RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

Michael Lame, posted October 22, 2009

The natural bias of a diplomat or negotiator is to promote dialogue, to have the parties reason together, to talk. When problems are not resolved by talking, the obvious next step is a second round of talks. The peace-maker’s bias is to encourage compromise or, even better, to find a win-win solution.

Over the last few decades, the U.S. has often facilitated dialogue between Israel and her neighbors. When dialogue has broken down, the U.S. and other interested parties have sought to restart the talking as quickly as possible, on the assumption that, in Churchill’s words, it is “better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.”

But in the Middle East, failed jaw-jaw can lead directly to war-war. The most prominent example of that phenomenon is the Oslo process – the years of inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations culminating in the failed Camp David talks – which was immediately followed by the outbreak of the second intifada, far more violent than the first.

The failure to talk can precipitate violence. So can talks that fail.

Why? Talks raise expectations. If those expectations are dashed, disillusionment sets in and the subsequent frustration and the search for alternative ways to break the status quo can lead to a renewed armed struggle.

The bias of negotiators, diplomats, and conflict resolvers to establish talks as quickly as possible and to keep them going as long as possible must, at times, be resisted. Now is one of those times. There is nothing new to talk about. The Israelis and the Palestinians know each other’s positions and red lines, their needs and their wants. Yet the gap between them still remains.

Imagine the following impossible scenario: Adam Smith and Karl Marx are asked to resolve their differences on economic matters and to continue meeting until they have found common ground. Their meeting would continue for all eternity. Why? Because they start with different sets of values, assumptions, and desired outcomes. They are men of principle, but their principles are in opposition. Their worldviews collide.

I do not mean to suggest that the gap between Israelis and Palestinians is necessarily a permanent or unbridgeable one. Rather, more talk based on the same conflicting sets of values, assumptions, and desired outcomes will result in more of the same – another breakdown in negotiations followed by another round of mutual recriminations.

Something basic needs to change in the outlook of either or both sides in order for agreement to be reached. Discovering what that changed or new element is requires serious work by each side on its own. If the United States government is not already locked into fixed positions about what each side must do, then it can perform some useful work with both sides separately to help them re-examine their assumptions and formulate positions that will be conducive to reaching a resolution.

At the moment, however, the U.S. government has not presented a viable strategy for working with either the Palestinians or the Israelis. And to those who believe that the real barrier to peace in the Middle East is a failure of will, and that all we really need is leadership, I suggest that America currently is not offering leadership in the region. Instead of movement forward, we get motion to and fro. Mitchell travels back and forth. Statements are made. People work late. But nothing new seems to develop.

Who are the obvious candidates for U.S. leadership in forwarding a Palestinian-Israeli breakthrough? President Obama? Secretary of State Clinton? Special Envoy Mitchell?

If a Camp David-like scenario eventually emerges, I’m afraid we will find that Obama is personally ill-suited to the role of bridge-builder between the two sides. It’s not just that he is currently distrusted by the Israelis and has already backed away from his strong support for Abbas on the settlement freeze issue (as well as on the Goldstone report). It is also his cool and dispassionate demeanor.

“Getting down in the trenches,” as Carter and Clinton were so willing to do at Camp David I and II, is no more the behavior we associate with or expect from Obama than we would from George W. Bush. Perhaps there is another side of Obama’s presidential style that he can effectively employ to bring Palestinian and Israeli leaders to a final agreement, but what that might be has yet to be discovered or displayed.

Secretary of State Clinton has not distinguished herself so far as a conciliator between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Nor has she shown herself to be an effective arm-twister. In May she stated unequivocally:

“With respect to settlements, the President was very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here. He wants to see a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions. We think it is in the best interests of the effort that we are engaged in that settlement expansion cease. That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly not only to the Israelis, but to the Palestinians and others, and we intend to press that point.”

Clear communication may be a necessary condition for conflict resolution but it is not a sufficient one. Altering other countries’ behavior requires more than firmly stating the position of the United States.

Finally, there is George Mitchell, who seriously and transparently backtracked during his appearance before the press in New York last month. When asked specifically about the President’s position on an Israeli settlement freeze as a way to re-launch negotiations between the parties – a position so forcefully stated above by Secretary of State Clinton – he demurred:

We are not identifying any issue as being a precondition or an impediment to negotiation. Neither the President, nor the Secretary, nor I have ever said of any one issue, that or any other, that it is a precondition to negotiations. What we have said is that we want to get into negotiations. We believe the suggestions that we’ve made and the requests that we’ve made would, if accepted and acted upon, create the most favorable conditions available to try to achieve success in those negotiations. But we do not believe in preconditions. We do not impose them. And we urge others not to impose preconditions.

[Of course, preconditions (three, to be precise) are exactly what the U.S. and the other Quartet members have established for dealing with Hamas.]

If the president, the secretary of state, and the special envoy do not seem to be effective in dealing with the Israelis and Palestinians, where else could the necessary leadership come from? Dennis Ross? No, the Palestinians don’t want him back.

For the U.S. to play a key role in moving both the Israelis and the Palestinians towards a negotiated settlement, it may have to present a new line-up of mediators, negotiators, and stand-ins for the president. Perhaps we need to look outside the realms of politics and diplomacy to find the requisite temperament and skill set.

Who is capable of bringing parties in conflict into the same room and hashing out a deal? Hollywood agents? Real estate brokers? Divorce lawyers? Bankruptcy judges? Management consultants? What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. It’s time to work with someone new. It’s time to try something different.

Michael Lame, posted October 15, 2009

President Barack Obama, as everyone knows, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Many people ask: Does he deserve it? Well, it depends on what the meaning of the word “deserve” is.

“Deserve: to merit or have a claim to…because of one’s acts, qualities, or situation.”

