July 13, 2010

Hillary Mann Leverett was a featured panel speaker at a Capitol Hill conference on July 13, organized by the Middle East Policy Council, on “U.S. Policy Towards Israel and Iran: What are the Linkages?”  Other panelists included Martin Indyk, Paul Pillar, and Ian Lustick.  The transcript of her remarks follows.

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The “conventional wisdom” in Washington has long held that Iran, its Syrian ally, and their so-called proxies, HAMAS and Hezbollah, are the ultimate “spoilers” for Middle East peacemaking efforts.  According to the conventional wisdom, Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric and terrorist attacks by HAMAS and Hizballah have regularly scuttled what would otherwise surely have been successful diplomatic initiatives.  Given this conventional wisdom, two opposing strategies of “linkage” are typically put forward.  Both start from the same premise, that Iran and its so-called proxies can and must be marginalized—they really only differ in how to achieve that goal.

The first strategy, favored by the Obama Administration, see here, and articulated recently by National Security Adviser James Jones, see here, holds that trying to achieve Arab-Israeli peace is the key to Iran and its proxies’ regional marginalization.

–From this perspective, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement—or, more accurately, an Israeli-Fatah peace agreement—and the creation of a more prosperous Fatah enclave in the West Bank would undermine popular support for HAMAS, even in Gaza, marginalize HAMAS as an actor in Palestinian politics, and effectively terminate Iranian influence in Palestinian affairs, with significant negative consequences for Iran’s regional standing.

–Likewise, the prospect of an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement could be used to wean Syria away from its alliance with Iran, thereby circumscribing Hizballah’s role in Lebanese politics and further reducing Tehran’s regional standing and influence.

–And, of course, progress in the peace process will supposedly make it easier to form that mythical, and I stress mythical, diplomatic constellation, to which several U.S. administrations have aspired—a coalition between Israel and “moderate” Arab states, for the purpose of “containing” Iran.

The second linkage strategy, favored by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, posits that weakening Iran’s strategic position and stripping it of its nuclear capabilities—if necessary, by force—is needed before there can be real progress on Arab-Israeli peace.

Frankly, both sets of linkages are wrong.  Let’s start with why the first set of linkages—that is, trying to achieve Arab-Israeli peace as a way of marginalizing Iran and its so-called proxies—is wrong.

The key point is this:  It is simply not possible today—if it ever were possible at some point in the past—to achieve Israeli-Palestinian or Arab-Israeli peace in a manner that excludes and marginalizes Iran and its regional allies.

–Usama Hamdan, the chief of international relations for HAMAS has said that Israel and the United States have a “Cinderella shoe” approach to Middle Eastern elections—that is, unless the winner fits a certain set of specific parameters, he will not be accepted as a legitimate interlocutor.

–I agree, but I would add that Israel and the United States also have a “Cinderella shoe” approach to the Middle East peace process—only parties that can frontload their concessions need apply.

This is a profoundly dysfunctional approach to diplomacy.  That is something Israel’s late Prime Minister Rabin came to understand when he explained why Israel needed to negotiate with the PLO—because you make peace with your enemies, not your friends.  Policies that deny this reality are bound to and have failed—both in terms of Arab-Israeli peacemaking and in terms of dealing effectively with Iran.  I will elaborate this argument with three specific points:

First, though they are non-state actors, HAMAS and Hizballah have become indispensable political players in their respective national and regional contexts.  Simply put, these groups win elections—and they win them for the best possible reasons: because they represent unavoidable constituencies with legitimate grievances.  Under these circumstances, I challenge anyone to describe, in a plausible way, how Israel and the United States can reach sustained peace agreements on either the Palestinian or the Syrian and Lebanese tracks of the peace process without these groups’ buy in.

These groups should have a place in the peace process—because otherwise the process has no meaning, except perhaps as a crass “motion without movement” exercise.  Those who continue to depict these groups as nihilistic enterprises with no real political agenda are either not paying attention or are deliberately distorting reality for their own political purposes.

Second, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad continues to want better relations with the United States and a peace settlement with Israel that meets well-established Syrian “red lines” (for example, full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights).  But, as President Assad has made clear to my husband, Flynt Leverett, and me in our meetings with him, see here, and has said publicly, see here—Syria’s relations with Iran, Hizballah, and HAMAS are, at this point, “not on the table”.

Syria’s relationships with these actors have moved from perhaps being, in the past, primarily “tactical” levers for the Syrian leadership to being increasingly strategic assets.  As my husband described in his 2005 book, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial By Fire, following the end of the Cold War, Hafiz al-Assad’s preferred strategic option was a peace settlement with Israel that, under appropriate circumstances and with firm parameters for an acceptable deal, could be negotiated bilaterally with U.S. mediation.  To that end, the elder Assad seemed prepared to modify significant aspects of Syria’s relationships with Iran, Hizballah, and Palestinian militant groups, as part of the “price” for an acceptable peace deal with Israel and strategic rapprochement with the United States.  (Of course, this proposition was never put to the test, as the Syria track effectively collapsed under the Clinton Administration’s mismanagement just two months before Hafiz al-Assad’s death in 2000.)

But Bashar al-Assad’s accession to the Syrian presidency in 2000 took place at the beginning of what has proven to be a period of dramatic shifts in the Middle East’s strategic environment.  As we have described on our blog, www.TheRaceForIran.com and elsewhere, see here, these shifts include the effective collapse of the traditional Arab-Israeli peace process, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, inconclusive U.S. military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of Hizballah and HAMAS as important political actors (as I just discussed), the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri in Lebanon, and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as well as subsequent Israeli military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza.  It is in this context that Syria’s ties to Hizballah, HAMAS, and Iran have taken on an increasingly strategic character during Bashar al-Assad’s presidential tenure.

–With the removal of Syrian military forces from Lebanon following the Hariri assassination in 2005, Hizballah has become an even more valuable asset for Syria, see here.  Hizballah is, among other things, a key ally for Damascus in protecting Syrian interests in Lebanon; it also provides an important—and, at this point, strategic—deterrent against Israel.

–HAMAS’s control of Gaza and credibility among Palestinians more broadly, see here, makes it hard to imagine that Assad would agree to expel Khalid Mishal from Syria as part of a purely bilateral settlement with Israel.

–Iran has also proven its strategic value to Syria in recent years.  Iran’s religious legitimization of the Assads’ Alawi sect is important as Syria’s secular regime navigates its way through a religiously charged regional environment.  Iranian support was also critical for Syria in fending off heavy pressure from the United States, most of Europe, and moderate Arab states in the wake of the Hariri assassination.  In an uncertain strategic environment, Assad will continue to value the “hedge” provided by its close relationship with Iran.  Assad is not about to be “weaned” away from Syria’s alliance with Iran.

Third, all that I have discussed under my first two points means that, at this juncture, Iran is bound to be at least an indirect party to any serious Middle East peace process.  This is not an obstacle to peace; it is a requirement for progress toward peace.  In fact, HAMAS leaders and President Assad told us, and have said publicly, that Iran has backed their efforts to reach a settlement.

–Iran publicly endorsed Syrian participation in talks with Israel that were mediated by Turkey in 2008, see here.

–And, Iran does not try to block HAMAS’s publicly stated openness to a popularly legitimated two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see here.

Now let’s turn to the more hawkish version of linkage favored by Netanyahu—namely, that“rolling” back Iran is a prerequisite for Middle East peace, see here.  This vision is at least as delusional as the suggestion by many neoconservatives in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq that the “road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad”.  It is delusional to think that, if the Islamic Republic of Iran disappeared or were effectively “contained”, there would be no more problems with the Middle East peace process and HAMAS, Hizballah, and Syria would “fall into line” with Israeli and American preferences for organizing the regional order.

–These actors have their own agendas and preferences for regional diplomacy, which they will not give up simply because Israeli or U.S. military aircraft strike nuclear targets inside Iran.

–Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the increase in Iran’s regional standing and influence in recent years is not a function of its military capabilities.

