Yes to US Intervention, No to Imposed Solutions

Reflections on the Second Anniversary of the Collapse of Oslo and the Outbreak of the Intifada

 

Gidon D. Remba

 December 24, 2002

A quarter century ago I stood in Israel’s Knesset in Jerusalem as Egyptian president Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to extend his nation’s hand in peace to Israel.  One year later, the first Arab-Israeli peace accord was struck at Camp David.   When Israeli and Palestinian leaders attempted to reprise this feat at Camp David two years ago, their summit ended in failure, opening the gates to a new Palestinian-Israeli war.  Now as a US invasion of Iraq looms, we mourn the second anniversary of the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli Oslo peace process, and the outbreak of the second intifada.  Can the bloodletting be stanched and peacemaking revived?   Watching peace unfold first hand between Egyptians and Israelis twenty-five years ago, I learned a lesson which many have now forgotten. 

The beguiling fantasy of a magical imposed solution to the hundred-year war between the two long-suffering peoples is increasingly enticing a despairing left in the US and Europe.  Calls for suspending US economic and military aid, divestment of American business investments in Israel, and for boycotts against Israeli universities and industry, at best reflect a romantic, desperate species of impatient and reckless utopianism.  At worst, they belie a discriminatory campaign aimed at delegitimating Israel, while ignoring states committing far worse human rights abuses, including many in the Arab world.  The same left that blames US-backed UN economic sanctions against Iraq for the death of innocents now doesn’t balk at applying such sanctions against Israel.  Unemployment and hunger among the poor and underprivileged in Israel are on the rise, as the battered economy takes its greatest toll on the most vulnerable members of Israeli society—Palestinian Israelis, Sephardic Jews and others.  According to official statistics recently released by Israel’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, nearly one in five Israelis and 27 percent of all children in the country live below the poverty line; by the end of next year, the Ministry’s researchers estimate that nearly one in three Israeli children could be living in poverty.   Palestinian destitution is even greater. 

Violence and terror cannot midwife Palestinian independence—they will only abort it; nor will one-sided sanctions against Israel which falsely liken the Israeli-Palestinian reality to that of South Africa.  Peace did not require the acceptance by the black majority of the right to national independence of the Afrikaners, and an abiding commitment—in deed and not only in word—to honoring their right as a people to live free from armed violence in their own state.  But Middle East peace does indeed require such commitments from the Palestinians towards Israel, just as it demands that Israel grant the Palestinian right to national self-determination and freedom from Israeli dominion.  Economic sanctions against Israel alone are not only morally noxious; they will fail to hasten peace.   We must first see how both radical left and right—from Palestinian ultra-nationalists and their Euro-American champions, to the Bush and Sharon regimes—speak in the dulcet cadence of Middle East peace and human rights, while offering only strife and tragedy.  All have hitched their wagons to a strategy of coercion, military or economic.  Only by uncovering its bankruptcy can we envision the way up from the maelstrom.

 

Radical Refugees:  Hijacking Human Rights

 

Among the final status issues explored at the Camp David II summit in July 2000, and at the Taba talks in January 2001—including settlements, territory, Palestinian statehood, Israeli security, water, and Jerusalem—the problem of the Palestinian refugees remains the most nettlesome.  The refugee problem cuts to the heart of the national conflict.  Palestinians who demand a right of return for as many as four million refugees and their descendants to former villages and homes in Israel subvert the Palestinian claim to accept a two-state solution.  The exercise of that right by an appreciable number of refugees would soon sabotage Israel’s Jewish majority, and its character as a Jewish state.   Palestinian radicals call for an unfettered right of return under the guise of human rights or international law, which do not sanction these claims.  Hussein Ibish, Communications Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, has written in the New York Times that “the right of return for refugees is guaranteed by all basic human rights treaties;” those who believe otherwise “would have Palestinians renounce their basic human rights to accommodate Jewish ethno-nationalism.”  Ibish’s polemic should be seen for what it is:  a new attempt to delegitimize the right of Israel to exist by cynical misuse of the idea of human rights.   Ibish charges that maintaining Israel as a Jewish state would be to tolerate a pernicious ideology.  In fact, it is to recognize that Israeli Jews insist on the same right to national self-determination in their own political space that Palestinians themselves claim in their bid for independence in the West Bank and Gaza. 

