What is the current status of Israeli-Palestinian talks?
They are very much in flux. The question of the moment is whether the settlement moratorium will be extended for a shorter period of time–perhaps sixty days. But now the Palestinians seem to be moving the goal posts somewhat in saying it’s not just an extension of the moratorium, there has to be a total freeze. I don’t know what exactly that means but we may find ourselves in a situation in which the moratorium gets extended but the Palestinians say that’s not good enough. That’s just a way of underscoring that the situation is very unclear at the moment. The Arab League foreign ministers met over the weekend and endorsed the Palestinian position, but gave the United States a month to work things out. Meanwhile Netanyahu appears to be moving right in order to move left: shoring up his right-wing support by demonstrating that he is protecting the Jewish nature of the state, while now openly discussing the extension of the settlements moratorium. My guess is that the moratorium will be extended but then what happens on day sixty-one if there’s no real progress on defining the borders of the Palestinian state? We’ll be right back in this hole.
What is your assessment of the reported letters or assurances that have been offered to both the Israelis and the Palestinians to get them to stay engaged in negotiations?
It’s hard to comment on the substance since we don’t know exactly what is going to be in them. The press reports may not be accurate because the letters are also in flux. So the only thing I can usefully comment on at this point is the idea of providing these kinds of assurances. This is a well-established practice on the part of the United States in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations because both sides feel that they can’t get what they need from the other side and so they look to the United States to provide what’s sometimes referred to as ’hamburger helper.’ There’s nothing wrong with it in principle, but there are certain other principles that need to be respected. Nothing should be said in those letters that would undermine the prospects of achieving a negotiated agreement. And the United States has to be careful not to preempt issues that would have to be negotiated.
You were quoted as saying in regards to the letters that the United States needs to be careful not to pay for tactical breathing room with strategic coin. How would you advise the administration to ensure that that doesn’t happen?
That’s another principle that needs to be observed here. If we make commitments that we would need to use to secure a final agreement merely in return for a two-month extension of a settlement moratorium, then we will have undermined our ability to achieve the final agreement. In other words, if we are going to make strategic commitments, it needs to be in return for strategic concessions not tactical ones. That’s very important here: we shouldn’t debase the currency that will be critical in terms of getting the parties to an agreement just for the sake of getting them into the negotiations again.
How do you foresee or imagine that the process might unfold from here?
The way we seem to be headed is towards a two-month extension of the settlement moratorium and two months of negotiations. The problem with that—if that is indeed the outcome—is what happens at the end of the moratorium extension? Are we going to face another breakdown—another crisis? The administration has already spent the better part of eighteen months in this particular settlement sandbox trying to find a way to reconcile the demands and constraints of the two sides. I hope that we can find a way through what’s happening now to get out of this particular sandbox and into the real one, which is supposed to be about resolving this conflict. And that’s my concern about where things are going at the moment.
What options do you think are available to the administration to move beyond the current sandbox?
At this point, there aren’t any good ones. It’s very complicated. Perhaps we need a clarifying moment in which both sides need to take a look again at what’s at stake here. There’s this old line that everybody uses at these kind of junctures: ’We can’t want it more than the parties themselves.’ It happens to be true. And at the moment, I think both sides have the sense that we do want it more than they do. Perhaps we need some clarity as to who are the primary stakeholders here.
Is there something that either European leaders or Arab leaders should be or could be doing to help move the negotiations forward?
I think that they probably are and should be weighing in with both sides and making clear that they want to see this resolved and that both sides need to find a way to get back to negotiations and do what’s necessary for that purpose. This is where outside powers, beyond the United States, have a very important role to play in working with both sides to encourage them to get on with it. The first responsibility this weekend will be with the Arabs, but I think the Europeans and the Russians, the Quartet and everybody that has a stake in this should be actively working to get both sides to see that their interests lie in a substantive and serious negotiation.
What is your assessment of the capabilities of each side to take the necessary decisions and the necessary risks to move forward and to really come to an agreement?
I have this belief, based on public opinion polls, that the publics on both sides are ready for the deal and essentially understand the compromises and difficult concessions that would have to be made . I think they are ahead of their leaders in this regard. What really is necessary is for the leaders to have the courage to go forward rather than to fear that their publics won’t be with them. In the end, it can’t be done unless the leaders make the decisions. The United States and the international community can provide the safety net for that, and the encouragement, but in the end, it is the decision of two men, Abu Mazen and Bibi Netanyahu. And they seem to be more fearful of their politics than they are forceful in reaching across the divide and finding a way to resolve this conflict
Do you think that the Israeli governing coalition is strong enough to make such concessions?
