RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

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.

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 on December 29, 2009

At the end of my last posting, I wrote that in Part 2 “ I’ll suggest a few, hopefully provocative, specific do’s and don’ts for the new year.”

Each and every one of the following suggestions has a downside to it. Each can be dismissed as “unrealistic” because one or another side currently finds it objectionable. That is also true of the most popular ideas now in circulation. A two-state solution, for example, has major downsides for both peoples.

So far, no proposal or process has succeeded in resolving Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Nothing has worked. That fact alone should give us pause, providing the basis for some humility and a wee bit of uncertainty about the likelihood that anyone knows the answer to the problem.

So let’s start the new year by examining, newly and freshly, different ways of viewing the conflict, different ways of addressing it, and different proposed solutions for it.

For what they are worth, here are my 2010 suggestions to President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Special Envoy Mitchell for re-thinking and re-tooling America’s approach to this conflict. No attempt has been made to insure that this list is either comprehensive or balanced.

What Not to Do

Let’s start with what not to do, or rather, what not to say:

1) Stop talking about 242 and 338. They are out of date and out of juice.

2) Stop talking about the Road Map. It’s a map that neither side wanted and neither side has followed.

3)  Stop talking about land for peace. The Palestinians need more than land in order to build a state. The Israelis need more than a peace treaty in order to sleep soundly at night.

4)  Stop talking about a commitment to a Palestinian state, but don’t stop working towards it. It’s still unclear if that circle can be squared. To be so publicly committed to such an iffy proposition is not wise foreign policy. This is the United States. We don’t get points internationally for trying. We should commit ourselves to what we can deliver, and we cannot guarantee success in forcing two unwilling peoples to make peace.

5)  Stop talking about getting the parties back to the negotiating table as soon as possible. As we saw with the collapse of the Camp David II talks in 2000, talks that aren’t well prepared for and that don’t have a reasonable likelihood of success can lead not only to failure but also to the outbreak of deadly violence.

What productive actions could the U.S. take in 2010?

Refugees

An unconscionably large number of Palestinians have no citizenship or passports. The United States should explore constructive ways to address this problem without waiting for it to be dealt with in final status negotiations. After all, no one knows if or when such negotiations will take place or prove productive. The Palestinian refugees and their descendants should no longer be held hostage to the “peace process”.

The United States could create a taskforce – completely separate from the Mitchell team – to work towards ending that condition of statelessness. The idea here is to directly tackle perhaps the most tragic aspect of the conflict. In doing so, it must be made clear by the U.S. government that Palestinian acceptance of citizenship from any country in the world will not adversely affect the political or economic rights of Palestinians regarding their status as Palestinians or their original homes in Palestine.

The West Bank

The settlement freeze issue was so mucked up by the administration this year that it’s probably best not to make it a focal point of its efforts in 2010.

Instead, insist (and verify) that the Israelis significantly accelerate the pace of reducing the number of roadblocks and checkpoints and take other measurable, substantive actions to ease personal travel and commercial transportation in the West Bank. These are some of many steps needed to promote economic development and personal freedom for the Palestinian community in the West Bank.

Gaza

The Gazan population is largely cut off from the rest of the world. Travel is severely restricted. A very limited list of foodstuffs and other products is allowed in by the Israelis. Under these conditions, reconstruction is impossible. Hamas and Israel have been stalemated since January. The people of Gaza are the losers. The winners are the Israeli residents of Sderot and other nearby communities that are no longer shelled from Gaza.

Once the prisoner exchange is completed, the US should insist that Israel significantly relax the siege of Gaza, provided that the shelling of Israel does not begin again.

Re-Assess the Likelihood of a Negotiated Settlement

Through discussions with the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government, and other Palestinian and Israeli players, U.S. officials should delineate as precisely as possible the remaining gaps between Palestinian and Israeli positions on all issues (not just the “big four” of security, borders, refugees, and Jerusalem). These sticky issues include, among others: the disposition of West Bank settlements and settlers outside the areas which will likely be retained by Israel; economic relations between Israel and Palestine; water management; Gaza-West Bank links; and ending incitement.

Act on the Assessment

Based on the current gaps between the parties and the history of those gaps, assess whether any meeting of the minds between Israelis and Palestinians is a real likelihood by 2012 or by 2016. If not, switch gears from conflict resolution mode to conflict management mode.

If the assessment results in the conclusion that a deal is a real likelihood in the next few years, then formulate a set of questions for each side regarding a range of compromise options most likely to bring about a resolution of the conflict. (This is distinctly different from the US preparing a set of bridging proposals of its own on how to end the conflict.)

Formally and publicly ask these questions of both sides.

Encourage the Israelis to open up more public debate in Israel regarding these questions and regarding the specific likely sacrifices that will be necessary to reach a deal with the Palestinians.

Encourage the Palestinians to open up more public debate within Palestinian communities across the Middle East regarding these questions and regarding the likely sacrifices that will be necessary for reaching a deal with the Israelis.

Israelis and Palestinians live in highly politicized communities. If their leaders are to make painful concessions for peace, the groundwork must be laid with the populace. For the US to make an appeal to the people on both sides to grapple with the most difficult issues is an attempt to engage the two nations in moving towards a mutually beneficial arrangement – at least a modus vivendi, if not a peace treaty.

Deal Breakers

If there are areas in which no compromise is likely to satisfy minimum requirements of both sides, then that fact should be acknowledged publicly.

Many people already suspect that finding a mutually acceptable division of Jerusalem is a chimera. The question of the “right of return” of Palestinians to their pre-1948 homes may likewise be unsolvable within the paradigm of a two-state solution. Trading off an unpalatable bargain regarding Jerusalem for an equally repugnant result regarding refugees may not be the answer either. Stateless Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon need to have their personal, familial, and communal concerns addressed. Having a Palestinian flag fly over the Dome of the Rock does not accomplish that.

If Jerusalem, the right of return, or some other issue does turn out to be a deal breaker, then a conflict management strategy should continue to claim the full attention of a special envoy to the region. However, a secretary of state’s time or certainly that of the president should be sparingly used if the problem turns out not to be ripe for resolution.

Forcing it, as President Clinton tried to do at Camp David II, won’t work. By contrast, pressing parties that are anxious for a deal did work for President Carter at Camp David I, and it just might work for President Obama at a Camp David III.