 

Ali Abunimah, Vice President of the Arab American Action Network and Electronic Intifada editor, denounces Palestinian moderates like Sari Nusseibeh who believe that the only practicable and just solution to the refugee problem is to realize the right of return in a new state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. Those choosing not to return to Palestine would be provided options of rehabilitation, citizenship and compensation in the states where they reside, resettlement in third countries, or family reunification in Israel on humanitarian grounds for a limited number.  Abunimah dubs such solutions “the shredding of fundamental [Palestinian] human rights.”  He claims that “the right of return is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own and return to his country.’ Decades of international jurisprudence support this principle.” 

 

But Lex Takkenberg, who heads the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Gaza, sums up his comprehensive study of The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law, published by Oxford University Press, by concluding:  “The refugees do have the legal right to return to their ‘own country,’ Palestine. As long as there is no Palestinian state, this right applies in principle to the entire territory of the former British Mandate. However, now that the PLO, as the representative of the Palestinian people, has recognized the right of Israel to exist, it is obvious that the Palestinian refugees will only be able to exercise their right to return in conjunction with their right to self-determination” in a Palestinian state living at peace with Israel.   Many scholars of human rights law cited by Takkenberg agree that the right to return referred to in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a “right of nationals to return to the their own country,’ and as the Palestinian refugees are not Israeli nationals, accordingly this does not apply to them.”  Most Western and non-Western scholars agree with a UN study of the right to leave and return that the problem of the Palestinian refugees should be solved within the framework of the right to national self-determination in their own state, not through irredentist claims about historic Palestine masked in the lofty rhetoric of human rights. 

 

Renewed political assaults on the legitimacy of Israel, attempts to turn Jews into a minority in a single Palestinian Arab majority-ruled state only move us farther from an end to the national struggle, prolonging the war, and the affliction of both peoples, including Palestinian refugees.  No interpretation of human rights law which promised the perpetuation of a national conflict and the destruction of a people’s right to national independence—in this case that of Israeli Jews—could faithfully reflect the tenor of international law, whose overriding goal is peace and justice.   Such tactics sabotage the forces of reconciliation in both societies.  Israelis refuse to commit national suicide and relinquish their right to a Jewish state, just as Palestinians insist on creating a Muslim, Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza, as reflected in the proposed new Palestinian constitution.   The only viable road to peace in our lifetime requires mutual acceptance of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinian people, as Palestinian and Israeli moderates have recognized. The problem of the Palestinian refugees must be solved in a way that is consistent with the national rights of both peoples. 

 

While firing broadsides against the peace plan devised by Palestinian leader Sari Nusseibeh and former Israeli Shin Bet security service chief Ami Ayalon, Abunimah too objects to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, again claiming that both law and justice make such a state illicit:  “While virtually all Israelis deny the right of Palestinians to return to their homes, Israel now demands that the Palestinians recognize that Israel has a 'right to exist as a Jewish state.' This has absolutely no basis whatsoever in any law or principle of justice. Even if Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, no one can grant it a right to maintain a specific demographic composition—a Jewish majority—for eternity.   To do so would mean that if the natural processes of population growth, immigration and emigration were to change the demographic composition in a way that interfered with Israel's ‘right’ to have a Jewish majority then Israel would be allowed to alter its own demographic composition.” 

 

Abunimah insists that if

 

a) Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, then this is tantamount to

b) a timeless claim to maintain a Jewish majority; moreover, he argues that this implies that

c) Israel would have the right to engage in “transfer,” or ethnic cleansing and forced sterilization.  “After all,” he concludes, “if Israel has a ‘right’ to maintain a Jewish majority, then this right must be enforceable or it is simply meaningless.”

 

But affirming Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state does not imply acceptance of (b) and (c).  Abunimah has simply begged the question by rigging a loaded definition of “Jewish state” which is designed arbitrarily to lead to just the conclusions he seeks to confute.  Supporters of Israel as a Jewish state can deny both (b) and (c) and accept that so long as Israel does in fact have a Jewish majority, and as long as this demographic mix is a result of morally defensible policies—which obviously exclude “transfer,” ethnic cleansing or forced sterilization—then it is legitimate, as a matter of both morality and law, for Israel to remain a Jewish state in important respects. 

