President-Elect Obama’s Middle East Engagement
By Henry Siegman
November 12, 2008
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that unlike Presidents Bush and Clinton, he would engage in the Middle East peace process "from day one."
While serious presidential engagement is clearly an essential condition for success in reaching a peace accord, "engagement" as such is not a policy. The Israel-Palestine conflict has defied all previous peace initiatives not for lack of presidential engagement but for lack of a policy that has been able to break the stalemate.
So the critical question is not whether President Obama will engage from day one, but what will be his policy that will energize this promised engagement. The answer to that question is not at all clear, since his key Middle East peace advisors are deeply divided over it.
One school of Obama's presidential advisors has urged the president-elect to resist the temptation to provide Israelis and Palestinians with America's own ideas for a permanent solution. Indeed, they believe that the U.S. should not even press the parties prematurely to engage in permanent status negotiations, for in its view there is not yet sufficient trust between them to enable them to do so successfully. Its members believe that the U.S. cannot want peace more than the parties themselves do. The goal of U.S. "facilitation" should therefore be limited to incremental confidence-building and conflict management. Permanent status negotiations by the parties before they have developed a sufficient level of mutual trust to sustain such a fraught and complicated process risks failure and catastrophic setbacks.
The other school of Obama Middle East peace advisors rejects the notion that the U.S. cannot want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians themselves want it. Its members see American exertions to end the conflict not simply a favor to Israel and the Palestinians but in the service of America's own vital national interests in the region and beyond. The U.S. could therefore indeed want peace more than the warring parties do, and therefore has every reason to put forward its own recommendations for a peace agreement, and to vigorously seek its acceptance by the parties.
They also believe that peace has eluded the parties not only because they lack a sufficient desire for peace, which may be true (the appetite for territory may exceed the passion for peace), but because of the vast imbalance between the two parties that enables one of them to impose demands entirely unacceptable to the other. What is needed therefore is third-party intervention to restore a modicum of balance and fairness to the process, an intervention only the U.S. can lead.
Peace processing that focuses on incremental improvements in the absence of at least an agreement on the parameters of a Palestinian state specific enough to assure its "viability, sovereignty and independence," as specified by the Road Map, cannot hope to build confidence, they maintain. Indeed, in the present circumstances, in which Israel has been allowed by the international community to use the delay in resolving permanent status issues to enlarge and deepen its settlement enterprise, such further delay will destroy what little confidence may yet remain.
Given this disagreement among Obama's advisors, the latest progress report on Middle East peacemaking issued by the Quartet, as described in the press release it issued following its meeting in Sharm El Sheikh on November 9, should be seen as a timely gift to the president-elect. The vacuousness of the Quartet's assessment of the "progress" made in the negotiations initiated by the Annapolis meeting a year ago should tell President-Elect Obama all he needs to know about "peace processing" in the absence of a clear commitment to Palestinian statehood. The Quartet's statement has nothing at all to say about the content of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, whose progress it hails. Instead, the distinguished members of the Quartet expressed their admiration for the process, and their respect for the negotiators' self-imposed rule that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" - an entirely unnecessary precaution, since indeed nothing has been agreed.
Members of the Quartet also solemnly pledged to respect "the bilateral and confidential nature of the negotiations." They expressed not even a hint of concern that the "confidential" requirement might have been intended to assure the continuation of a process that is still devoid of all content, while the "bilateral" requirement might have been intended to insulate the parties from outside pressure for more tangible progress.
The Quartet's strenuous efforts to mask the futility of a negotiation that has been all process and no substance are in vain. It is clear to everyone that no agreement has been reached on even one of the major permanent status issues - whether borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, water or security. Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told Israel's Army Radio that the subject of Jerusalem was never on the negotiating table. When asked about her commitment to "discussing all the core issues," in a remarkable display of candor, she replied, "it is important to differentiate between a commitment and actual discussion." (Ha'aretz, November 9, 2008)
The lesson offered the new Obama administration by this latest Quartet exercise should be clear. Peacemaking efforts that focus on process, confidence-building and incrementalism in the absence of clear parameters that define the endgame get nowhere. It is a strategy resorted to by those who lack the political courage to say to Israel that its exploitation of the absence of a peace agreement to extend its confiscations of Palestinian lands and the displacement of the Palestinian people can no longer be tolerated by the U.S. or the international community. To allow it to continue while the possibility of a two-state solution is systematically destroyed is not an act of friendship or solidarity with the Jewish state.
An engagement with the Middle East peace process by President Obama that fixes the outline of a permanent status agreement upfront, while reserving the principle of incrementalism and confidence-building for its implementation, is the only hope of ending this half-a-century long tragedy. It is also the only way of ensuring Israel's survival as a Jewish and democratic state.
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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