because an idea is popular doesn’t mean it is viable.

No one knows if any proposed solution to this conflict will work. No one knows for sure if there will ever be a Palestinian state. And since we can’t know the future, we can only make an educated guess as to whether the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel will result, as Michael Thomas asserts, in a “future for Israel that is safe and stable.” In large part that will depend on the orientation of a future Palestinian state, its leadership, and its relationship to Israel.

Remember that the wording of the polling questions and the specificity of the proposals presented can significantly alter the outcome. If you ask Israelis do they support a two-state solution with a Palestinian state run by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, there will likely be a positive response. If you ask the same Israelis do they support a two-state solution with a Palestinian state run by Hamas leaders Khaled Meshal and Ismail Haniyeh, I strongly suspect there will be an overwhelmingly negative response.

While the Obama administration has succeed in focusing attention on the Israeli government’s building plans beyond the green line, another major stumbling block to successful negotiations looms on the Palestinian side. Until it becomes clear who will likely lead a future Palestinian state – those who accept Israel or those who reject it – the Israeli government will see fit to negotiate based on a worst-case scenario, i.e., an eventual Hamas-led Palestinian government. That scenario will result in a much tougher Israeli negotiating stance than if the prospective neighbor is the less militant, more secular, moderate, and business-oriented Fatah.

All these matters are inherently complex. Simplification has its appeal, but people who are serious about resolving the very tough problems facing Palestinians and Israelis should resist the temptation to present the uncertain as certain, the disputed as settled, and the future as an extrapolation from the present.

by Michael Lame, posted March 25, 2010

Throughout history, legality and morality have often been at odds. Actions can be legal and immoral. Actions can be moral and illegal. In the United States we have a long and venerated tradition of breaking laws which we consider to be wrong or simply wrong-headed. Whether the issue has been taxation, slavery, unions, alcohol, drugs, civil rights, abortion, immigration, or the speed limit, millions of Americans have disagreed with the law, protested it, disobeyed it, or simply ignored it.

Reverence for the law is not a requirement for being a good American. Just last month the President of the United States publically took the Supreme Court to task for what he considered to be a misguided ruling on the constitutionality of certain election laws. Laws can be wrong; courts can be wrong.

Following the law – local, state, federal, or international – is not always the right thing to do. And if Americans have been ambivalent about adhering to domestic law, we have been far more skeptical about the wisdom and practicality of international agreements.

Although President Woodrow Wilson enthusiastically supported the creation of the League of Nations at the close of World War I, he could not persuade the US senate to ratify the treaty. The US never joined the League. The Convention against Genocide, completed in 1948, was not ratified by the US until forty years later, under President Reagan. With the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement among newly-independent third world countries during the Cold War, anti-Americanism increased across the globe, and with it, America’s reluctance to participate in global legal structures that might adversely affect the nation and its citizens.

Why should we be any less skeptical of the process and outcome of international legal rulings than we are of state and federal laws? Why this new reverence for international law? Is it deserved?

Many hard-working, lofty-principled men and women from around the world have met in conferences over the last hundred years to hammer out the Hague Conventions, the League of Nations Covenant, the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Genocide, and several other global agreements aimed at decreasing man’s inhumanity to man.

But good intentions don’t necessarily make for good law. And there are fundamental differences between international and national law. Obtaining agreements among nations is terribly difficult. We saw that just recently in Copenhagen. The formulation of international agreements is so problematic that the documents are often drafted in language which is intentionally loose and generalized, leaving room for different interpretations on fundamental matters, with conspicuous silences on those important issues where accord is not possible.

Once an international agreement is reached and ratified, it becomes exceedingly hard to revisit and revise it. Reaching global consensus for changing international covenants and treaties is far more complex than having the House and Senate reach agreement on health care reforms. Witness the stalled Doha Round of WTO talks.

Enforcement of International Law

Another way in which international law differs from the law of sovereign states is in its enforcement, which is uneven, often ineffectual, and frequently impossible.

