Tony Klug offers a vision of the endgame for a possible just solution to the IsraelPalestine conflict but says the opportunity must be seized urgently or it will be lost.
Palestinian opinion has started to lose faith in the two-state outcome, some 20 years after the PLO in 1988 dropped its previous demand for the eradication of the state of Israel and officially committed itself to the two-state solution.
We live – to paraphrase an old Chinese proverb – in precarious times. Our jumbled world is transmogrifying into a global village, with the promise of many splendid future benefits. But for now, it faces a torrent of emergent threats – catastrophic climate change, financial and economic meltdown, weapons of mass annihilation, global terrorism, pandemic disease, irreversible resource and species depletion, and endemic international conflict – to name just a few (so as not to cause alarm). Any one of these would-be disasters could drive us towards the abyss.
A succession of flawed peace initiatives has left one of the present crises – the IsraeliPalestinian conflict – on the verge of becoming unresolvable, a prospect ostensibly hastened by the assumption of power in February 2009 of the most hawkish government in Israel’s history, together with deepening Palestinian factionalism.
Yet, despite these setbacks, a brief window of opportunity has opened up owing to the providential election of US President Obama.
Will Obama will remove the peace process from the deep freeze?
The hope is that Obama will remove the peace process from the deep freeze. But this will be just a passing sentiment if the short time we have is not used to bring the dispute swiftly to an end.
For this to happen, two things have to be got right simultaneously: the destination and the strategy. But this is a double act never yet achieved.
For some three decades following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, there was neither a viable nor a commonly agreed destination. To the extent that the conflicting parties projected eventual outcomes during this period, they were either deficient or misconceived – the so-called Allon Plan and ‘Jordanian option’ for the Israelis, a version of the ‘one-state’ idea for the Palestinians, UN Security Council Resolution 242 for the international community. The common flaw was their failure to embrace the key question at the heart of the conflict: how to resolve a bitter clash between two charismatic national movements?
To Resolution 242, the Palestinians were just homeless refugees, not a stateless nation. To the PLO charter, the Jews were merely a religious minority, to be treated accordingly. To Israel’s former prime minister Golda Meir, ‘it was not as though there was a Palestinian people…they did not exist’.
To my mind, as someone who first called for the two-state paradigm in the early 1970s and fully expected to see it materialise by the mid 1970s, the subsequent 30 years were heedlessly squandered until, eventually, a solid international consensus – backed by majority Palestinian and Israeli opinion – emerged, around the turn of the century, in support of two viable states as the backbone of a solution. The consensus was reflected in Security Council Resolution 1397 in 2002 and, in the same year, the Arab Peace Initiative called for a comprehensive regional settlement with full normalisation of relations among all states of the region, including the Israeli and Palestinian states.
So finally the international community got the destination essentially right. But it still had to get the strategy right – and this it has persistently failed to do. While they had their merits, a range of initiatives – from the Oslo process, through the Road Map, the Annapolis summit and any one of the other dead-end, stillborn or toothless plans - rested on too many doubtful assumptions, were too vague about the objectives or let the parties too easily off the hook through a lack of an effective enforcement mechanism. All the while, the state that already existed steadily chiselled away at the territory of the putative other, bit-by-bit eroding the feasibility of the only destination that made sense. And all the while, leading members of the international community effectively sat on their hands and let it happen.
You could almost say they encouraged it, if only by neglect.
In consequence, even the most pragmatic Israel/Palestine: Is it Now or Never?
Variations on the one-state theme are now coming back into vogue in Palestinian circles, even though it may mean engaging in a bitter long-term struggle with uncertain consequences and reaching for an objective that has not been clearly thought through, is not necessarily favoured or truly believed to be achievable.
In parallel, Hamas rockets, which terrorised the population of southern Israel for years, have deepened the mood among Israelis that peacemaking is futile – that Palestinians are not serious about peace and that a state in the West Bank is merely a device to attack Israelis from closer range and finish them off. To many Israelis, ‘peace’ has become a four-letter word.
The principal casualty of these political currents could be the irretrievable collapse of the consensus destination. That would take us back to square one: no agreed destination – and therefore no call for a strategy to achieve it. Such a development – not far off – may usher in an era of indefinite strife. So it is vital that confidence in the consensus destination is restored. And the only way to restore it at this point is to move rapidly towards it. In effect, this would require substantial and irreversible progress towards two states in the first term of the Obama presidency – before the re-election campaign takes over. So we have maybe two years.
The challenge then is to formulate a strategy that will be effective in both forging the substance of the endgame and swiftly achieving it, and not be sidetracked by issues which, while maybe important in themselves, are not directly instrumental in resolving the conflict. Stimulating the West Bank economy, relaxing internal travel restrictions, reducing the number of roadblocks and checkpoints, and releasing some prisoners are essentially humanitarian measures that may make Palestinian life under Israeli rule more palatable, but they do nothing to end the occupation and further a peace settlement.
Reining in settlement expansion is a different matter owing to its potential to fatally subvert any peace process based on two entities. It is for this reason that President Obama called for a full settlement freeze but, by not being prepared to back up this demand with firm enforcement measures, he has allowed himself, in the short term at least, to be finessed by the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. However, not even the settlements issue should be allowed to impede the urgent prosecution of a broader peace strategy.