 

Speaking of the Law of Return, Israel’s ties with the Jewish Diaspora, and the maintenance of a Jewish majority, political scientist Alan Dowty notes that “None of these features is inherently inconsistent with liberal democracy, and none of them are in fact unique to Israel. There are at least two dozen ethnic democracies in the world (among several dozen ethnic states), and a large number of states grant citizenship on the basis of ethnic identity or descent.”  Observes Israeli constitutional law scholar Ruth Gavison:  “The Jewishness of Israel is, first and foremost, the recognition of the fact that Israel is the state in which the Jewish people exercises its right to national self-determination.  Many of the world’s democracies, old and new, have a distinct culture analogous to Israel’s Jewish culture.  The constitutions of most European countries reveal that they are nation-states in this sense.  These states celebrate their distinct histories, languages, identities, and emblems.  Many of their citizens do not share this nationality.  But so long as the rights of these citizens are not denied, and so long as they can participate fully in the political and civil life of their societies, we do not deny the democratic nature of the state.”  “There is no contradiction between striving to grant the Arabs equality as required by law and decency and the fulfillment of Zionism,” explains Israel’s Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein. “Whoever wants to preserve Israel as a democratic and Jewish state must strive to grant equality to the Arabs.”

 

There is no clash between Israel's remaining a haven for persecuted Jews, or inviting free Jewish immigration under the Law of Return, and its becoming fully a state of all its citizens, a principle which guides the jurisprudence of Israel’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak.  Just as Israel gives preference to Jews wishing to emigrate to it under the Law of Return, so Palestine will have a Palestinian Law of Return, which gives preference to Palestinians, especially Palestinian refugees, to emigrate into the new polity.  Israel is both a Jewish and a liberal democratic state, and liberal democracy requires equality among all citizens, Jewish or Palestinian, in the domestic public sphere where government acts—when it provides education, allocates budget and land, regulates employment, assesses taxes, and imposes the duty on citizens to serve the state through national service.   Peace between Israel and Palestine will help remove the main obstacle to equal civic benefits and duties for Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians—the ongoing national conflict.  Shawki Hatib, a Palestinian Israeli who serves as chairman of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, told an Israeli audience in Tel Aviv marking the seventh anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder that “Rabin was the only Israeli leader who gave hope to Israeli Arabs, the first prime minister to give them equal rights and to promote their civil status.” In the Jewish republic, Israel, living at peace with a Palestinian state, Palestinian citizens will be more apt to enjoy equal citizenship.  Equal civic duties means national service for all citizens, including eventually, when conditions permit, service for all Israeli citizens in the Israel Defense Forces which will, with the evolution of peace between Israel and its neighbors, no longer face an Arab army with which it is likely to be at war. 

 

The UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa from August 28^th to September 1^st 2001 called for “the reinstitution of UN resolution 3379 determining the practices of Zionism as racist practices.”  It termed Israel’s laws of return and citizenship discriminatory, designed to “maintain the exclusive nature of the State of Israel as a Jewish state to the exclusion of all other groups.”  But the Palestinian law of return will discriminate against non-Palestinians and non-Arabs, including Jews, in just the same way that Israel’s law of return gives preference to Jews.   Yet the Durban declaration further called “upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state as in the case of South Africa which means the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel.” Anti-Zionists who deny the legitimacy only of Jewish national self-determination, while tacitly affirming this right for Palestinian Arabs and other peoples, seek to impale Israel on one or another horn of a false dilemma.   Only Israel’s wish to maintain a Jewish nation-state is deemed a moral toxin.   If such intolerance towards Jews, and anti-Jewish bias, is not anti-Semitic, it’s hard to imagine what is. 