–To this day, the Islamic Republic of Iran has no meaningful capacity to project conventional military power beyond its borders.  To the extent that Iran’s regional standing and influence has increased in recent years, it has been because Tehran has picked “winners” for its allies in key regional arenas like Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine.  U.S. and Israeli pressure on the Islamic Republic is not going to undercut its regional influence; in fact, confrontation with Israel and/or the United States might well enhance Iran’s regional standing.

It is also delusional to think that concern about a rising Iranian threat could unite Israel and moderate Arab states in a grand alliance under Washington’s leadership.  In reality, the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics.  Even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation.  Pursuit of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is not only delusional, it also will continue to leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in free fall—as these tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, HAMAS and Hizballah.

Additionally, Iran is not going to take Israeli and U.S. political or even military pressure without “pushing back”.  And at least some of the ways in which Tehran will seek to “push back” are likely to make it even harder than it is now (that is to say, virtually impossible) to move forward with serious Arab-Israeli peacemaking.

Finally, Netanyahu’s declaration this weekend that only the threat of U.S. military action can have a positive impact on Iran’s nuclear decision-making comments during his visit here last week should be taken very seriously, especially among those of us in the American Jewish community, because he is on an extremely dangerous course.  Netanyahu’s push for eventual U.S. military action against Iran could do real damage to Israel and the American Jewish community.

A U.S. attack on Iran would almost certainly result in a much broader confrontation between the United States and Iran—a confrontation that will threaten U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, the strategic outcomes of our military adventures in both of those countries, spike the price of oil and hurt an already shaky global economy, and shatter international perceptions that reckless and dangerous U.S. behavior in the strategically vital Middle East was peculiar to George W. Bush’s presidency, see here.  These eminently foreseeable consequences would have a devastating impact on America’s standing in one of the world’s most important regions.  Israel and the pro-Likud community, if not the broader Jewish community, in the United States may well be blamed when the resulting U.S.-Iranian confrontation does severe damage to American interests, because they have led the charge to war, see here.

So, what is a more constructive way forward?  The answer is clear:  Real U.S.-Iranian rapprochement to normalize U.S.-Iranian relations, what my husband and I call the “grand bargain”, along with a serious negotiation for Arab-Israeli peace that includes Hamas and Hezbollah.  The precedent for this is what Nixon and Kissinger did to realign U.S. relations with China and Egypt in the early 1970s—striking grand bargains with what, at the time, were two rising regional powers.  These strategic bargains profoundly changed, for the better, the regional environments in Asia and the Middle East.  In particular, the U.S. rapprochement with Egypt and its corollary, the Camp David Accords, have made another generalized Arab-Israeli war nearly impossible.

Today, from a strategic perspective, bringing Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah into a non-conflictual diplomatic process and, eventually, a political settlement would be at least as consequential.  For those who buy into the demonization of the Islamic Republic and these groups, it would be useful to remember that only in retrospect is the late Anwar Sadat viewed as a “man of peace”—throughout much of the 1970s, he was widely seen as an anti-Israel activist who had launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war, had admired Adolf Hitler, and had collaborated with Nazi Germany against British forces in Egypt during World War II.

But the critical point is that without U.S.-Iranian rapprochement the United States will not be able to achieve any of its high-priority goals in the Middle East.  This would be bad for America’s Arab allies and Israel, which need credible and effective American leadership in the region to maintain a stable balance of power, address serious threats, and ensure their safety and survival.

June 22, 2010

Foreign Policy

This weekend Israel, under growing pressure from Washington, announced a change in the siege strategy toward the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. Up until now, Israel’s strategy has been to deny entry of almost all goods, except the most basic supplies it alone deems necessary to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. The list of goods that Israel has allowed into Gaza has changed, sometimes daily, as the Israeli government has sought to maintain its absolute, arbitary control. Gazans, faced with the engineered shortages of everything from diapers to coriander, have imported all manner of goods through an underground tunnel system linking Gaza with Egypt. As a result of the attempt of the “freedom flotilla” to break the siege and the resulting international outrage led by Turkey against Israeli actions on May 31, the Israeli government has promised to modify its draconian policies. Yet the debate over what kind of siege to place on the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million trapped Palestinian inhabitants avoids the critical point.

Instead of playing the game according to rules set by Israel, the international community must focus on creating an entirely new border regime on Gaza’s land borders and sea and air corridors; a regime that removes Israel from its commanding role as gatekeeper, encourages Egypt to establish economic links with its Palestinian neighbor, that establishes land and sea corridors that operate according to internationally accepted standards, and that restores to Palestinians a system to import and export goods and services according to their abilities and preferences–not those of their enemies.

The failure of the international community to confront Israel’s decision to isolate Gaza from Israel and the West Bank is at the root of the web of crises centered on Gaza today. However understandable the international focus on Gaza’s humanitarian emergency, what is at issue is the fact that Gaza’s current nightmare is the consequence of Israel’s continuing effort to separate the political, economic, and security destiny of the West Bank from that of the Gaza Strip–an objective that the international community has tacitly supported because of opposition to Hamas’ rule in Gaza (for more on this, see Tony Karon’s piece in Time magazine and Marc Lynch’s Middle East Channel post).

Framing Gaza’s problem as a humanitarian issue represents a victory for the view of those intent upon tinkering at the margins of the ongoing crisis. Continuing to view the unconscionable humanitarian consequences of the embargo on Gaza that has increased incrementally over most of the last decade as simply the result of security or logistical shortcomings (a view that continues to be the case today), condemns the people of Gaza, more than half of whom are under the age of 18, to unending misery at the hands of a policy that has destroyed the economic fabric of Palestinian society.

Despite the recent show of concern for the Palestinians of Gaza, the international community (led by the United States), has been an active accomplice in the current crisis, focused on softening the hard edges of Israel’s draconian policies in a manner that leaves the essence of the policy intact and which acquiesces in, rather than challenges, Gaza’s engineered descent into penury. International inaction is almost solely the result of opposition to Hamas–arising from a fear that any amelioration of the Gaza status quo favors Hamas to the disadvantage of the “Ramallah model” represented by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad.

“This is a moment of clarity for all Palestinians, and now comes a moment of choice,” President Bush noted in July 2007, shortly after Fateh’s expulsion from Gaza. “The alternatives before the Palestinian people are stark. There is the vision of Hamas, which the world saw in Gaza–with murderers in black masks, and summary executions, and men thrown to their death from rooftops. By following this path, the Palestinian people would guarantee chaos, and suffering, and the endless perpetuation of grievance. They would surrender their future to Hamas’s foreign sponsors in Syria and Iran. And they would crush the possibility of a Palestinian state.” The widespread adoption of Bush’s narrative guaranteed the “chaos, suffering, and endless perpetuation of grievance” that he promised.

That said, the economic strangulation of Gaza actually preceded Hamas’ election victory in January 2006 and Fateh’s bloody expulsion from Gaza in June 2007. It is rooted in Israel’s 2004 decision to “disengage” from Gaza. This policy resulted in an end to Israel’s permanent security and settlement deployment in Gaza, but also to a marked a change in its economic, trade, and labor relationship with the territory. An Israeli policy of economic estrangement along the Israel-Gaza frontier aimed at minimizing the transit of Palestinians, Palestinian labor, and economic trade across the Gaza Strip-Israel border and forcing Egypt to re-assume the economic and security role it played in Gaza before Israel’s June 1967 occupation. This latter policy represented a reversal of Israeli policies pursued from the inception of occupation in June 1967, and it enjoys broad popular support in Israel.

Draconian restrictions on the entry of Palestinian labor to Israel, the failure to establish a reliable export/import regime through Karni and other crossings, and the stillborn safe passage route linking Gaza with the West Bank–all signature elements of policy before June 2007 and indeed before Hamas’ parliamentary victory in January 2006–are the product of this strategic re-evaluation of Israeli interests. As such, the policies that have so stirred the international community in recent weeks are not incidental byproducts that can be solved by technical fixes of the kind now being proposed, but rather are integral to Israel’s strategy. Even before June 2007, this system resulted in the creation of a “soft quarantine” that created substantial economic dislocation in Gaza and led to widespread flight of Gaza’s manufacturing base.