Decisions reached by the General Assembly do not have the force of law, including the 1947 partition plan itself. The International Court of Justice, a UN-affiliated body, issued a 2004 ruling against Israel’s building of the barrier/fence/wall, but that was a non-binding advisory opinion, without teeth. International sanctions have rarely proved effective. South Africa was an exception. Iran is not.

Since the five permanent members of the Security Council can exercise an overrideable veto, the SC will never take action against China’s oppressive activities in Tibet or Russia’s in Chechnya. And, yes, as long as the US is willing to veto anti-Israel SC resolutions, Israel will remain immune to punishment by that body.

The League of Nations fell apart largely because of its inability to deal with fascist aggression in Europe and Africa. Its successor organization, the United Nations, in its very first attempt at nation-creating botched the job so badly regarding Palestine that the world is still dealing with the aftermath of the UN partition plan of 1947, sixty-some years later.

The Hague Conventions of 1907 failed to prevent the atrocities of World Wars I and II. The 1949 Geneva Conventions were designed to strengthen and broaden those earlier efforts to make the world safer from state-sponsored barbarism, with mixed results to-date.

In fact, we have no world government capable of enforcing international decisions. Some are pleased with that situation; others lament it.

But law is only one tool for tackling conflict between people. Arbitration, mediation, and other forms of dispute resolution are commonplace today. In the international arena, war, diplomacy, and negotiations between parties in dispute have much longer lineages than do legal systems in establishing or restoring peace. War is not obsolete. Diplomacy still works. And negotiation between parties, regardless of legal rulings by international courts or councils, is still the best way for Israel to settle differences with her Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese neighbors.

The solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if it is ever found, will not come through the courts or references to legal precedents. The designation of suicide-bombing as a violation of human rights changes nothing. Prefacing the term “settlement” with the modifier “illegal” does not move the two parties closer to resolving their differences. (Nor is such a legal finding required for America to lean on Israel regarding the settlements, if it so chooses.)

Settlements and the Law

Some have argued that Israel has not violated international law in the construction of settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. (See, for example, Nicholas Rostow’s recent analysis at http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=782.)

But even if there was no wholesale illegal activity by the Israeli government, there has certainly been massive government collusion in employing a variety of techniques resulting in the alienation of hundreds of thousands of acres from Palestinian villagers. Somehow this land has found its way into the possession of Israeli settlers.

These are tougher issues than many people would like to acknowledge, morally and practically as well as legally. Not all settlements are created equal. To consider any Jewish habitations beyond the green line to be illegitimate requires a willful blindness to the history of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City or the Gush Etzion pre-1948 kibbutzim.

Even when an activity is legal and legitimate, it might not be wise. Exclusively legal concepts do not take into account the neighborliness factor. A few hundred Jews now live in the center of Hebron, an ancient center of Jewish life which is today a city of more than 100,000 Arabs. Neither side wants the other there. Both sides have employed lethal violence. Without a modicum of good will and common sense, no legal determination of pre-1929 home ownership can solve the problem.

Consider this: What if everyone were to agree that the existence of settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank violates international law? What then? Must we accept such a determination as a basis for action? Or is it possible that the law in this case is wrong?

The argument for the illegality of settlements relies primarily on Article 49, paragraph 6, of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which provides that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The debate continues as to the intention of the writers of this sentence. Was it designed to protect occupied civilian populations from any changes to the land under occupation except those required by military necessity or was it meant to prevent the occupying power from forcibly shifting populations around – moving the occupied out and/or moving their own people in? Does Israeli government support for settlement activity constitute “transfer” of its civilian population rather than simply aid to voluntary decision-making by the settlers themselves? Is this a distinction without a difference?

Even if we accept that any movement of settlers beyond the green line violates this Geneva Convention provision, does the provision itself make sense? Time does not stand still. An occupation of four months is fundamentally different than an occupation of forty years. Things are guaranteed to change during that length of time. And in this case, where the 1949 armistice lines were never legally recognized as borders, Israel was far from a disinterested occupier.

Look at Jerusalem. The future of that city is shaped by every baby born there – to Muslims or Christians, to religious or secular Jews – and by every business started or expanded there and by every building constructed or remodeled there. These are all “facts on the ground.” The idea is ludicrous that either the Israelis or the Palestinians – even if they wanted to, which they don’t – could refrain, for decades, from taking actions that might prejudice the final status negotiations over Jerusalem.

