RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

[Note: The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of Re-Think the Middle East.]

Some Thoughts on Iran and the United States

Michael Lame, posted June 29, 2009

“So what I’ve said is, `Look, it’s up to the Iranian people to make a decision. We are not meddling.” President Obama, in a CNBC interview on June 16, 2009

Meddle: “to interest oneself in what is not one’s concern: interfere without right or propriety” www.merriam-Webster.com

One hopes against hope that now is the time when a new political order will emerge in Iran. But whether it does or not, it seems clear to this observer that now is not the time to be concerned with what the rulers of Iran think of us. They will accuse us of “meddling” whether we meddle or not. We already know that Ahmadinejad is no stranger to the Big Lie. (E.g., “The Holocaust is a big deception.” “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals…”) And “meddling”, the unfortunate term used by President Obama, is not the right word in any case. For Americans to express concern when another country violently muzzles non-violent protest by its own citizens is to remain true to the best in our tradition of support for civil liberties. And given how critical Iran’s foreign policy is to the future of the entire Middle East, the United States has a legitimate national security concern about the nature of the government that rules in Iran. Saying so is not meddling.

In fact, I would have been thrilled to hear news reports that our president was busy working the phones, deeply engaged in consultation with our European allies to come up with a joint position towards the Iranian government. Instead, the president told the nation, in his June 23 press conference, that “we don’t know yet how this thing is going to play out.” That’s true. No one knows. The role of leadership is to intervene (“meddle”?) before the outcome is known in order to influence the course of events in a positive direction.

Especially after the last two weeks, there is no basis for believing that negotiations with the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran, if such negotiations were to occur, would produce anything more than months and months of Iranian delaying tactics. Negotiations, even as they drag on, would likely furnish America and Europe with another excuse for postponing debate on the fundamental issue: Are we willing to live with a nuclear Iran?

Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons is not a matter of right, as the Iranians prefer to posit the issue. Nations no more have a right to acquire nuclear weapons than an individual has a right to own a Stinger missile. (Even passionate Second Amendment advocates would agree with that.) And while some argue that it’s not fair for the world’s small nuclear club to restrict further membership, fairness isn’t the issue either.

Nor is the operative issue one of double standards: “Israel has the bomb, so why shouldn’t Iran?” There is a fundamental difference between preventing further nuclear proliferation – which is difficult but achievable – and denuclearizing those few countries that already possess nuclear weapons – which is unlikely to impossible.

The question is whether the people of the world would be more safe or less safe if Iran went nuclear, i.e., if the government of Iran controlled a nuclear arsenal. Given what is known about the foreign and domestic policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the last thirty years, no one should be sanguine about the prospect of a nuclear Iran.

But again, we return to the basic question which the Obama Administration has not answered: Are we willing to live with a nuclear Iran? In a June 26 exchange with the press, following his meeting with Chancellor Merkel, President Obama stated that “Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons would trigger an arms race in the Middle East that would be bad not just for U.S. security. It would be bad for the security of the entire region. . . We have to also be steady in recognizing that the prospect of Iran with a nuclear weapon is a big problem and that we’ve got to work in concert with the international community to try to prevent that from happening.” To say that a nuclear Iran “would be bad” for U.S. security, that the prospect “is a big problem”, and that we’ve got “to try to prevent that from happening” is far from an unequivocal statement that the United States will not countenance a nuclear Iran.

On the contrary, the President’s statement seems more like a set up for a future explanation of failure: “Well, we tried to stop them. We really did, but we couldn’t. We wanted tougher sanctions, but the Russians and Chinese wouldn’t go along. We coordinated our efforts with the Europeans, but those Iranian centrifuges never stopped spinning. We were willing to negotiate in good faith with the representatives of the Supreme Leader, and I thought we were making progress, right up until the day Iran announced the impending test of its first nuclear device. This new development dramatically increases the need for constructive engagement with the Islamic Republic of Iran.” WE TRIED BUT FAILED is the theme song of the last thirty years of American foreign policy towards Iran. Would someone please change the music.

There are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides of the question: Can we live with a nuclear Iran? But that is the question. What is our government’s answer?