Hamas’s rout of Fateh in June 2007 only confirmed Israel’s policy of keeping Gaza on what Israeli official Dov Weissglass once cynically referred to as a “diet” (first announced in the wake of the Hamas January 2006 victory), and created an opportunity to gain international support for implementing it more broadly–by suspending indefinitely Gaza’s normal trade with Israel and lowering the bar to permit limited “humanitarian” imports, narrowly understood. It’s not as if the international community didn’t notice. Within weeks of the intensified Israeli embargo, the World Bank offered a critical view of the new status quo:

[T]he entry of humanitarian goods is a necessary but insufficient condition for the survival of the Gazan economy, which is already in dire straits after almost two years of restrictions. A sustainable solution must allow for imports and exports at the very least at levels similar to those pre-crisis which were already deemed insufficient and not meeting the minimum targets set in the AMA…the current restrictions on the entry of goods and services in and out of Gaza is not unique to July 2007. It has been underway since disengagement, and the Bank and others have quantified the impacts. As such, the pillars of Gaza’s economy have weakened over the years. Now, with a sustained closure on this current scale, they would be at risk of virtually irreversible collapse.

Limited and basic border operations enabling the transfer of goods from Israel to Hamas-controlled Gaza were functioning within days of the Hamas takeover. Three years on, these operations remain elementary, informal, unwritten, impermanent, and non- transparent. The official transit of goods exempted from the general ban–whether imports from abroad or from Israel/West Bank–is impossible, unless individual exceptions are granted by Israel.

Permitted goods enter Gaza in an environment that meets the minimum security and operational standards acceptable to the parties involved. This fact needs to be highlighted. Security issues related to the operation of Israel’s border with Gaza have been solved by Israel and Hamas. This limited and elementary system–in its security and operational dimensions, is working according to the standards set for it (primarily Israel) and it is evidence of the modus vivendi established between the interested parties, principally Israel and Hamas’ security forces in control in Gaza.

This “system” has met the security and operational conditions established by Israel for the successful provision of basic humanitarian goods. To the extent that Israel is a party to practical cooperation with Hamas to ensure minimal border functionality, Israeli officials are adamant that this is a function of operational cooperation only and does not reflect any political reconsideration about the need to destroy Hamas. Hamas is prepared to cooperate in this effort–to demonstrate to Israel (and others) that it is the responsible security address in Gaza and to provide for its people. Ironically, the government in Gaza is the most ardent champion today of a liberal trade regime with Israel (and Egypt) and the party most interested to restore a variation of the status quo ante at both Karni and Rafah.

Israel has chosen to lower the bar that defines its responsibilities for the welfare of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip under the Fourth Geneva Convention, responsibilities which Israel’s own foreign ministry acknowledges that it retains despite disengagement. It treats Gaza as an “enemy state,” imposing pressures on Gaza which, had they been visited on the people of New York or Paris, would long ago have resulted in endemic anarchy and mayhem. That Gaza continues to function today is a testament not to Israel’s or the international community’s humanitarian impulses, but to the remarkable social cohesion of Palestinian society and, let us acknowledge the fact–to Hamas’s governing skills.

The United States needs to begin showing far greater creativity and boldness in breaking with the tactics of the Bush administration. President Obama will find it difficult if not impossible to achieve his stated goal, of two states equally free and equally secure, by continuing the failed policies that have led to the disaster of the Gaza Strip.

Geoffrey Aronson is the Director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and editor of the Foundation’s report on Israeli Settlement Activities in the Occupied Territories. He is a consultant to the EUPOLCOPPS security mission in the West Bank and was a member of the World Bank team during Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2004-2005.

June 17, 2010

Forbes Magazine

The Israeli government says it’s in a death struggle with Hamas, cast as a terrorist movement affiliated with al-Qaida and threatening the entire Western world. But current Israeli propaganda to the contrary, Hamas is not al-Qaida. Hamas has never carried out violent attacks outside of historical Palestine.

The West is out to rid the world of al-Qaida. While we can easily imagine a world without al-Qaida, we cannot imagine a Middle East without the kind of massively supported politicized Islam that Hamas represents in Palestine. A more difficult question is whether we can imagine the Middle East without Israel. Among Middle Easterners, the answer to that question is, increasingly, yes.

Ironically, Israel’s best hope for living with political Islam is the kind of modus vivendi that Egypt, Jordan and other secular Arab regimes have reached with their local versions of Hamas. That arrangement is basically what Hamas is offering Israel: competitive coexistence for a generation or two. At this point it is probably the best deal Israel can get.

But Israel is not buying it. Why not? As is true of most propaganda, the Israeli government’s line on Hamas tells us more about Israel than about Hamas. The attempt to banish Hamas from the Middle East is a reflection of just how desperately Israelis wish the Middle East were different and that their country was located somewhere else. In a remark that resonated deeply with Israelis, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, now defense minister, called the State of Israel “a villa in the jungle.” Having long described themselves as “living in a bad neighborhood,” Israelis increasingly feel out of place in the region. Indeed most feel about the Middle East the way Israelis came to feel about “the Lebanese muck” (habotz haLevanoni)–the longer we stay, the more hopeless it seems.

Israelis have acted on these sentiments. In May 2000 the sudden evacuation of the Israeli army from Lebanon signaled Israel’s frustration with the results of the 1982 invasion that had been designed to “fix” the region. Shortly after the violence of the second Intifada, Shimon Peres’ image of Israel integrated into a “New Middle East” was abandoned. In 2003 Israel stood alone among Middle Eastern countries when it endorsed the American invasion of Iraq. In 2005 Israel left Gaza unilaterally. It is now building a barrier of concrete and razor wire around the entire country. Meanwhile its leaders call for the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities even as they assert Israel’s unique right to maintain a nuclear arsenal in the region.

This is a temper tantrum, not a sustainable national policy. It stems less from fear of contact with the Middle East than a deeper desire not to be there at all. Yet Israel is a Middle Eastern country and that means it cannot expect to live peacefully or securely by conducting its own jihad against the region’s dominant religious, cultural and political movement. From Egypt and Jordan to Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, most Muslim governments have realized this. Competition with militant Islam can be managed, but it can neither be suppressed nor ignored. Israel will ultimately need to choose between constant war with an adversary that cannot be defeated, or a long-term competitive relationship whose outcome cannot be guaranteed.

To an extent, Islamists inside Israel proper may offer a model for a larger Israeli relationship with political Islam. Muslim citizens of Israel, including those active in the Islamic movement, act as law-abiding, though annoying participants in Israeli democracy. They challenge the ideological and cultural sacred cows of statist Zionism, but pose that challenge without terrorism and with a long time frame. Despite recent efforts to restrict political expression by Israeli citizens, the government’s willingness to go toe to toe with Islam in the domestic political arena is a far cry from decades of dominating millions of effectively stateless West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who have no political access to the Israeli political arena.

As in the Arab countries, the force of Islamism in these territories has sidelined nationalist movements whose incompetence, corruption and ties to the West destroyed their political standing. While heavily subsidized Palestinian secularists maintain a precarious hold on the West Bank, at least as long as free elections are not held, in Gaza the Islamists are having the same success they have had in Lebanon and Turkey, and would have in Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere, were honest elections permitted.

Having left Gaza without an agreement to make it part of a viable Palestinian state, and having corrupted and humiliated what was left of the Palestinian nationalist movement, Israel lost the best opportunities it had to domesticate Hamas as a loyal opposition. It also lost the kind of direct and continuous access required to enforce police-state repression on mass-based Islamists. In Gaza Hamas is prospering despite Israel’s blockade and the decimation of its leadership. Now that Egypt is changing its policies toward Gaza, and with the entire world ranged against the blockade, Israel is finding that Gaza ghettoization is backfiring, deepening its own isolation from the world community.

Israel still does have another option. In a variety of Sunni Arab countries the Muslim Brothers and affiliated groups (Hamas is in this category) have agreed to compete peacefully in the social, cultural and ideological spheres while foregoing direct military or political attacks on the secular governments. In effect Hamas has offered Israel the equivalent–a generation long “hudna” (armistice) during which a Muslim Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza would exist alongside of a Jewish State in Israel. This arrangement, modeled on those existing in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere, would not involve any “end of the conflict” agreements, any recognition of the righteousness of the other, or any elaborate arrangements for cooperation and mutual advantage. Instead, time and non-violent competition would determine if and how the conflict would be continued after two or three decades and whose attachments to land and belief would prevail.