Again, I find that the arguments about the difficulties of this coalition in Israel miss the point. This is the most stable governing coalition that Israel has had since the start of the Oslo negotiations, in terms of a government that’s engaging in an effort to resolve the conflict through the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Rabin and Barak entered negotiations with minority governments, or close to minority governments, and that’s not happening here. The foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has declared that he’s not leaving. That’s because, I suspect, he knows that if he leaves, rather than the government coming down, Netanyahu can turn to Kadima and form a different coalition and he’ll be out in the cold and forgotten.
So, Bibi has a lot of leverage over his coalition partners. And, if I am right that the public is ready, he can go over their heads and appeal to the public. So, I don’t believe that his constraints are as great as some make them out to be. But, of course, that’s easy for me to say; I’m not sitting where he’s sitting.
In the same manner, how much leverage or how much power does President Abbas really have within the Palestinian constituency, considering the divide between the West Bank and Gaza?
Look, there’s no doubt that he’s in a weaker position than Netanyahu because of the Hamas-Fatah split and because there are a lot of people around him who are carping and opposing what he wants to do. And he feels, I think, embattled and lacking support. But again, the public will be with him. And the president of the Palestinian Authority and the chairman of the PLO—he wears both hats—just like the prime minister of Israel, wields immense authority.
I know it sounds facile, but it’s a question of leadership. Both of these leaders need to stand before their people and explain to them that the time has come to end the conflict and that that’s going to require painful concessions and that they’re going to go ahead and try to resolve it.
One of the reasons that I was optimistic after the convening of the leaders in Washington at the end of August was that both of them seemed to be in that mode. They both spoke in those kind of terms. But now we’re back in the hole again arguing about settlements. I think they both need to rekindle the spirit of engagement that they had in Washington at the beginning of these negotiations.
How do the Palestinian Authority’s state-building efforts tie in with the political aspect–the negotiations?
They are critically important in terms of ensuring that if the negotiations succeed there is an institutional base for the fulfillment of commitments that the Palestinian leadership will undertake. There have to be credible, responsible, accountable and transparent institutions of government on the Palestinian side. And Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has made great progress with the help of the international community in building those institutions. That process needs to go forward as the negotiations go forward.
Is there anything else that you think is important to mention—about Syria, Gaza or anything else?
It is important that we never lose sight of the broader context in which all of this is happening. Iran is still engaged in very aggressive efforts to assert its dominance in the region: in Baghdad, in Beirut and in Gaza. And at the same time it’s still pursuing its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities. I think that the leaders in the region are conscious of that, and can see it unfolding in these days—Ahmadinejad is about to go to Beirut.
If the negotiations break down and we’re unable to move forward, it will not only damage American credibility, but it will be a real boost to Iran’s ambitions in the region. Because what’s at stake here is a battle over an idea. Our idea is that negotiations, compromise, reconciliation, and peacemaking can help to resolve the region’s problems. And the Iranian idea runs directly contrary to that; that violence, terrorism, defiance of the international community, threats to destroy Israel, are the way to achieve dignity and the rights of the Palestinians.
If the negotiations break down, then their idea will receive a very large boost that will help Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran. That cannot be in the interests of Israel or the Palestinian Authority or any of the Arab governments supporting the peace process. It’s really important that everybody understand and remember what’s at stake here. It’s not just about resolving the conflict; it’s about a much bigger challenge across the region.
“We knew at the outset that the task would be difficult. We acknowledged that publicly and privately. We knew this would be a road with many bumps— and there have been many bumps—and that continues to this day. But we are not deterred. We are, to the contrary, determined more than ever to proceed to realize the common objective, which we all share, of a Middle East that is at peace with security and prosperity for the people of Israel, for Palestinians, and for all the people in the region. We will continue our efforts in that regard, undeterred and undaunted by the difficulties, the complexities or the bumps in the road.”—George Mitchell, special envoy for Middle East peace, remarks with Prime Minister Netanyahu, September 29, 2010
The United States nudged the Palestinian Authority to make a counter-offer to Israel's proposal for a new freeze on building in Jewish settlements if the Palestinians recognized Israel as a Jewish state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said if the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel “as the homeland of the Jewish people,” he was ready to ask his government to extend a freeze on West Bank settlement building.
Israel's insistence on maintaining a presence on the eastern border of a future Palestinian state could be reviewed over time, a government spokesman said Wednesday.