You may not want one side to take particular actions. Many people around the world believe that dividing Jerusalem and designating east Jerusalem (Al Quds) as the capital of a Palestinian state and west Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) as the capital of the Jewish state, is the best, the just, the right, and the only possible thing to do.

Whose Land is it?

Whose land is it anyway? Ask the land. It won’t answer. Ask a geologist, geographer, or historian and you will not receive a single definitive response. Land ownership is a cultural and legal construct. Ownership is not inherent in the land. There is no such thing as Israeli soil or Palestinian land or Arab earth, no Jewish birthright or Muslim patrimony.

To the extent that Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a real estate dispute – and I believe it to be much more than that – we need to find a context within which to address the land ownership issue for all of Israel/Palestine, for Gaza and the West Bank, for east and west Jerusalem. It is not simply an issue of legal title to a parcel of land held by an individual or a family. Nor can this complex matter be resolved by reference to who lived where at a particular point in history – in the days of Abraham/Ibrahim, the First Temple period, Roman times, 1600 years of Muslim rule, 1947 or ’67.

What is to be done? What can bring about, if not closure, then at least a modus vivendi that both sides will find tolerable? The answer to this question is not a legal one.

by Michael Lame, posted March 15, 2010

Everyone is upset with Israel at the moment. While Vice President Joe Biden was in the country on a fence-mending visit last week, the Interior Ministry tore down the entire fence by announcing the award of a contract for the construction of 1600 housing units in east Jerusalem.

The plot thickens. Secretary of State Clinton spent 45 minutes on the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu on Friday, upbraiding him for the recent uproar about Jerusalem during the Biden visit. According to the State Department spokesman, in the call Secretary Clinton asserted that “the Israeli government needed to demonstrate not just through words but through specific actions that they are committed to this relationship [with the US] and to the peace process.”

While every Israeli prime minister – even Netanyahu – knows that the relationship with the US is the bedrock of Israeli security, after more than a decade and a half of on-again, off-again negotiations with the Palestinians, a commitment to “the peace process” is an iffier proposition. Perhaps it’s time to drop the term altogether, along with the insistence on nurturing this anachronism.

East Jerusalem was captured/liberated from the Jordanians by the IDF on June 7, 1967. On June 28, with the passage of enabling legislation in the Knesset the previous day, the Israeli government issued an order incorporating east Jerusalem within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. No country has ever recognized this annexation, but that has not prevented Israel from extending Israeli law to the eastern part of the city.

Fast forward forty-some years. The landscape of greater Jerusalem has been transformed by the building of fences, walls, roads, and Jewish neighborhoods/settlements as well as by the vastly increased Arab population in the city.

In response to the Obama administration’s request/demand last year that Israel stop building in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Netanyahu government announced a ten-month moratorium on new private construction in the West Bank. At the same time, it declared that Jerusalem was not included in this temporary building halt. In other words, Israel told the world that it would keep building in Jerusalem, whether the world liked it or not.

This decision was known. At the time it was announced, Secretary Clinton hailed it as “unprecedented.” So why the upset now? Certainly it’s about timing. It might also be about substance and process.

Timing

Of course the timing was awkward, as the announcement of the approved building permit came during the visit of Vice President Biden, thereby embarrassing him. And to the dismay of those who cherish a close American-Israeli relationship, a visit that was supposed to be a love fest turned into something strained and discordant.

Would it have been better if the announcement had been made a week after Biden left the Middle East? A month after? If the building was to go forward, this was the wrong time to announce it. The visit became a missed opportunity to add a bit of warmth to an otherwise chilly connection between Obama’s Washington and Netanyahu’s Jerusalem.

Substance

Others will say the permits should not have been issued at all. Most two-state solution advocates oppose continued Israeli building in both east Jerusalem and the West Bank, so they are disheartened by Israel’s announcement regarding new housing construction.

And regardless of their position on Israel’s claim to east Jerusalem, peace process advocates are anxious that the dim prospect for successful negotiations not be extinguished altogether by Israel’s latest announcement.