This will not be an easy competition for Israel to win, but in the Middle East as it is, and as it will be, that is the best opportunity it will get. The alternative is an endless competition in brutality that Jews will definitely lose, not because their ethics are stronger, but because more Jews than Arabs have foreign passports.

Ian S. Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of dozens of books and articles on Middle East politics, including Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank/Gaza.

June 3, 2010

Tablet Magazine

On the morning of May 31, Americans woke up to a flood of media reports about a deadly Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla, and Israel’s liberal supporters in the United States immediately found themselves in a familiar bind. On one hand, pro-Israel hardliners called on liberal Zionists to take a firm stand in support of Israel’s actions, warning—as one neoconservative critic put it ^[1]—that to do otherwise would mark them as “at best, fair-weather friends and, at worst, little different from open anti-Zionists who implicitly support [Hamas]’s goal of eliminating the Jewish state.” On the other hand, critics of Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza called on these liberals to denounce not merely the tactical wisdom of the raid but the morality of the blockade itself. Most liberal Zionists proved characteristically unwilling to get behind either alternative. While a few spoke out ^[2] against the siege of Gaza, the majority restricted themselves to familiar admonitions that the raid was “unwise” and “counterproductive” even if the intentions behind it were blameless.

It was a classic illustration of the liberal Zionist predicament. In recent weeks this predicament has received an increased amount of attention, due in large part to a bracing and much-discussed essay ^[3] by Peter Beinart ^[4]—a former editor of The New Republic, the very citadel of American pro-Israel orthodoxy—in which he sounded the alarm on the plummeting levels of support for Israel among younger American Jews. “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door,” Beinart wrote, “and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.” Similar concerns led to the formation in 2008 of J Street, a lobby group that aims to represent the views of liberal Jews and serve as a counterweight to traditionally right-leaning groups like AIPAC. If current trends continue, American Jewish attitudes toward Israel may ultimately be transformed in a way unseen since the bulk of the community first got on board with Zionism, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

How can liberal Zionism be saved? For those aiming to revive the form of American liberal Zionism that marked the generation that came of age after the 1967 war, it is tempting to blame its decline on a betrayal by outside forces. On this logic the collapse of support has been caused by Israel’s own shift to the right in recent years—epitomized by the rise of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman—a shift aided and abetted by a right-leaning institutional leadership of the American Jewish community that refuses to criticize Israel under any circumstances. Resuscitating liberal Zionism, this argument goes, will thereby involve siding with Israeli moderates while speaking out against settlers abroad and neoconservatives at home.

But can liberal Zionism, at least in the form that has dominated American Jewish life for decades, be saved at all? And should it be? These are harder questions but may ultimately be more important ones. It may be emotionally satisfying to posit a blameless liberal Zionism betrayed by outside forces, or to suppose that younger Jews are reacting only against the right and not liberal Zionism itself, but it is not clear that either claim is true. For one thing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman undoubtedly make good villains, but the aspects of Israeli politics that have alienated U.S. liberals go deeper than the current right-wing government. (To take only the most recent example, it was not the nefarious Netanyahu or the loathsome Lieberman who brought us the attack on Gaza, but rather the supposed “good guys”: Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni.)

More generally, the apparently impending collapse of mainstream liberal Zionism in the United States is no accident. Some of the phenomenon may be attributed to the simple passage of time—to a generation growing up farther removed from the looming presence of the Holocaust and without memories of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But we cannot adequately understand this collapse without understanding the compromises and contradictions that liberal Zionism became involved in over a period of decades.

***

Let me drop the pretense of disinterestedness for a moment. I am a member of the “younger generation” whose attitudes have become the subject of so much discussion, and in many ways I am typical of it. When the last decade began I considered myself to be, broadly speaking, a fairly standard young liberal Zionist—at least insofar as I thought about these things, which was not often. In the years since, my views have shifted to the point that I would not consider myself a Zionist at all. I make no claim to “speak for my generation,” whatever that would mean, and one should never trust anyone who claims that they can. But I have reason to think that my experience was far from atypical, and it might therefore be worthwhile to examine it more closely.

It’s always tempting, when writing a conversion narrative, to exaggerate the magnitude of the shift for dramatic effect. But I can’t honestly claim that I was ever a neoconservative or a hardliner (aside from a brief Likudnik episode in my childhood). Rather, I held a set of views fairly typical of American liberal Zionism. I was largely uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I was against the occupation and the settlements, and I considered myself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering. Still, I did not really question the basic Israeli narrative of the conflict (“we want peace, but they only want to annihilate us”); I believed that everything would be better if only the Palestinians could find their King or Gandhi; I was convinced that the shrill-sounding activists who constantly harped on Israel’s sins were hysterical at best and anti-Semitic at worst. I was a “serious” and “responsible” liberal, I told myself, and much of this identity hinged on differentiating myself from them.

I considered myself a Zionist, in the sense that I supported Israel’s “right to exist,” which I took to mean that I did not want the state to be violently destroyed and its inhabitants driven into the sea. Only later did I come to understand that this was not the meaning of Zionism at all, and equally that non-Zionism had nothing to do with wanting to drive the Jews into the sea; I then realized that I had probably never been a Zionist in any real sense at all. (I now suspect that this is a common phenomenon, and that many if not most American Jews who call themselves Zionists are not so in any strict ideological sense—a misunderstanding encouraged by a pro-Israel establishment that is eager to equate non-Zionism with anti-Semitism.)

Above all, I felt that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was tragic and irrational and complicated. For those who have seen through the simple morality-play version of the conflict, in which a blameless Israel is constantly beset by bloodthirsty Arab hordes, it is a belief in the conflict’s endlessly “complicated” nature that keeps them in line and deters them from taking any firm stand. And of course, the conflict iscomplicated, with more than enough blame to go around. But all the talk of the complicated and tragic nature of the situation, I eventually came to believe, was partially designed to obscure certain stark realities that were, perhaps, not terribly complicated at all: in particular, the fact that for decades the lion’s share of power has been in the possession of one side, and the lion’s share of suffering has been borne by the other. Once again, however, this realization was a long time in coming.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when or how my views shifted. A great deal of the change can probably be explained simply by the fact that I started paying closer attention to the conflict and its history. I suspect the general disillusionment of the George W. Bush years also pushed me to the left on the Israel-Palestine issue, as it did to so many people on so many issues, and the Iraq war in particular (which I had opposed, but far from wholeheartedly) made me reconsider the merits of “serious liberalism” as an overall foreign policy stance. The fact that so many of Israel’s most vocal supporters were among the leading proponents of the Iraq debacle forced me, like many others, to confront exactly what support for Israel entailed.

But of course, blaming Bush and Iraq does not explain why one should reconsider Israel and Zionism; even blaming the neocons or the Likud does not explain why one should reconsider mainstream liberal Zionism. To do so, it is necessary to examine some features of the liberal debate over Israel as it has been conducted in recent years in the bastions of mainstream Jewish opinion—in the New York Timesand on NPR, in campus Hillels and suburban synagogues. It was only after years of following this discussion that I became convinced that liberal Zionism, at least in the form that had reigned among the bulk of American Jewry for decades, was inherently unable to grapple with the problems at stake—that its basic suppositions had forced it into a role that made it marginal, self-indulgent, and ultimately irrelevant.

***

The first notable feature of the debate that became apparent was its heavily emotive and tribal character. Rather than taking a measured look at the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories, at the concrete facts and issues in play, participants spent an inordinate amount of time fighting to claim the “pro-Israel” mantle and squabbling over who could be said to love Israel more. The basic contours will be familiar to anyone who has spent much time following the debate: Hardliners charge liberals with a lack of concern for Israel’s security in the midst of an allegedly annihilationist mass of Arab neighbors; liberals reply with familiar warnings that in the absence of a two-state solution Israel will have to choose between Zionism and democracy. Hardliners contend that a “true friend” would never criticize Israel publicly; liberals argue that a “true friend” must help Israel avoid becoming an international pariah.

