RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

by Michael Lame, posted on February 19, 2010

A couple weeks ago, within one 24-hour period, two friends on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sent me emails. One message came from Amman, the other from Tel Aviv. Each contained a link to a website.

www.islamonline.net referred me to www.ifamericansknew.org, whose tagline is “what every American needs to know about Israel/Palestine” and which claims to provide “full and accurate information on this critical issue…” Of course, the organization is terribly biased, in this case against Israelis.

The second email linked me to www.mythsandfacts.org and a long article by an Israeli-American polemicist entitled “This Land is My Land”. Of course, the piece is terribly biased, in this case against Palestinians.

Now, it’s a truism that you can find anything and everything online, including lies masquerading as facts, half-truths presented as whole-truths, false analogies, faulty reasoning, unwarranted benefits-of-the-doubt, and plenty of wishful thinking.

One common-sense fallacy, espoused frequently by people of goodwill, upon first looking in on a conflict from the outside, is the assumption that the truth must be found somewhere in the middle, as in “I’m sure they’re both right and they’re both wrong.”

Others, who naturally side with the underdog in a controversy, assume that the weaker party is in the right.

The schoolyard rule of thumb is that whoever throws the first punch is the bully and definitely in the wrong.

Many of us, myself included, start from the assumption that my people are in the right, however one defines “my people” – by nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, or alma mater.

All of these assumptions can be recognized and the biases overcome, but to do so takes hard work – both internally, by examining oneself, and externally, by studying the issues and their context.

Wittgenstein wrote that “from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.” Yet perhaps the most important realization about what one sees is that one is seeing it. Absent that insight, one may simply imagine that one is seeing the world as it is, rather than seeing it from a particular vantage point. Since the eye cannot see itself, it is no easy matter to recognize one’s own physical point of view, or, more broadly, one’s own bias.

Even a comprehensive educational program culminating in a PhD in Middle East Studies is unlikely to produce an absence of bias. Scholars, like everyone else, bring their prior bias to their reading and writing. The scholar’s bias is then reinforced by selective facts and figures, with references to documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts, and original source materials.

But the region’s conflicts are real and complex, not simply the products of academic interpretation or biased viewpoints. Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians, as well as other Arabs, have bones to pick with Israel, and vice versa. The basis of their grievances – not only the grievances themselves – deserves our close attention. Our support can be gained by the power of the claims and by compelling reasoning behind the claims. Alternatively, if the claims appear insubstantial or the reasoning seems faulty, our support may be lost.

In presenting their arguments, Arabs and Jews often rely on law – Talmudic, Islamic, Ottoman, British, Israeli, natural or international law – though neither side relies exclusively on jurisprudence to make their case. In the search for authoritative criteria, both sides also bring in other disciplines: history, archaeology, scripture, demography, economy, etc. Appeals are made to one’s humanity, to national interest, to the future of one’s people, to the future of all people.

Each side questions the validity of the criteria employed by its opponents: Is the Tanach or the Qur’an a legitimate authoritative source for determining claims to the land? Is there such a thing as “Palestinian soil” or “Jewish land”? What entitles a group of people to political self-determination? Who should have a place at the table in determining the outcome of the dispute? What sorts of attacks against what kinds of targets are beyond the pale?

Knowledgeable people of goodwill, intelligence, and strong conviction can be found all across the political spectrum and on all sides of Middle East conflict. One need not postulate bad intent to account for Zionist or anti-Zionist sentiments.

In light of the above, consider this recent quote from Jeffrey Goldberg:

“The Middle East is a tragedy precisely because the Israelis have an excellent case, and the Arabs also have an excellent case.”

Should we buy this argument? Do both sides really have an excellent case? Even if some merit can be attributed to the position of each of the parties, does one side’s claim or contention decisively outweigh the other’s?

The answers to these questions may not be true for all time. Your answer ten years ago might be different than your answer today or ten years from today. A once-righteous cause can lose its potency over time. A solution that looked good in the heady days of Oslo may be less attractive now. Conversely, a feeling of hopelessness dating back to the second intifada could conceivably be replaced by a sense of renewed possibility.

I look forward to reading your responses to these questions.

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.