 

Angels and Demons: Rationalizing Bias

 

After Harvard President Lawrence Summers described the divestment campaign against Israel as “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent,” a group of faculty from Harvard and MIT mounted a defense in the Boston Globe, “Divestment Petition is Not Anti-Semitic.”  (October 4, 2002) They maintain, first, that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not symmetric because “Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, not the reverse.  Palestinians are killed by the Israeli military acting under orders from the government; Israelis are killed by individuals with no sovereign government to represent or restrain them.”  This overlooks the crucial fact that the Palestinian Authority successfully thwarted most terrorist attacks against Israel from 1997-2000 by deploying its forces against individuals and groups who sought to undermine a negotiated peace with Israel.  With the eruption of the intifada in the thick of post-Camp David talks, Arafat and the PA reversed course, choosing to aid and abet these groups, undermining the Israeli government with which they were negotiating.  They did so by releasing terrorists from PA jails, funding some operations, turning a blind eye to others, and abandoning all security cooperation with Israel.  The only realistic hope for ending the occupation now and working out a two-state peace formula requires both sides to take simultaneous unilateral steps to build a truce, and restore the trust needed to resume political dialogue.  The US must spearhead a new diplomatic initiative whereby Israel will suspend offensive military operations and offer clear, significant and immediate political incentives to Palestinian moderates, such as the dismantling of some populated settlements.  With US, EU and Arab help, Palestinians should reconstitute their security services under a unified accountable command, orchestrating an end to the armed intifada.   Such Palestinian steps will bolster the fortunes of the peace camp and the left in Israel.  There is no better time than now to do so when Labor has bolted the Sharon government to face the Israeli public with its own platform in the January 28th election.

 

Another Harvard professor, Jay M. Harris, hits home in his response to the divestment campaign, published in the Harvard Crimson.  He points to “the basic Manichean structure of the petitioners' narrative in which all blame rests entirely with the Jews.  Put simply, the petitioners prefer to reduce the complexity of the situation to a cartoon in which Palestinians stand on the side of the angels, which leaves the Jews right where, at an earlier time, many Christian zealots were quite happy to put them, on the side of the demons. If such a simplistic and narrative line is not ‘anti-Semitic in effect’ what is?”

 

Second, the pro-divestment authors claim that “the target of the petition is not the state of Israel, but its policy of occupation.”  But it is Israelis and Israeli society which will suffer the effects of economic sanctions, not simply Israelis who occupy Palestinian territory.   Many who support divestment do not make this fine but unworldly distinction. These include the hundreds of college students from seventy campuses around the US who came together in mid-October at the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s pro-divestment conference at the University of Michigan.  Many publicly oppose the existence of a Jewish state called Israel, which they liken to South Africa as an illegitimate “apartheid state,” even were Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.  They call for an unqualified right of refugee return to Israel, and favor divestment as a means to undermine Israel’s economic viability, the better to make way for a single, multi-national state in all of Palestine, where Palestinian Muslims will form the majority, and Israeli Jews a minority.  Are “occupation-only” divestment advocates not responsible for the unintended broader consequences of their actions?

 

Again Jay M. Harris scores a direct rhetorical hit:   “Given the history of the divestment strategy and its earlier target, the claim that only the policies of the Sharon government are targeted here seems strikingly naive. As we learn from the precedent of South Africa, divestment is a tool far too powerful and destructive to express opposition to a set of specific policies in any focused way (apartheid was much too pervasive a political and social phenomenon to be called a policy). Rather, the divestment strategy was aimed at the very foundations of a morally repugnant state. Whatever the intent of the signers, the strategy chosen cannot help but say that we as a moral community cannot tolerate our hands being dirtied by association with the State of Israel. Summers understood this well when he described the campaign as seeking ‘to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested.’  Demonizing the Jewish State as uniquely repugnant, worse even than Sudan—as the campaign implicitly does—is something that most Jews cannot help but see as ‘anti-Semitic in effect.’”

 

Still, champions of divestment from Israel insist that they are not targeting Israel alone “when wrongs are committed by governments everywhere.”  After all, many signers of their petition “have been involved in a variety of efforts to end human rights abuses around the world.”   No one doubts the commitment of the petitioners to fighting human rights violations in other countries.  But it is only Israel against which the blunt weapon of divestiture is deployed.   “These are the tactics of delegitimization, aimed at isolating and destabilizing Israel itself,” warns Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet in the Chicago Tribune (October 20, 2002). 