This past week the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institute issued an analysis paper entitled Which Path to Persia? Options for a new American Strategy toward Iran, which outlined nine distinct policy options for the US government, and concluded by suggesting that some of the nine be mixed and matched for an “integrated policy.” Unfortunately, there is no agreed upon set of policy planning assumptions set forth in the document as to acceptable or unacceptable outcomes. It’s all open-ended.

At the event launch for the new report, when I asked about specific dangers that a nuclear Iran would pose to the United States and her allies, I received the following answer from Bruce Riedel, who served as a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues and who recently chaired President Obama’s interagency strategic review of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Iran:
(http://www.brookings.edu/events/2009/0623_iran_strategy.aspx)

“We can live with an Iran with nuclear weapons…Iran is not a crazy state. It’s an unpleasant state, and it’s getting more unpleasant. But the rules of nuclear deterrence work with Iran just like they work with everyone else…[T]he more dangerous phenomenon is that Iran will feel emboldened to do other things, not use nuclear weapons, but it will act like other nuclear weapons states…If it has nuclear weapons, it will feel it is invulnerable if it allows terrorists to attack its neighbors. It will feel invulnerable if it starts small wars with its neighbors. It will feel invulnerable if it stands up to the United States and says, no, we’re not going to do that. That…is the danger. We’ll live with it, but it will be more unpleasant and more difficult. And, of course, the final problem is that everyone else in the Middle East will also want to have a bomb now – and more bombs. And everyone in South Asia will want to build more bombs faster, too. So it will accelerate an already serious arms race. It’s not a good outcome. I think it is one that, in my judgment, we will probably have to live with over the course of the next decade or so.”

Now don’t you feel better?

I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with Aaron David Miller in his office at the Woodrow Wilson Center here in Washington. Aaron is an engaging, thoughtful, and enormously experienced Middle East analyst and negotiator who served under six secretaries of state in the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian peace treaties that, unfortunately, did not come to fruition. The Much Too Promised Land, his candid and insightful book on the last thirty years of American peace-making efforts in the region, is an excellent introduction to the intricacies of Middle East policy formulation and implementation.

We talked about the sequencing of what Aaron calls “transactional diplomacy” and “transformational diplomacy”. He claims that the former must precede the latter, that is, reaching agreement on the nitty-gritty issues that affect people’s lives opens the door to a shift in the relationship between the parties in contention. He identifies the four “core issues” of Israeli-Palestinian conflict as borders, Jerusalem, security, and refugees. Those are issues that he knows intimately from countless hours of sitting with other American, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Madrid, Washington, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Camp David, and elsewhere. Aaron believes that those issues must be resolved before we can hope for Palestinians and Israelis to treat each other as good neighbors.

Formal agreements signed by political leaders must precede true peace between peoples in conflict. . . Is that true?

In our meeting, I read to Aaron from the final paragraph of Charles Enderlin’s book Shattered Dreams: the failure of the peace process in the Middle East, 1995-2002. Enderlin, a French journalist who has lived in Jerusalem for the last 40 years, indicts the Americans, the Israelis, and the Palestinians for their failure to achieve peace: “The Clinton administration was unable to complete the political process that Yitzak Rabin had begun without any American assistance. Because they did not understand that peace must first be made between nations and not solely between leaders, the peace team and the negotiators in both camps led the Middle East closer to hell. This is a failure of politics, of diplomacy, and of a vision of the world.”

Peace must first be made between nations and not solely between leaders. . . Is that true?

These questions are of more than academic interest to me. I devoted several years of my life in the ’80s and early ’90s to designing, organizing, promoting, and conducting face-to-face seminars between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem as well as between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in cities across the United States and Canada. Bread was broken. Friendships were formed. Minds were opened. Political viewpoints were altered. On a micro level, there is no doubt that this made a difference.

Many Middle East activists have engaged in efforts at transforming individuals’ experience of “the other”. But how does the micro translate into the macro? Is that only possible when the work is done with leaders or with those who interact directly with leaders (work that Herb Kelman pioneered in his Harvard seminars in the early ’80s)?