It is not difficult to see, however, that the liberal Zionists in these debates will always be at an inherent disadvantage. After all, Netanyahu and the rest of the Israeli political establishment are more than happy to weigh in on who they think their “true friends” are—and not surprisingly, it is the friends who are willing to hawk for war against Iran and turn a blind eye to West Bank settlements. Liberal Zionists will never really be able to convince the public that they know Israel’s long-term interests better than Israel itself, no matter if it is true, and therefore will always have trouble answering the charge that they are, as Sarah Palin put it ^[5], “second-guessing” Israel’s own decisions. Thus the competition over who can appear to love Israel more is one that, unjustly or not, the liberals will generally lose.

More to the point, by constantly reaffirming their undying love for Israel, by couching every argument in terms of Israeli needs and Israeli security, the liberals sacrifice the most effective advantage they have: their power to make moral arguments. Thus we hear frequently that a two-state solution would be “good for Israel” by solving the “demographic problem,” or that the Gaza assault was “bad for Israel” by harming the country’s international standing. Less frequently do we hear that the real value of the two-state solution would be in ending the misery and injustices of the occupation, or that the Gaza assault was bad, first and foremost, for the people of Gaza. Because they are afraid to make these arguments, because they are afraid to suggest that Israel’s actions might be not merely imprudent but also immoral, the liberals have no good answers when the hardliners reply that the two-state solution imposes intolerable risks to Israeli security, or that the Gaza incursion was a successful response to the rocket fire into southern Israel.

Similarly, the claim that Israel’s “security decisions” are Israel’s business alone invites an obvious answer: namely, that outsiders have every right to question these decisions because they affect millions of people who are not Israelis. But because mainstream liberal Zionists have refused to move beyond a myopic focus on Israeli interests, this is an answer that is foreclosed to them, and the charge of “second guessing” will always be devastating.

The second feature of the debate that became apparent to me was related to the first; it was the obsessive focus on the motives of Israel’s critics. On the one hand, there was the need to ensure that all criticism was restricted to “true friends” of Israel—always Jews, who must constantly reaffirm their Zionist credentials, who must pull their punches in public debate, who must take care not to criticize too stridently or to overstep the innumerable lines demarcating “acceptable” criticism of Israel. On the other hand, there were the unhinged (one might say disproportionate) attacks directed at any critics who were deemed to be “outsiders”—generally Gentiles (and if Jewish, easily tarred as “self-haters”), who failed to abide by the rules of acceptable debate and therefore had to be made examples of.

Recent years have seen any number of examples, from Jimmy Carter to Tony Judt to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt to, mostly recently, Richard Goldstone. In each case, much of the crime was to step outside the prescribed limits of “acceptable” criticism: to say not merely that the perpetuation of the occupation would be regrettable, but that would bring “apartheid” (Carter ^[6]); not merely that the window for a two-state solution is closing, but that it has closed (Judt ^[7]); not merely that the Israel lobby is bad for Israel, but that it is bad for the United States (Mearsheimer and Walt ^[8]); not merely that Israel made unspecified “mistakes” in Gaza, but that it committed outright war crimes (Goldstone ^[9]). But in each case, the problem was more with the messenger than the message. Thus both Ehud Olmert ^[10]and Ehud Barak ^[11], for instance, have reiterated Carter’s “apartheid” rhetoric without arousing much visible outrage. Similarly, Beinart is only the latest in a line of mainstream liberal Zionists who have conceded the basic truth of the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis without acknowledging it by name. (I should disclose here that John Mearsheimer teaches in the political science department of the University of Chicago, in which I am a doctoral student, although we work in different fields.)

If the debate over Israel has shifted noticeably to the left over the last several years, this fact therefore owes almost nothing to the “responsible” liberal Zionists and almost everything to those whom the responsible liberal Zionists have tarred as anti-Semites. Yet the mainstreaming of once-taboo positions has not brought a respite in the tone or frequency of attacks; on the contrary, Israel’s defenders seem to have doubled down. It has gotten to the point that when Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz recently compared ^[12] Goldstone to the Nazi vivisectionist Josef Mengele—an objectively shocking analogy—few observers so much as batted an eye.

This pattern of behavior has by now become so familiar that we rarely stop to ask the obvious question, why? Why focus so obsessively on delineating “acceptable” from “unacceptable” criticism and attempting to annihilate anyone who crosses the line?

Many of those responsible for enforcing ideological conformity on the issue were neoconservatives; their behavior could at least be read as a rational attempt to further their political goals. After all, they liked the status quo as it was—unwavering U.S. support for Israel, expanding settlements, frequent wars—and saw no need to change it. But many of the enforcers were liberals, or at least claimed to be. They professed their support for the two-state solution, their opposition to the settlements, their discomfort with (although never outright opposition to) the attacks on Lebanon and Gaza. Their professed goals actually differed little from those of many of their targets; after all, most of the hate figures mentioned above are fairly moderate proponents of a two-state solution, not one-staters or anti-Zionists. One might reasonably expect that if the liberal enforcers were serious about their “pro-peace” agenda, they would have found a way to make common cause with these critics rather than trying so fervently to destroy them. Instead, they followed a typical pattern: a few perfunctory words in favor of “peace” and against the settlements, followed by torrents of invective directed at anyone who was actually engaged in concrete action to further these goals. If these so-called liberals had devoted one-tenth the time they spent policing the bounds of the debate to actually ending the occupation, the entire situation might be very different today.

This is not to deprecate those liberal Zionists who genuinely acted on their moral convictions; they have performed admirable work against the occupation, often at serious personal cost. But they have always been the exception rather than the rule. When it counted—during the Gaza attack, for instance, or the current debate over confrontation with Iran—the bulk of the liberal Zionists could be counted on to fall into line. They expressed their hopes that Israel would choose, out of the goodness of its heart, to stop colonizing the West Bank or to show more restraint in its military actions. But by conceding beforehand that Israel would have their steadfast support even when it inevitably decided to ignore them, by working to ensure that Israel would face no consequences when it did so, by insisting that only the right people with the right ideologies were allowed to agree with them, they only ensured that nothing would ever change. It became hard to avoid the conclusion that their protestations were intended more to salve their own consciences than to accomplish anything substantive.

***

At some point, I simply got tired of these fratricidal and self-absorbed debates, tired of the endless rhetorical dance. I stopped caring much about the “pro-Israel” label, or whether others would consider me a true “friend of Israel,” or whether I was abiding by the strictures of “acceptable criticism.” In the face of so much evident misery and injustice, these considerations came to seem self-indulgent and irrelevant. I continue to believe that the policies I support would ultimately be in the best interest of the people of Israel, but I recognize that only a minority of Israelis agree with me, and I frankly have little interest in squabbling with the Likudniks and neoconservatives over the right to call myself “pro-Israel.”

I suppose at this point I should relate anecdotes about my bar mitzvah or travels to Israel, tell shtetl stories about my ancestors, proclaim my love of latkes and klezmer and Woody Allen and Philip Roth. I should talk about “Jewish values” and how my views on Israel-Palestine are an extension, not a renunciation, of these values. I should try to reassure you, in other words, that I am not a deracinated or, worse, “self-hating” Jew; that I am one of “us,” not one of “them.”

But I won’t talk about these things, not because they are untrue, but because they are irrelevant. One of the least attractive features of the debate as it has been conducted in the Jewish community is the constant insistence on changing the subject from the concrete political issues at stake to issues of Jewish identity and Jewish self-understanding. It is the worst kind of narcissism to insist on talking endlessly about our feelings rather than the political realities that stare us in the face. So I will not dwell on my “feelings” about Judaism, my “relationship” with Jewish identity, because these are simply distractions. Either the Gaza blockade is just, or it is not, either the Lebanon war was wise; or it was not; either the U.S. should bomb Iran, or it should not; either the two-state solution remains viable, or it does not. To reply to these questions with invocations of Judaism or anti-Semitism or the Holocaust is sheer non sequitur, and when someone does so it is generally a sign that they have no good answers. As for the charge of self-hatred, it may once have had bite, but today it has lost its sting. It comes off as desperate, even silly, and I can’t find it in me to muster an answer to it.