Israel's demand for such a presence is one of the potential obstacles to a Mideast peace deal.The Palestinians say they will not accept any Israeli deployment in their future state, arguing that the deployment of international forces during a transition period—an idea they support—should be sufficient to address Israeli security concerns.
Hamas security forces raided and shut down the headquarters of the Palestinian Journalists Union in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the head of the organisation said.
“Hamas internal security forces raided the headquarters today, and one of the officers informed the members of the board who were there that it would be closed until further notice,” Abdelnasser al-Najar told AFP.
An Israeli military court has sentenced the leader of a West Bank protest movement to a year in prison for incitement and organizing illegal demonstrations amid criticism from the European Union and human rights organizations that the conviction was politically motivated.
Palestinian activist Abdallah Abu Rahmah, 39, was convicted in August for his involvement in organizing weekly protests against the route of what Israel calls its security barrier and what Palestinians call an apartheid separation wall. In a statement released at the time, the Israeli military said Abu Rahmah “was convicted of incitement and participation in an illegal riot.”
The Palestinian Authority has submitted a request to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office for the construction of a new Palestinian airport in the central West Bank district of Jericho, Hebrew-language media reported Tuesday.
The four square kilometer airport, 10km southeast of Jerusalem, includes plans for a single terminal, six gates for boarding, a large parking lot and international airport facilities and was submitted by the PA transport minister, Israeli daily Maariv reported.
The official results of the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections come out tonight, but a cursory look at initial results presented by parties and reported by the media paint a fairly clear picture: Islamists will be a majority in the next parliament, led by the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, and Salafists have exceeded expectations to be, perhaps, the second party in Egypt.
This news has profoundly depressed most educated, middle class Cairenes I know who had hoped that the overthow of Hosni Mubarak would be followed by a relatively liberal democracy that would be inclusive of moderate Islamists. It is particularly distressing to non-Muslims, who will now fear the Islamization of public life that has taken place in the last two decades will now be accelerated, with full backing from parliament and government leaders in the next few years.
In Hugh Roberts’ excellent essay in last week’s London Review of Books, he makes a common enough point: “Religion had little to do with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt.” But to anyone paying attention to the Arab Spring, that might seem an absurd conclusion. After all, it is religious parties that seem to be doing very well for themselves.
Mustafa Abdul Jalil, leader of Libya's interim National Transitional Council, declared the end of the war and the liberation of Libya on Sunday following the controversial death of Moammar Qaddafi. Judging by the tenor of discussion in the United States, you would think that this was an unmitigated disaster -- a humiliating end to an illegal war which prevented the UN from acting in Syria, massacred civilians, and opened the door to state failure, warlord violence, reprisals, and radical Islamist tyranny. (Though at least we can be relieved that the rebels can now get their mack on.) That's quite a catalog of failure dominating the public discourse at a time when the official war has come to an end, and most Libyans are celebrating Qaddafi's demise and planning a democratic transition towards a post-Qaddafi future. In fact, the intervention in Libya has been broadly successful and has helped to give Libyans the opportunity to build the country which they so deeply deserve.
There's every reason to be cautious about Libya's future, of course. There will be massive challenges facing the emerging new country, from independent militias to tribal and regional conflicts to the legacy of decades of the systematic destruction of independent civil society. But nobody denies that. Despite what Google tells me is 64,300,000 articles warning that "now comes the hard part in Libya," this is a straw man. I have heard almost nobody arguing the opposite -- certainly not the White House, which consistently has warned that "We’re under no illusions -- Libya will travel a long and winding road to full democracy. There will be difficult days ahead."
By Matt Duss
TEL AVIV- While President Obama’s speech yesterday wasn’t particularly groundbreaking, I thought it was an important (and overdue) statement of recognition of the deep significance of the Arab uprisings, both for the peoples of the Middle East and for the future of U.S. policy in the region. I’ll confine my comments here, though, to the president’s remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There has been a lot of attention paid to the president’s statement that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” This exact language may be new for a U.S. president, but the sentiment it describes is not. George W. Bush himself made a similar reference to ’67 in a 2005 speech.
To be clear, no one is saying that Israel will be forced to withdraw to the pre-1967 lines. What Obama is saying is that those lines will be the basis for negotiations to determine how much settlement land Israel will be permitted to retain, and how much of pre-1967 Israel must be given to Palestine as compensation.
This really shouldn’t be as controversial as it probably will be. Treating the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiations in this way represents the overwhelming consensus of the international community, enshrined in multiple UN resolutions. That anyone should be confused or surprised about this probably goes to the success that Israeli leaders have had over the years in obscuring it, and the indulgence that American leaders have often shown toward those efforts. (The most notable example of this is George W. Bush’s 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon, in which the U.S. president appeared to unilaterally decide one of the most contentious issues in the conflict — the future of the major settlement blocs — in favor of Israel. Obama’s position on that letter is sure to be an area of intense discussion in his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.)