Perhaps there is a more mysterious and less linear means by which the Zeitgeist is affected. Could anyone have predicted – did anyone predict – the kind of uproar that Iran has experienced these last few days since the election? The Middle East truly is a place of political miracles (if of no other kind) and of transformational events, for better or for worse – the birth of Israel, the Iranian Revolution, Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza, Syria’s troop withdrawal from Lebanon, Hamas winning the 2006 election. The shocks and surprises have not ended. The next ones may not be the result of U.S. foreign policy. They may not be the result of anyone’s policy. History happens.

The question remains: What, if anything, can be done by non-governmental actors to affect, in a positive way, the future course of Middle East history? Can the transactional and the transformational move forward together? Can the impetus for dramatic change come from the bottom up as well as from the top down?

Michael Lame, posted June 15, 2009

There was an odd moment in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech when it appeared that he was about to openly proclaim his recognition of Palestinian rights. In fact, he said in the middle of the speech: “So far I have spoken about the need for Palestinians to recognize our rights. In a moment, I will speak about our need to recognize their rights.” Then he immediately began to talk about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel, and he never returned to the subject of Palestinian rights. Instead, he focused on Israel’s rights.

Netanyahu’s premise is that the cause of Arab-Israeli conflict is “the refusal to recognize the right of the Jewish people to its own state in its historical homeland.” And he demanded of the Palestinians that they “recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” This demand goes far beyond recognition of the fact of Israel’s existence. It addresses the question of the right of Israel to exist.

Does Israel have a right to exist? Does Israel exist by right? My answer to both questions is NO.

Sovereign states do not exist by right. They come into existence – and remain in existence – by force, or by agreement, or by a combination of the two.

Israel owes its existence to winning a war in 1948. If it had lost that war, there would be no state of Israel, despite the United Nations General Assembly vote of 1947 approving the partition of Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state.

But Israel could never exist in total isolation. It also owes its existence to the agreement of most members of the United Nations. The ’47 U.N. vote facilitated that process of gaining international acceptance for Israel’s existence. Both force and agreement gave birth to Israel. Right had nothing to do with it.

Does the United States have a right to exist? It’s a silly question. It exists. Our nation also came into existence by force – winning the Revolutionary War – and by agreement – signing the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain, ending that war. Israel is the only country in the world that I know of about which the questions are asked: Does it have a right to exist? Do you recognize its right to exist? I suggest we retire these questions and not ask them anymore.

In any case, it is too much to ask of the Palestinians that they recognize Israel as having a right to exist. On the contrary, a common Palestinian belief is that Israel’s existence is wrong, that the creation of Israel is based on a fundamental injustice perpetrated against those who inhabited the land when the Zionist influx began. For Palestinians to accept Israel as the state of the Jewish people is tantamount to their acknowledging the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise which has clashed with Palestinian aspirations for a hundred years.

If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer.

Asking the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s legitimacy or right to exist is the wrong question to ask. And given the current state of Palestinian sentiment, Palestinians would have to lie to give Israelis the answer they want to hear. Peace should not be built on lies.

It’s possible to build a peace that does not have a prerequisite that the parties in conflict give up their views of history and morality. Netanyahu pointed out that the Arab “circle of hostility” was breached by Egypt and Jordan when they signed peace treaties with Israel. But Netanyahu neglected to mention that Israel never requested or required of either of those states that it acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to a state in the land of Israel. Moreover, Mubarak has just strongly rejected Netanyahu’s demand of the Palestinians or any other Arabs that they do so. If peace could be made and maintained between Israel and two of her Arab neighbors without such an acknowledgement, should it really be asked of the Palestinians?

Michael Lame, posted June 9, 2009

In a recent appearance in Washington, Israeli professor and peace activist Menachem Klein opened his talk by acknowledging that he supports a two-state solution. He then provocatively took one step back: “If I have a solution, I ask: To what problem? The two-state solution is a solution to the problem of Palestinian self-determination.” Interestingly enough, he did not say that it is “the solution” or “the one and only solution” but rather “a solution” to the problem.

We could then ask if a two-state solution is the best answer to the problem of Palestinian self-determination, the best way for Palestinians to participate in determining their own political future. This may seem like an overly-philosophical approach, but we are really dealing here with both theoretical and practical issues. In theory, what political structure would best serve the Palestinian people? In practice, given the political reality of the Middle East, what is the best structure the Palestinians can obtain?