 

Finally, the authors insist that “Israel is held to no standard at all when any criticism of its government’s policies is branded as anti-Semitic.”   But Summers himself made clear in opposing divestment that “there is much in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged.”   Opponents of divestment, including Peace Now, are among the most vocal critics of the Israeli government’s policies.  No one accuses the pro-divestment crowd of anti-Semitism simply because they criticize the Sharon government.  Those who charge anti-Semitism rest their case on the unfair singling out of Israel, the demonization of Jews and Israel and the assault on the economic foundations of the Jewish state which the divestment strategy portends.

 

Pax Americana

 

There are no workable, coerced solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  Ham-handed paternalism will only arouse great opposition in both societies, jeopardizing the prospects for success, and the will to build peaceful relations.  A total volte-face by America towards Israel, from ally to antagonist, bullying only Israel while demanding nothing of the Palestinians, will only whet the appetite of the enemies of peace, while undermining the credibility of the US as a dependable partner.  Oslo was destroyed by extremists on both sides who sought its demise before the ink was dry; it would be a grievous error to force peace in a way which would embolden its foes.  There is a wide gulf between the laissez-faire policy of the Bush Administration and a full-bore coerced pax Americana of the kind some leftists now favor. A well-calibrated diplomatic intervention by the US has a far better chance of success than a superpower diktat, imposed with the favorite cudgel of the radical left—withholding all US aid to Israel, and only Israel, until it capitulates.  This nostrum is more a measure of animus against Ariel Sharon and antipathy toward Israel than a wise and well-considered strategy for crafting a durable peace.  Nor is it likely to happen under any US administration.  History teaches that the US has used the threat of economic pressure on Israel only when there was a US-backed peace initiative already at work, buttressed by widespread support from the Israeli public.  From the struggle for peace between Egypt and Israel we learn that popular backing for peace even in non-democratic societies is indispensable.  Progress now demands unleashing the forces of democratic change among both Palestinians and Israelis.  The United States alone has the power to foster such popular movements on both sides of the ramparts. 

The US must offer the Israeli and Palestinian publics a diplomatic opening which they can willingly enter, and it must keep the door wide open for as long as it takes. Democratic processes of change in Israel, and political reform among Palestinians, will be set in motion.  The forces of moderation among the Palestinian leadership will be empowered, the intifada war factions sapped.   It will take diplomatic pressure on both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to create such an opening and sustain it.  But coercion of leaders can work only when the people are actively enlisted in the battle.  

President Jimmy Carter practiced effective coercive diplomacy with Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978, helping to father the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, an achievement for which he has finally now won the Nobel Peace Prize.  Coercive diplomacy worked because Carter had at his disposal two powerful allies which under present circumstances the US president lacks:  the support of Israel’s then-Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan, and its Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, giving voice to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who marched under Peace Now’s banners in Israel.   In the morality play of the radical left, Israel is the great Goliathan ogre, while Palestinians are the noble oppressed little David.  Goliath must be punished and restrained.  But both sides are victims of their own, and one another’s folly, and both bleed and suffer under the crushing weight of Oslo’s collapse.   The radical left favors one-sided compulsion of Israel alone, forgetting that it will take enforcement and monitoring of Palestinian commitments to maintain a lasting truce to insure popular Israeli support for implementing difficult concessions.  And it will take both pressure and aid to consolidate the diverse Palestinian militias under a single accountable anti-terrorist command.   Their task will be to prevent the extremists, by force if necessary, from sabotaging a new movement towards two states living finally at peace with one another.