You may argue that I am an aberration, that I speak only for myself. Indeed, in recent weeks many of Israel’s defenders have vigorously disputed the notion that anything has changed. They argue either that there is no real drop of support ^[13] among the young, or that the phenomenon is restricted to a few left-wing elites, or that the U.S.-Israel relationship can get by just fine without liberal Jews anyway. I personally think they’re deluding themselves, both in imagining that the attitudes of American Jews are the same as they’ve always been and that the special relationship can be preserved without the support of mainstream liberal Jewry. But ultimately all I can say to those who dispute the facts of the shift is: We’ll see in due course who is right.

It is also worth noting, in this regard, that I came to political consciousness at a time when events—superficially at least—seemed to ratify the broad Israeli narrative; I first became aware of the conflict through Oslo, the suicide bombings of the 1990s, Camp David, the second intifada. Those who are a decade younger than me are coming to consciousness with the assaults on Lebanon and Gaza as their earliest memories. Thus there is every reason to expect that, if anything, they will follow the same path that I traveled far more rapidly than I did.

But if this is the case, if I am more representative than defenders of the status quo would like to admit, then it is naive to think that the old post-1967 liberal Zionism can be revived simply by speaking out more forcefully against Avigdor Lieberman and the settlers. It is likely that American liberal Zionism was always destined to founder eventually on its own intellectual contradictions and political compromises, and those who are nostalgic for it should consider the possibility that at this point we simply can’t go home again. The way forward can only come if we shed the pathologies that have stunted thinking to this point, and take a hard and pragmatic look at what concrete steps could lead to a better future.

Daniel Luban is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Chicago.

[1] put it: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/303796

[2] spoke out: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-01/israel-flotilla-disaster-gaza-embargo-us-supporters-to-blame/

[3] essay: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/?pagination=false

[4] Peter Beinart: http://www.tabletmag.com/tag/peter-beinart/

[5] put it: http://www.haaretz.com/news/palin-u-s-shouldn-t-second-guess-defensive-military-steps-taken-by-israel-1.253703

[6] Carter: http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285026

[7] Judt: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/

[8] Mearsheimer and Walt: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

[9] Goldstone: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/FactFindingMission.htm

[10] Ehud Olmert: http://www.haaretz.com/news/olmert-to-haaretz-two-state-solution-or-israel-is-done-for-1.234201

[11] Ehud Barak: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/03/barak-apartheid-palestine-peace

[12] compared: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3885999,00.html

[13] no real drop of support: http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/34533/wrong-numbers/

June 4, 2010

Foreign Policy

The silver lining in the tragedy of Israel’s brutal raid on the Free Gaza flotilla is a new urgency about lifting the blockade on Gaza and addressing the territory’s humanitarian crisis. Calls for the blockade to be lifted have been made in the Arab world, in Europe and even, albeit more timidly, by the Obama administration. But Israel’s siege is not the only thing that has been highlighted: the role of Egypt, Tel Aviv’s silent partner in the blockade, has also been brought to the fore. This is an uncomfortable development for Egypt, which denies playing any role in the blockade even as it closed its border with Gaza at Rafah since the June, 2007 Hamas takeover. Even now, after quietly opening the Rafah border crossing to avoid popular outrage, the Egyptians are preventing an aid convoy led by the Alexandria Pharmacists Association from reaching the crossing. The renewed uproar over Rafah has the potential to destabilize Egypt, exponentially raising the cost of its participation in the Israeli-led, Quartet-endorsed blockade — an outcome that the Egyptians will seek to avoid but is also a concern for their Arab allies, Israel and the Obama administration.

The Egyptians have for the past three years offered an elaborate explanation to deflect blame for their enforcing of the blockade — despite the fact that the border, with a few exceptions for a few medical cases and hajj pilgrims, has remained closed since June 9, 2007.  Whatever the legal merits of Egypt’s position, domestically and regionally it lost the moral and political argument: there has been widespread outrage at what is essentially seen as Egyptian collaboration with Israel to punish Gazans for Hamas’s actions. Its intentions have also been made clear by acts that can be best described as petty and vindictive, such as the treatment of last December’s Viva Palestina convoy, which arrived at the southern Sinai port of Nuweiba only to be told to it could not disembark: it was forced to go to the northern Sinai port of al-Arish by heading back to Jordan, driving up to Syria, and then chartering a boat to al-Arish. Its reported intention of building an imposing wall across the border has been the subject of intense debate.

Why has Egypt taken such an unpopular hard line towards the Rafah crossing into Gaza?  What will it do now?

Firstly, the Egyptian regime has been concerned about the precedent that Hamas’ political electoral success in Palestinian elections in January 2006 set for the region, particularly after Egypt’s own Muslim Brotherhood secured an unprecedented 20 percent of parliament. It wants Hamas to fail. Mustafa al-Fiqi, the chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, noted at the time, “Egypt will not accept the establishment of an Islamic emirate along the eastern border.” Yet, despite its overt and covert support for Fatah and, until June 2006, a substantial intelligence presence in Gaza, it has failed to contain Hamas. This has been a personal failure of Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief, who has now spent five years assuring visiting dignitaries he has a plan to reverse Hamas’s rise without anything to show for it.

Secondly, Egypt’s ties with Israel and the United States have been prioritized over the Palestinian cause, even if this comes at a domestic cost. Between 2006 and 2009, the U.S. Congress aggressively pressured Egypt to do more to constrain weapons smuggling to Gaza, with military aid threatened for the first time. In 2009, U.S. and Israeli lobbying resulted in the construction of a metal wall at the border and the intensification of operations against tunnel smugglers. There has been a concurrent increase in support for the Mubarak regime in Washington, notably once the Obama administration came into office: not only have pressures on human rights and democratization vanished, but backlogged military purchases such as a multi-year $3.2 billion F-16 deal have been approved by Congress. While this is in part because of the new administration’s wish to distance itself from Bush administration policies, it is also due to its perception that Cairo is a crucial ally in its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Of course, Egypt also has legitimate security concerns about Hamas’ control of Gaza. It is concerned about radicalization of the territory and  believes that Gazan groups more radical than Hamas may have provided training for the terrorists who carried out three major attacks in Sinai between 2004 and 2006. (It is generally believed Hamas has imposed order in Gaza and checked smaller radical groups and criminal gangs.) The issue of weapons smuggling not only affects Israel’s security, but also Egypt’s, as stockpiles of explosives discovered in Sinai over the past year suggests. The dismantling of a network of Hizbullah network last year, recognized by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah to be involved in smuggling to Gaza, has also raised concerns that Egypt could be drawn into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even worse, officials fear a plan to “dump” the problem of Gaza on Egypt’s lap, something Israeli strategists have contemplated for decades. Already facing tense relations with the Bedouin population of Eastern Sinai, the regime has no desire to become responsible for Gaza, one of the most radicalized places on the planet.

But perhaps most importantly, it is the Mubarak regime’s own security that is threatened. During the Gaza war, Nasrallah made an unprecedented call for the Egyptian military, as well as citizens, to force the regime to open the border. Many officials I spoke to during the war felt that the “resistance front” of Iran, Syria, Qatar, Hizbullah and Hamas — as well as pro-Palestinian activists around the world and media outlets such al-Jazeera or al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper — was waging war on Egypt as much as Israel. It was a flashback to the 1980s, when Egypt had been kicked out of the Arab League for signing a separate peace deal.

The regime has been suppressing activism on Gaza, despite growing tolerance for activism on other issues in the last decade. Campaigns against the blockade have been thoroughly suppressed, with even the new independent press treading carefully on the issue. Pro-Gaza activists have been arrested and foreign activists deported. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has organized one of the biggest aid drives for Gaza, has nonetheless refrained from any major demonstration condemning the regime on its Gaza policy since the war. Battered by a wave of arrests in the last three years, the Brotherhood has been unwilling to risk more clashes with the regime. There are few issues as sensitive as Gaza policy in Egypt today. Meanwhile, senior officials such as Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif and Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son, have articulated an “Egypt First” policy that is widely echoed in the official press, often relying on anti-Palestinian stereotypes and chauvinism.