Obama’s acts or actions have not produced definitive results on the world stage, not yet in any case. His qualities, as discerned through his words, probably weighed more with the Nobel Committee than any identifiable accomplishments. Speeches given in Cairo, Ankara, Prague, Strasbourg, and at the U.N. in New York have all been well-received internationally. Obama is the anti-Bush, signaling a new direction in foreign policy, and that sits well with Arab, Muslim, Russian, and European audiences, among others.

For those of us who care about the future of the Middle East, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize should be received as good news, though perhaps for reasons not at first obvious.

First, some history. This prize is the ultimate accolade American presidents, secretaries of state and diplomats can hope to receive for mediating international agreements to end hostilities. As the last sixty years bear witness, bringing about such a deal between Arabs and Jews is a very tall order, and for an American to be rewarded with a Nobel prize for such efforts is even tougher.

The first peace prize awarded specifically for work on Arab-Jewish conflict resolution came in 1950. Dr. Ralph Bunche received the Nobel for his successful efforts on behalf of the United Nations. First, he helped arrange truces during the 1948 war. His subsequent work required many months of mediation between Israel and Arab states, resulting in a series of signed armistice agreements between the warring parties. Harvard-educated Bunche was the first African-American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. became the second. And now Obama is the third. (Listen for references to both these predecessors in his acceptance speech this December.)

The 1978 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for achieving peace between their two countries. According to the Nobel Committee, “Two men who played a vital role in paving the way for this peace deserve to be mentioned: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter.” Kissinger had already received a Nobel in 1973, together with Le Duc Tho, for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam. Carter was eventually honored by the Nobel committee in 2002.

September 13, 1993 – on the White House lawn, Yasser Arafat shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres to mark the signing of the Oslo Agreement’s Declaration of Principles. One year later all three received the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” President Clinton was not mentioned in either the press release or the presentation speech.

The allure of the Nobel was rumored to have been a factor in Clinton’s push for a final Middle East deal in the last year of his presidency. What better way to assure one’s legacy than with an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty and a Nobel prize to go with it?

Obama would like to pick up the negotiations more or less where Clinton left off. Only this time he hopes to complete the deal. And while he has a stated goal – the two-state solution – he has not yet clearly articulated a strategy for how to achieve it.

But Arab-Israeli conflict is only one piece of unfinished business confronting the new president. And as the saying goes, if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority. The Obama administration and Obama personally seem to have so many top priorities, both foreign and domestic, that they are in danger of touching many issues while focusing on none.

The recent revelation that there has been rare direct contact between Obama and his hand-picked commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, either reflects a management style that honors the chain of command above all else or a preoccupation with health care legislation that relegates war management to the second tier of importance. Even a young and energetic president like Obama, Clinton, or Teddy Roosevelt cannot focus on an unlimited number of key concerns.

Although Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution has loomed as an important goal for several U.S. administrations, other Middle East matters are often more pressing. Iraq and Iran, on the region’s eastern edge, are now coupled with Afghanistan and Pakistan as the central focus of Obama’s foreign policy team.

But since the president has determined that Israeli-Palestinian peace-making is to be a top priority, regardless of what else is on his plate, he needs to determine the right timing in his approach to the issue.

Even before Obama took office, many Middle East experts issued warnings that he should not wait until late in his second term, as Clinton and Bush 43 supposedly did, before making a major push to resolve the conflict. And, indeed, Obama quickly appointed George Mitchell as his special Middle East envoy and then sailed full speed ahead into the maelstrom of Arab-Israeli political machinations.

A president’s domestic and international agendas cannot be kept separate from each other or from the imperatives of electoral politics. Clinton, for example, believed that he needed to complete the Camp David talks before the Democratic Convention took place in the summer of 2000. He knew that once the political season began in earnest, his focus would necessarily shift to electing Al Gore as president and Hillary as senator. This calculation regarding the U.S. political calendar shaped the timing of the Camp David talks.

Similarly, Obama may feel pressure to deliver at least one major foreign policy accomplishment before the 2010 midterm elections in order to help safeguard his Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. And what could possibly be a more gratifying and universally applauded achievement than to preside over the signing of an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty?

So the race against time has begun. When Obama met with Netanyahu and Abbas in New York last month, the pressure of time was foremost on his mind. As he told the press following the September 22^nd meeting:

“Simply put, it is past time to talk about starting negotiations — it is time to move forward…     Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon… Success depends on all sides acting with a sense of urgency.”

Last month’s unproductive trilateral meeting has been followed this month by the Nobel committee’s announcement. Perhaps Obama’s internal pressure to hurry up with the negotiations may be lessened by the fact that he now has his Nobel. This may result in his not pushing the two sides in order to fit his own timetable. That is good news for everyone. Progress, when it occurs in the Middle East, unfolds at its own pace, by fits and starts, and often obliquely.

Moreover, Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, even if they do resume in the next 12 months, are unlikely to prove productive without the introduction of some new element or new dynamic into the equation. Otherwise the same issues will simply be rehashed, as they were by Olmert and Abbas as recently as last year. If the two sides meet again now – with or without an American presence – they may inch their way a bit closer together, but the energy required on both sides to seal the deal is simply lacking.

One hopes Obama has already learned that the power of the oval office to shape the actions of Middle East players is not unlimited. No American president can cajole or pressure or bribe Israeli and Palestinian leaders into abandoning what they perceive to be their fundamental national interest or their personal political interest.

In this writer’s view, the press for an immediate resumption of negotiations will not lead to the desired outcome. Therefore we should look elsewhere for progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations. We should also thoroughly re-examine the conditions and pre-conditions under which talks are likely to succeed.

With regards to the appropriate timing of negotiations, let us also look beyond the realms of politics and international relations for guidance:

If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.