The Palestinians entered Oslo expecting an independent state free of Israeli troops and settlements at the end of the day.  With no agreement forthcoming and the doubling of the settler population during the Oslo decade, most Palestinians lost faith in the prospect of diplomacy and dialogue, and supported factions who turned to violence, terror and a strategy of coercion.  Israelis entered Oslo expecting security and peace at the end of the day; with no peace and rapidly deteriorating security, Israelis lost faith in the prospect of peace talks, voting Barak from office, handing the keys to Sharon, endorsing a strategy of counter-coercion through superior military force.  Yet today, both Palestinians and Israelis are divided within themselves. While Palestinians now overwhelmingly believe, mistakenly, that armed violence and terror is the only way to bring Israel to remove its forces and settlements from the West Bank and Gaza and win independence, most also favor a return to peace talks with Israel.  This Palestinian will is conditioned on achieving a truce and initiating talks which offer tangible hope of ending Israeli control and achieving statehood.  While Israelis endorse Sharon’s hard-line military tactics to defend against Palestinian terror attacks, most favor return to the peace table and withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza under a peace arrangement, allowing for minor border changes.  Israelis, in the end, don’t want to rule Palestinians; Palestinians don’t want to be ruled by Israelis.  Both peoples favor a two-state solution.  But the mutual will for peace will not be realized unless we can short-circuit the near-term appetite for violence which bedevils both publics and their current leaders.  

Oslo Without Illusions: Democracy, Regime Change and Peace

 

How can the bloody Palestinian-Israeli vortex be stilled and nonviolent dialogue revived?   The US must play an assertive role in spurring a new political breakthrough.  It should table a Security Council Resolution which calls on both parties to return to peace talks based on the progress achieved at Camp David and Taba, and the Saudi-Arab League peace plan, following a US-monitored truce.  It must practice persistent US public criticism of Israeli and Palestinian actions which obstruct negotiations, instead of parroting Sharon’s dissonant song, which ensures that peace talks are deferred forever, bearing no fruit even if somehow leaders met.  It is high time that the Bush Administration overcome its post-Clinton Camp David phobia.  The  US should announce its readiness to convene an international peace conference under American auspices based on the Taba and Saudi proposals, clearly stating that it will strongly encourage both parties, with both carrot and stick, to reach an agreement along these lines. The US should inform Palestinians and Israelis publicly that it will back such a conference if both do their part to squelch violence in the period leading up to the summit.  The implementation of any agreement reached should be conditional on consistent Palestinian and Israeli truce compliance, monitored by US-led NATO troops on the ground.  And membership in NATO for Israel should follow the execution of such a peace treaty, which many Arab states, including the Saudis, have pledged they would join, leading to diplomatic and normalized relations with most Arab nations.  Skeptics who doubt Saudi sincerity, are invited to call their bluff—by welcoming the Saudis to the conference and presenting them with a peace treaty to sign.  Better still, the Saudis, along with other moderate Arab states, can play a constructive role in reaching such an accord by providing political cover to Palestinian leaders who make the necessary compromises on sovereignty in Jerusalem and on the refugees, issues which are of great moment to Muslim and Arab states.    

No one could reasonably infer from such US conditions that a return to final status negotiations represents “a reward for terrorism.”  Both the return to peaceful dialogue and the implementation of agreements reached should be contingent on Palestinian compliance with their fundamental commitment to non-violence, and Israeli compliance with its commitments to withdraw—both sides must honor their part of the land-for-peace bargain.  Firm US public backing for these first bold steps along a new political track will transform the Israeli public’s attitude towards the Sharon government.  At the same time, they will arouse Palestinian opposition to the use of terror and armed violence, which gained popularity when the negotiations failed and Palestinians lost faith in the political process.  The notion that diplomacy must not begin until Palestinians change both their minds and conduct over violence puts the cart before the horse:  the promise of real political progress will prompt the desired change of course on the Palestinian side, while enabling Israel and the US to rightfully maintain that peace talks did not commence until the fires ebbed.  The creation of a sustained opportunity for a US-backed diplomatic breakthrough will turn the Israeli public towards a new ruling coalition capable of seizing a new chance, just as it will turn most of the Palestinian public and its leaders to abandon support for violence and terror, as the Oslo Accords did in 1993.  Palestinian support for violence against Israel plummeted to 20% when the accords were signed, and hopes were high for a negotiated solution, while backing for talks with Israel peaked at 80%.   Such conditions can be recreated.   