Parts of the opposition have suggested alternatives to the current policy, though. After the flotilla incident, Mohamed ElBaradei — the former IAEA chief who is campaigning for democratic change in Egypt — called for the opening of Rafah and slammed the regime, tweeting that “the opening of the Rafah crossing is the demand of every Egyptian and Arab. In a democracy, foreign policy represents the will of its people.” Short of opening full trade relations, providing humanitarian assistance is a more likely scenario. Essam al-Erian, a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza aid organizer, is one of many who argues that opening the border to Gazans is not incompatible with national security, since safeguards can be put in place. This is a reasonable position, albeit one the government has chosen to ignore.

It is not clear how “Egypt First” will fare in the wake of the outcry over the flotilla incident. The very first statement issued by the Egyptian presidency after the incident was that “the blockade can only be lifted when Palestinian reconciliation takes place” — the standing policy — only to be overturned hours later by a presidential directive to open the border “for an indefinite time.” With thousands protesting in Cairo and around the country over several days – and participants chanting anti-Mubarak slogans and making the link between the regime and Israel explicit — closing Rafah was no longer tenable. More likely, though, is a policy of deliberate ambiguity: while Palestinians have crossed through the Rafah terminal in the last few days, much of the aid is still getting held back or being made to go through Karam Abu Salem. There is no clear commitment to keep Rafah open, and Cairo has lobbied hard at the Arab League to keep diplomacy focused on action at the U.N. Security Council and away from Egyptian policy.

Egypt’s next concern will be the future of the blockade. In the short term, international focus will be on providing humanitarian relief and construction materials. Ultimately, though, Gazans and their supporters worldwide want to restore the economic integrity of the Palestinian Occupied Territories — their ability to trade among themselves and with rest of the world. For this, international support for Palestinian reconciliation would be necessary. Egypt’s position will be that that it is up to Israel to do that, with international support, on its side of the border. The Obama administration is reportedly pushing Israel to relax the enforcement of the blockade.

But what if Israel refuses to budge? If there is no breakthrough, the pressure returns on opening Rafah — and the last thing Egypt wants is to be seen as responsible for Gaza. Its priority is thus to ensure it does not come out a loser from the fallout of the flotilla incident. The Mubarak regime is being confronted by its complicity in the Gaza blockade just as its legitimacy has plummeted amidst uncertainty over Mubarak’s health (he was hospitalized for three weeks in March and is rumored to have cancer) and Egypt’s future leadership. That too will play a role in the calculations of not only the Egyptians, but also the Obama administration.

May 6, 2010

Maariv

The crisis between Israel and the United States is not the result of any kind of hallucination that may or may not be afflicting the Obama administration. It is also not because of something as simplistic as a lack of chemistry between the U.S. president and the Israeli prime minister. The essence of the clash can be linked to the changed strategic global map and any attempt by the Israeli government to belittle the clash and to claim that it is merely a fleeting cloud in an otherwise clear sky is dangerously misleading. The change in the global strategic outlook is happening primarily because of the possibility that a non-state body – such as al-Qa’ida – is investing time and money in reaching the point of practical nuclear capability. And al-Qa’ida is not alone.

The reason that the change is so significant is that, from the moment that a country joins the exclusive club of nations which possess the capability to develop and use nuclear weapons, it is immediately put under pressure by other members of that club to ensure that the weapons will never actually be used. A country with military nuclear capability does not really pose any kind of threat to the rest of the world. Even an irrational country like Iran knows that if it were ever to use a nuclear weapon against someone – and it doesn’t matter who that ‘someone’ is – it would soon cease to exist as a sovereign country. We know that Iran would never use the nuclear weapon it is trying so hard to manufacture, no matter how irrational we consider Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be.

The danger of Iran, which is a terrorist state, going nuclear lies in the possibility that it would supply nuclear know-how to a global terrorist organization. There can be no deterring a terrorist organization from using a nuke, since terrorist organizations do not have the same responsibilities that states have. Given this lack of ability to deter terrorist organizations, Israel, the United States and the rest of the Western world are facing a very grave threat. There are two options available to the West to ensure that this scenario does not become reality. The first is an all-out war against al-Qa’ida, the Taliban and their supporters across the globe. But this option would entail endless bloodshed and a huge financial cost, which the West cannot keep up for year after year.

The second option is to fashion a rapprochement with the moderate Arab states and peoples, who have similar interests to the West and who live in close physical proximity to the terrorist organization. When one examines the issue of Jewish construction in Jerusalem and in the settlements – or even the very existence of the settlements themselves – in the light of abovementioned threat, one does not need to be a student of international relations to understand that this is a price that simply has to be paid. It has nothing to do with rightist or leftist ideology. It is not one of Obama’s whims or some delusional approach by his administration. Any attempt to interpret the strategic map that is emerging today in any other way will lead us to a tragic miscalculation which could turn out to be uncorrectable.

We are talking about the survivability of the United States, the possibility that it will not be able to deter terrorist organization and to defend itself in the future; the very real possibility that it will become vulnerable to a massive terrorist attack which it will not be able to respond to since there is no clear target to attack. There are times when leaders need to take a long, hard look at reality and to act accordingly. And, in this case, ‘acting accordingly’ often means changing its own outlook, going against its most basic ideology, against the empty slogans which whipped voters into a frenzy the last time there were elections. Slogans such as ‘the war for Jerusalem’ are a sad example of blind ideology, which could end up costing us not just Jerusalem, but Tel Aviv as well.

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/28/is_the_israel_palestine_conflict_ripe_for_obama_s_intervention

By Henry Siegman

April 28, 2010

In an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal (04/26/2010), Richard Haass, the President of Council on Foreign Relations, argues that advocates of a more forceful U.S. intervention in the Middle East peace process have exaggerated that conflict’s impact on America’s interests elsewhere in the region.

I don’t know anyone among those who have cited the damage the Israel-Palestine conflict is causing U.S. interests in the region who believes this concern to be anything other than a secondary reason for a more muscular U.S. initiative to bring this conflict to a close. For everyone, the main reason is the human cost to millions of Palestinians who have lived under the boot of a military occupation for over 40 years, and to Israel’s citizens who, while living increasingly undisturbed and prosperous lives, nevertheless exist in the shadow of the threat of recurring wars and Qassam rockets.

The second compelling reason for a quick end to the conflict for all those who advocate it is the unrestrained expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, whose undeclared but widely understood goal it is to make impossible the emergence of a Palestinian state. This outcome would leave Israel with the choice of granting Palestinians Israeli citizenship, thus giving up its Jewish identity, or ending its democratic character as it enforces a regime that denies millions of Palestinians their individual and national rights-in effect turning Israel into an apartheid state.

Oddly enough, these concerns find no place in Richard Haass’s essay as he warns against exaggerating the bearing of a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict on U.S. interests.

Forty plus years into this conflict and into the creeping Israeli annexation of territory in the 22 percent of Palestine left the Palestinians, Haass pleads for patience for the situation to “ripen” before we try to end it by putting forward an American plan. He maintains that what is missing is not ideas, but the will and ability of the parties to compromise. Haass notes that “Palestinian leadership remains weak and divided; the Israeli government is too ideological and fractured; U.S. relations are too strained for Israel to place much faith in American promises.”

One would have thought the problem has been placing faith in Israeli promises. But more to the point, it is precisely the ability to compromise that will be the victim of further delay-for it will discredit the moderate leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad who will surely not be replaced by greater moderates. Their replacement will be Hamas-if we are lucky-or the more extreme groups in Gaza that are now challenging Hamas for what these groups consider to be Hamas’s excessive moderation.

It is true that Palestinian leadership, as Haass states, remains weak and divided. But their weakness and division is the result of Israeli and American failure to reward their moderation. As far as Palestinians are concerned, aside from marginal improvements in the economy, for which the international donor community is largely responsible, it has produced only a hardening of Israeli positions on the core issues.