The nation-state solution to the problem of political organization developed in Europe over several hundred years. That type of solution is of far more recent vintage in the Middle East. Even today we do not necessarily consider that all ethnic or religious conflicts need to be resolved by setting up more sovereign states. For example, despite the fact that there are several times more Kurds than Palestinians in the Middle East, no strong international demand is raised for the creation of an independent Kurdistan. The Dalai Lama, with widespread support in the West, claims that he only seeks Tibetan cultural autonomy, not independence for his homeland. We should not automatically assume that the Palestinian problem can only be satisfactorily resolved by establishing a new independent state.

What is the problem that Palestinian self-determination seeks to address? I suggest we start with one fundamentally unacceptable fact of Palestinian existence: statelessness. In the 21st century, it is a very bad idea to be without a country – to be a citizen of no place, to have no passport for travel purposes, to be without a government that considers itself committed to protecting you as one of its citizens. There is a beautiful old Hellenistic notion of cosmopolitanism – to be a citizen of the world. But that idea has never been realized and perhaps never will be. The world does not issue passports. Countries do.

To be sure, not all Palestinians are stateless. More than one million Arabs are citizens of Israel. Jordan long ago extended citizenship to Palestinian refugees on both sides of the Jordan River. But those Palestinians who lived in Gaza or who fled to Gaza in 1948-49 never became Egyptian citizens or citizens of any other state. Those who fled to Lebanon and Syria did not become citizens of those countries either. Similarly with Palestinians who moved to the Gulf States. With a high birth rate and the passage of time, there are now several million stateless Palestinians in the Middle East.

Even though I’ve tried to understand the historical process by which this came about, I remain shocked that it is so and has been allowed by all parties to remain so – millions of stateless people in a world that does not take kindly to statelessness.

That condition of being without citizenship is, I believe, the most egregious aspect of Palestinian existence. But certainly there are many other deplorable burdens placed on the Palestinian people: the employment restrictions imposed upon them by the Lebanese government; the economic blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel; the heavy puritanical hand of Hamas on social life in Gaza; the suppression of political dissent by Hamas in Gaza and by Fatah in the West Bank; the indignities inflicted by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the West Bank; the land confiscations; the fences and barriers and walls; the highly elaborate and frequently changing set of rules and regulations enforced by the Israeli military and by various Israeli governmental agencies.

To question the efficacy of Palestinian statehood is not to condone the severely circumscribed conditions suffered by the Palestinians on a daily basis. Life under occupation is never desirable.

In his Cairo speech, Obama asserted that Americans “will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” But around the world, many peoples live in dignity and experience opportunity without having a state of their own. Is it a good idea – for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, for the Egyptians and Jordanians, the Lebanese and the Syrians – that the Palestinians have a state of their own?

The assumption that the creation of a new Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel is the one and only answer can blind one to the downside of the proposal. All ideas have downsides, and as conditions in the region continue to change, the negatives of Palestinian statehood may be multiplying. Not only have Israeli settlements expanded and outposts increased in number in recent years, but the Palestinian population has continued to grow rapidly, which constitutes another set of “facts on the ground.” Hamas solidifies its hold over Gaza while Fatah firms up its control of the West Bank – more facts on the ground which can alter the equation about the desirability and feasibility of a two-state solution.

One might ask: Why re-open this question at all? Hasn’t the matter already been decided by all peace-loving Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and Europeans? Isn’t the only possible just and lasting solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict the two-state solution, with Israel and Palestine living alongside each other in peace and security?

Implicit in this formulation of the two-state solution are three assumptions: 1) there is or can be a solution to this problem; 2) all other proposed solutions have been examined and found wanting; and 3) this idea will work. I suggest that all three assumptions are questionable and need to be re-examined in light of recent developments in the region. After doing so, it may indeed turn out that 1) the problem of Israeli-Palestinian conflict is susceptible to solutions; 2) no other proposals are feasible; and 3) the two-state solution, if and when implemented, is likely to turn out well for all parties concerned. But that reexamination process has not yet occurred. One initial purpose of Re-Think the Middle East is to engage multiple parties in undertaking that review – to participate in a fresh and honest look at how best to address Palestinian-Israeli conflict.