Is the Israeli action as detrimental to prospects for peace as the media has reported? No.

Process

The great “accomplishment” of the Mitchell mission has been to extract agreement from the Palestinians and the Israelis for the establishment of proximity talks, i.e., indirect negotiations, with Israelis and Americans sitting in one room, Palestinians and Americans sitting in another. The Americans will go back and forth between the two sides, in the hope of reducing the gaps between them and eventually reaching agreement on at least some of the “final status issues” such as borders, security, settlements, refugees, water, sovereignty, future relations, and, of course, Jerusalem.

Proximity talks now? That recipe has been used in the past to initiate contact between parties that refuse to deal directly with one another. As recently as 2008, Turkey sponsored proximity talks with Syrian and Israeli officials, but the Israelis and Palestinians have been negotiating face-to-face at least since Oslo in 1993. Collectively they have logged many thousands of hours in such talks.

Proximity talks between Israel and Iran would be a major step forward. Proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, at this late date, constitutes a major step backwards.

I see only two reasons now for proximity talks to occur:

1)   After the US government botched its attempt to rein in Israeli construction beyond the green line, the only way the US could get the Palestinians back to the table without the latter significantly losing face was to employ this procedure. It allows Palestinians to refuse to negotiate directly with the Israelis while negotiating with them through the Americans. But remember that we wouldn’t be in this mess if Mitchell and Obama hadn’t initially insisted on an Israeli building moratorium, thus creating unrealistic expectations within the PA leadership.

2)   Perhaps Mitchell & Company believe they will be able to move the negotiations in a positive direction if they are running the show rather than leaving it to the Israelis and Palestinians to have at it with each other as they did most recently in the ‘07-‘08 meetings between then-Prime Minister Olmert and PA President Abbas.

Both of these reasons are based on the notion that talks are better than no talks. But that’s not always true, especially not in the Middle East. Since neither side is anxious for these talks to begin, why is the US so eager to push the two parties into another round of gab sessions? Is there a secret set of Mitchell/Obama proposals that will cause the recalcitrant players to significantly change their positions once the meetings begin?

Carrots and Sticks

It should be obvious by now that in the realpolitik bag of carrots and sticks, sticks don’t work that well with either side. Given the continuing growth in the number of Israelis living in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, one might imagine that this trend would create such fear in the minds of Palestinian decision-makers that they would rush to negotiate a final deal before more land is swallowed up and more roads constructed. But no, that’s not the way Palestinians work.

And given the billions in military aid that Israel receives from the US each year and the tremendous diplomatic support the US provides Israel in the UN Security Council, with the EU, Arab states and others, one might assume that Israel will hop to it in doing America’s bidding. But no, that’s not the way Israelis work. Client-state or no, Israel at times defies its greatest ally. That needn’t be seen as ingratitude. It may simply be perceived self-interest. No two individuals and no two countries ever see the world in precisely the same way.

What Americans consider a reasonable risk for Israel to undertake might be seen by Israelis as an unacceptable existential threat. The American government should certainly make its case and do so forcefully, but it might be best to do so without lecturing the Israelis about what is really in their own best interests since obviously they’re too blind to see it for themselves! And for Americans to tell Israelis that they must fix their “dysfunctional” political system seems particularly rich at the moment, when so many pundits are wondering aloud whether America’s political system is “broken” and our own health care political debate has been a daily TV soap opera for more than a year now.

During the presidential campaign, then-candidate Obama liked to quote Martin Luther King on “the fierce urgency of now.” But not every serious problem needs to be addressed right now, nor should it. One aspect of political wisdom is knowing when the time is ripe for action. Endless rounds of meetings that produce frustration and anger rather than results serve the purpose not of the peace-makers but rather of the rejectionists on all sides.

As form follows function, so process should follow substance. When Israelis and Palestinians have something serious to offer each other, then negotiations will make sense. If America can bring to the table a practical vision for the future and some substantive proposals – not just its “good offices” – then its involvement will make sense. Supporting the peace process by keeping channels open is not a game big enough to claim active participation from the highest levels in the US government.

After all, peace is not a process.