Partial incremental approaches like the “road map” adopted by the Quartet (the US, the EU, the UN and Russia) are bound to fail. To be sure, implementation of any comprehensive accord must be phased. But the continued deferral of further attempts to formulate a declaration of principles addressing all final status issues repeats one of the fundamental errors of the fractured Oslo approach.  To galvanize the sustained backing of both publics for a renewed peace initiative and consolidate a stable truce, both sides must clearly grasp, and commit to, its end point from the get-go.  The time for creative ambiguity and incrementalism is long gone.   Upfront clarity leaves no doubt as to the kinds of actions which would undermine transition to the finish line; US enforcement of a final treaty’s terms affords little room for opposition to gather steam.   Settlement growth is incompatible with the emergence of Palestinian statehood; phased settlement removal is crucial to maintaining Palestinian confidence in a final deal. Palestinian terrorism is inconsistent with Israeli security, as refugee return is with Jewish statehood.  Security cooperation, terror prevention, and a pragmatic resolution to the refugee issue are a sine qua non for maintaining an Israeli mandate for a great leap forward.   

Without US intervention, past Arab-Israeli peace overtures could not have succeeded, nor advanced to the extent they did.  In the present context, the US cannot wait for Israelis and Palestinians to re-initiate a political exchange over core issues.  It must lay the groundwork, jump-start and nurse the conversation to fruition, with the backing of a willing Israeli public and a new center-left Israeli government.  The Palestinian public and leadership will support such moves, which should reward real Palestinian political reform.  Democratic reform includes the creation of a prime ministerial post which will answer to the Palestinian Legislative Council, and to the electorate, not to Arafat.  Palestinians need not be ruled by Jeffersonian democrats, as the American and Israeli right suppose.  With pragmatic leaders, they will reach an accommodation with Israel when offered a fair deal, despite the absence of many features of liberal democracy, just as Egypt did, despite its oppressive, autocratic rule. 

It will take nothing less than democratic regime change on both sides to silence the guns and recharge the forces of Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement.  Only the US has the power, with its European allies and the United Nations Security Council, to clear the mine-fields and beat a new path.   The security crisis is the glue that bound the Israeli national unity coalition together; if the US fails to change course, it could resurrect that motley crew, and the next wave of terror, after new Israeli elections.  Ariel Sharon's strategy is to maintain a state of perpetual crisis, in the vain hope that through relentless and unending military pressure the Palestinians can be forced to accept his humiliating peace terms, a Palestinian Treaty of Versailles.  A return to diplomacy will spell electoral defeat for Sharon, as he promises no corridor towards a new agreement.  Even a Palestinian quisling cannot sign Sharon’s “long-term” interim accord, which cedes less than half of the West Bank and offers no removal of Israeli settlements, while deferring all other final status issues for at least fifteen years.  After the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the US initiated the Madrid Peace Process.   It could do so again following the next war on Iraq, if one there will be; better still, it could launch a comprehensive new Arab-Israeli peace initiative while pursuing a new UN inspection regime in Iraq. 

US diplomatic intervention will unleash a new political dynamic, as it becomes increasingly clear to the Israeli public that a right-wing government, sans Labor, will be unable to paddle in new currents, and as the right's military strategy wins little more than pyrrhic victories for Israel. Much the same recognition is spreading among a growing minority of the Palestinian leadership in Arafat’s Cabinet and the Palestinian Legislature, as more prominent Palestinians come to understand that the militarized intifada has borne no fruit, and only its cessation will put them back on the road to independence.  But with so small a carrot and so large a stick in the Bush-Sharon arsenal, progress towards Palestinian political reform and movement toward a return to negotiations with Israel will be glacial.  Welcome to the Intifada Decade, the era of militant Islamist and ultra-nationalist ascendancy in the Palestinian and Arab world.  US intervention is the secret weapon which can stir the winds of change on both sides to end the endless war, and consummate a political solution to the conflict. 

 

Gidon D. Remba is president of Chicago Peace Now, an affiliate of Americans for Peace Now, the sister organization of Israel’s largest grassroots peace movement.  He served as Senior Foreign Press Translator in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office and the Knesset from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process.  He co-translated Egyptian President Sadat’s speech to the Knesset, and the responses of Israeli leaders, for the world press.  He is currently editing an anthology, From Oslo to Intifada and Beyond:  A Reader on Palestinian-Israeli Justice, War and Peace, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, the Jerusalem Report, Tikkun and other periodicals.  To learn more about Chicago Peace Now, see http://www.chicagopeacenow.org/