This said, an authentic Palestinian invitation to the settlers to stay if they wished under Palestinian state sovereignty would take the sting out of much of the issue. Some settlers may take up this offer, some may accept compensation for returning to Israel – especially if the bribes were large ones – and some might remain in settlements that are transferred to Israel as part of an equitable territorial swap.
A menu of such choices coupled with an end to all government subsidies plus a definitive deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli army protection following a peace agreement could be more practical and effective than threatening hundreds of thousands of settlers with the dubious prospect of the Israeli military driving them out by force. At the appropriate time, a new coalition government in Israel would need to be assembled to initiate such steps, with Kadima replacing the far-right parties, or it may require a new election.
President Obama recently got his fingers burned by attempting to steer the parties into resuming direct negotiations and into reviving what are euphemistically called ‘confidencebuilding measures’. But he was badly advised, as there is no reason to believe that negotiations between these innately unequal parties will be any less of a sham than before, or that efforts to build trust between an occupying authority and an occupied people will be any less hollow than in the past. These are dead-end tracks. The time for goodwill-based bilateral negotiations has come and gone. Without firm outside guidance and pressure, no substantive progress can be expected.
In my recent Fabian pamphlet, Visions of the Endgame, I put forward an alternative strategy that is designed, in quick time, to flush out the ultimate positions of the belligerent parties and drive forward a robust peace process, predicated on a clear horizon and an effective enforcement mechanism that would not easily be derailed by the first atrocity or be disrupted by the furtive manoeuvrings of any party.
The strategy would comprise three phases.
The first move would be an invitation from, say, the ‘Quartet’ (US, UN, EU, Russia) to the principal belligerent parties to tender their realistic visions of the endgame – within the parameters of the international consensus – by a fixed deadline of around six months. This would place the ball firmly in their respective courts, impel them to take responsibility and should catalyse new political currents within each society.
If, for any reason, the members of the US-led Quartet are unable to act collectively, the US President could still proceed on his own authority.
In the second move – whether the parties observe the first deadline or not – the Quartet would formulate a definitive plan to end the IsraeliPalestinian conflict and resolve the wider ArabIsraeli issues. The plan would draw on the proposals submitted by the parties, and also on past agreements and near-agreements, and other sources. The endorsement of the plan by the UN Security Council would give it added political weight and solid international legality.
In the third step, the Quartet (or the US government as the case may be) would preside over the implementation of a schedule of interim moves along a fixed timetable towards the final settlement, rewarding implementation and penalising failure at each stage. This would constitute the principal enforcement mechanism that has been so lacking in the past.
The belligerent parties would be free to negotiate and agree any matter bilaterally among themselves during the first two phases, extending over a period of roughly one year. Whatever they agree would go into the definitive plan. What they fail to agree, would be left to the Quartet to determine. Crucially, the default position would no longer be the status quo, which has invariably favoured just one party.
So where are we right now? Following his election, President Obama moved more quickly than some had anticipated to set out his stall in support of two states and to achieve a settlement freeze. Despite his lack of success to date, this remains his policy. So the intended destination is clear enough. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in attempting to balance these demands with the exigencies of holding his coalition together, felt obliged in his speech in June 2009 to utter, for Likud, the hitherto forbidden phrase ‘a Palestinian state’, even if he hedged it with strict preconditions. More recently, he has been trying to shift the public debate from the West Bank settlements to Jerusalem where he feels he may generate stronger national and international support, especially among American Jews, although he may be wrong about this.
While gleefully pocketing his short-term victory over the US administration on the settlement freeze, Netanyahu may discover, over the longer-term, that he has more than met his match in Obama. In his first few months in office, the US president has shifted the debate with – and within – Israel towards the nature and shape of a Palestinian state. The world now waits as he contemplates his next big move. It should involve taking the positive element from Netanyahu’s speech – the Palestinian state – and inviting him, and the other parties to the conflict, to flesh it out in detail. It is vital he maintains the momentum and keeps his eye firmly on the big picture – the endgame – and not get sidetracked by other issues.
He is yet to visit Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as president. It could be a big moment. A well-timed visit – maybe coordinated with a separate or simultaneous visit by the Saudi King Abdullah – and a common appeal from them to both peoples could help generate new currents in both camps and spark off a momentum towards peace, redolent of the Sadat effect 30 years earlier. But such an initiative is only worth taking as part of a broader, coherent strategy. Obama still has the wind with him, but time and direction are both of the essence. He simply must not allow the wind to blow itself out. In the words of the old classic, it’s now or never. ______________________________________ Dr Tony Klug has written extensively about the IsraeliPalestinian conflict for nearly 40 years. He is a special advisor on the Middle East to the Oxford Research Group and vice chair of the Arab-Jewish Forum.
Formerly, he headed Amnesty International’s international development programme. He is the author of the Fabian pamphlets How Peace Broke out in the Middle East: a Short History of the Future and Visions of the Endgame: a Strategy to Bring the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Swiftly to an End.
This article is based on a talk given by the author to the United Nations Association in Oxford on 13th October 2009.