More to the point, the Palestinian divisions that Haass deplores were deliberately planned and fostered by Israel and the U.S. during the previous U.S. administration. There is something less than honorable in pointing to problems that our own misguided policies created as a reason the victims of our policies are undeserving of our support.

Of course, the U.S. must stand by its commitment to protect Israel’s security. Haass must know there was never any reason for Israel to doubt the solidity of U.S. commitments on this score. Indeed, the over-the-top American assurances that there will never be “any daylight” between us and Israel when it comes to security may come to haunt us. For if we heed the advice to delay stronger U.S. intervention in the peace process for future, riper moments, we may find ourselves tied solidly to an Israeli government that-in order to preserve Israel’s Jewish identity-imposes an apartheid regime on a Palestinian population under its control that outnumbers its Jewish counterpart.

Most of the political parties that comprise Netanyahu’s government, including Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s Foreign Minister, and Shas, have left no doubt that if forced to choose between democracy and the state’s Jewish identity, they would opt without the slightest hesitation to end Israel’s democracy.

What exactly would an American president do when confronted with such a new reality, which undoubtedly would again produce a spate of full-page advertisements and AIPAC resolutions in the U.S. Congress stressing the Jewish people’s biblical attachment to the land and demanding that we stand by our traditional ally? How would a less than forthright U.S. response to such a situation play in the rest of the world? Isn’t it in America’s national interest-not to speak of the interests of the State of Israel and its people and of the Palestinian people-for an American president to exert every effort to prevent such a likely deterioration that would force our policymakers to make the most agonizing and fateful decisions?

None of these concerns seem to find a place in Haass’s calculations of a “ripeness” that should motivate an American president to move expeditiously to help put an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.  He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress.

By James Dobbins

May 1, 2010

The Middle East has seen numerous peacekeeping operations over the past fifty years. Several continue to this day. For over three decades, a U.S.-led force in the Sinai has helped separate Israeli and Egyptian forces and maintain peace between these two states. On Israel’s northern border, a UN force in Lebanon seeks to prevent renewed fighting between Hezbollah militants and Israel. Helpful as these missions have been, they have done nothing to advance resolution of the core dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbors. They have not resolved the fate of the Palestinian population displaced when Israel was created in 1948 or determined the final status of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967 but never incorporated into it.

Something more than inter-positional peacekeeping will be needed as part of any accord designed to resolve these core issues. Simply separating the Israeli and Palestinian populations will not be enough, because it is difficult to imagine a Palestinian state that could, immediately upon the signature of a peace agreement, proceed to effectively control its side of the divide and reliably guarantee faithful execution of that accord. The absence of such a state presents a classic chicken versus egg dilemma. There can be no Middle East peace without a Palestinian party capable of effectively controlling the territory under its control, yet no such Palestinian party can be created without a peace agreement. Experience has shown the challenges of establishing these two conditions sequentially. Israel will not end the occupation until it has a reliable negotiating partner, one capable of fulfilling whatever obligations it accepts, but such a Palestinian partner cannot be created under Israeli occupation. These two prerequisites for peace must be put in place more or less concurrently. Doing so will probably require some third party to help the emerging Palestinian state establish itself and at the same time assure Israelis that the peace accord will be faithfully implemented.

Though the nature of a hypothetical peacekeeping force in a new Palestinian state is fraught with uncertainty, it is possible to make well informed predictions about what circumstances would be likely to result in its creation. It seems unlikely that the United States or the rest of the international community would be willing to deploy troops into the Palestinian territories in order to garrison an Israeli occupation or to substitute for it. So a precondition for the deployment of such a force would be an end to that occupation. On the other hand, Israel appears unlikely to agree to a full transfer of sovereignty to a Palestinian state – particularly for functions potentially affecting the safety of the Israeli population, such as security and border control. Thus, an international mission designed to help keep an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to combine both inter-positional and state-building functions. Certainly one of its responsibilities would be to help prevent incursions and other attacks by Palestinian extremists into Israel, thereby also forestalling Israeli military incursions into the Palestinian state. But the mission would also have to help that state develop the capacity to secure and effectively govern its own territory.

Many non-military elements of an international state-building mission are already in place. U.S., European and UN personnel have been working for some time to improve the quality of Palestinian governance. But these efforts are taking place in the midst of an ongoing military occupation run by an Israeli government that is unsure about whether it truly wants the emergence of a competent Palestinian state – particularly one capable of securing its own territory and population. The international community’s state-building programs are also being conducted in the midst of an ongoing conflict among the Palestinians themselves regarding the nature of their state and control over its institutions. External efforts to build more effective Palestinian institutions are unlikely to make adequate progress until both these impediments – Israeli ambivalence and Palestinian infighting – are removed or at least mitigated in a manner conducive to success.

Palestinian authorities will not want to trade an Israeli occupation for an international one, so international authority would need to be carefully delineated and substantially less sweeping than the current Israeli writ. External assistance in the field of state-building, on the other hand, is likely to be considerably more extensive than what is currently provided – both because the conditions will be more favorable and because with their troops on the ground and at risk, contributing nations will have a strong incentive to improve Palestinian institutional capacity to serve the Palestinian population and control its own territory.

Considerable buy-in would be necessary from both the Israeli and Palestinian sides before the United States or any other government would likely be willing to support such a mission. There is no strong constituency in the United States for coercing Israel to make peace. Nor is there likely to be any stomach among potential troop-contributing nations to force the Palestinians to do so. Thus, if such a mission is to take place, it is more likely to resemble recent UN-led post-conflict missions, which have had the assent of both sides, than the more robust NATO-led peace enforcement efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo – not to speak of the even more intense counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The UN is not a plausible candidate to lead this particular mission, however. Most UN members regard the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to be, at best, unduly prolonged, and, at worst, illegitimate. Israel, by the same token, does not regard the United Nations as sufficiently impartial to undertake a mission so central to Israeli security. To garner the support of both of the key parties, therefore, it is more likely that the military component of any such international mission would need to be organized as a U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” or, perhaps more likely, by the NATO Alliance.

A plausible construct would thus be a NATO-led military component with a civilian-led parallel organization to handle political, governance and development matters. Both components would require the explicit consent of all the parties to the conflict, and their mandates would likely be embedded in the peace settlement. The governments involved would also likely seek and receive a parallel UN Security Council mandate. The international civilian leader would be appointed by a select group of interested countries, to include those contributing significantly to the NATO-led military force as well as those prepared to provide substantial economic assistance. These governments would also need to provide funding to allow the civilian leader to assemble a staff and to conduct a variety of advisory and assistance activities. This civilian leader would probably need some extraordinary powers deriving from the peace agreement and the accompanying Security Council resolution. Enforcement would largely depend upon voluntary compliance but would have to be backed by a willingness to employ NATO military force, or alternatively the threat to withdraw that force and risk an Israeli reoccupation.

Any peace settlement would fall apart if Israel were to be exposed to continued attacks from Palestinian territory, and these will occur unless the overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the settlement. Achieving peace among Palestinians will thus be essential to sustaining peace between Arabs and Israelis. Certainly there will be few international volunteers to man a peacekeeping mission in a Palestinian state at war with itself. Thus such a deployment will probably require agreement, not just between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but also between the two major contenders for power in the new Palestinian state, Fatah and Hamas.

Summary

In sum, a peacekeeping force in Palestine is no substitute for agreement among the main Palestinian factions, and between them and Israel, but is a likely and perhaps essential component of such an accord. Although the United Nations is unlikely to be chosen to lead such a force, its experience in overseeing the implementation of a dozen or more similar such peace agreements over the past couple of decades, as well as NATO’s endeavors in Bosnia and Kosovo suggest that this is a feasible, if by no means a certain or easy endeavor.

* James Dobbins, a former Assistant Secretary of State, served throughout the 1990s as the Clinton administration’s Special Envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, and then as the Bush administration’s first Special Envoy for Afghanistan following 9/11. Since joining the RAND Corporation, where he heads the International Security and Defense Policy Center, he has produced a series of studies looking at the American, UN and European record of nation-building over the past sixty years.

The views expressed in US/MEPolicy Briefs are not necessarily shared by the U.S./Middle East Project.