I wasn’t thrilled with the equivalence President Obama posited between the Israelis refusing to meet their obligations to halt settlements and the Palestinians walking away from negotiations in response to the Israelis’ failure to meet their obligations to halt settlements, but these sorts of rhetorical flourishes are not the end of the world.
Obama’s criticism of the Palestinians’ pursuance of statehood at the UN was understandable — it does, after all, represent a vote of no confidence in the U.S.’s ability to manage the process fairly — but his dismissal of this effort as “symbolic” indicated a lack of appreciation of just what is at stake, for the U.S. and Israel, should the Palestinians successfully circumvent U.S. brokerage. (This Jerusalem Post article describes the process by which the Palestinians will likely pursue statehood at the UN, and explains why Israel needs to be nervous about it.)
I would say, however, that the most important part of Obama’s remarks on Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not what he said, but just how much he said, where he said it, and what that says about his view of the continuing significance of the conflict for U.S. interests in the region.
In a speech of some 5600 words, almost 1200 of them — 20 percent — were devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This indicates that, while the president’s approach to resolving the conflict may have changed, his recognition of the importance of resolving it has not.
In a speech that spanned a region in turmoil, he came to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last. This indicated an understanding that, while the conflict is certainly not the only problem in the region, its continuing irresolution handicaps the United States’ ability to address those other problems.
Again, this shouldn’t be surprising. Barack Obama has been clear about this view since he was candidate for president, when he referred to the conflict as a “constant sore” that “infect[s] all of our foreign policy.” In the two years since he took office, this analysis has been backed up repeatedly by others in his administration, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, then-CENTCOM/now-incoming CIA chief General David Petraeus, and Middle East adviser Dennis Ross. WikiLeaks also revealed Arab rulers deeply concerned about the conflict’s negative impact.
While most in the Middle East, as elsewhere in the world, are concerned primarily with increasing their own security and economic opportunity, there’s no question that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to dramatically impact regional domestic politics. It will continue to be a major determinant of attitudes toward the United States. According to a recent TIME article on expectations for the speech, “for many Arabs — including every person interviewed in Cairo for this story — the litmus test of whether the U.S. is serious about revising its relations with the Arab world, is its attitude to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
We probably don’t even need to refer to this idea as “linkage” any more. We can just refer to it as reality.
But while recognizing — or, in Obama’s case, re-affirming — reality is important, more important is what he’s going to do about it. And here the speech said little. This speech wasn’t the place for Obama to offer specifics on strategy, but that time has to come soon, in time to avert a looming disaster in September. Having recognized the importance to U.S. interests of resolving this conflict, Obama should also recognize how devastating it would be for the U.S. to spend the time between now and September simply working to block the Palestinians’ unilateral statehood effort. Instead, he should commit to crafting a fair and credible process that could entice them away from it, and bring them back to the negotiating table under clear terms of reference.
I hope last night’s speech marked the beginning of an effort to do that. I must admit that, after the soaring rhetoric/total lack of follow-through of the Cairo speech, I’m not hugely optimistic, but I’m ready to be surprised.
Official Name: League of Arab States’ Follow-Up Committee on the Arab Peace Initiative
Members: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the Secretary General of the Arab League
Origins and Mandate: Members of the Arab League adopted the Arab Peace Initiative at the 2002 Beirut Summit. The document mentioned the need to form a separate, smaller committee to gather support for the plan. Later, two groups were formed to that end: the follow-up committee and a contact group, comprised of Egypt and Jordan, created to gain Israeli support for the plan.
History
Select important dates of the committee include:
- On July 25, 2007, the Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers visited Israel where they formally presentend the Arab Peace Initiative for the first time.
- Members of the follow-up committee attended the U.S.-hosted Annapolis conference in late November 2007, which re-launched negotiations between Israel and the PLO.
- On March 2, 2010, the committee met and the following the day the full Arab League endorsed a plan for Palestinians to enter into U.S.-mediated proximity talks with Israel, though the talks were delayed because of disputes about Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem. The committee met again on May 1, 2010, and supported the proximity talks, which began on May 9.
- Representatives of the follow-up committee met on July 29, 2010, and agreed to support direct talks between Palestinians and Israelis when the Palestinians deemed the time right.
- On October 8, 2010, the committee supported the Palestinian stance of declining further direct negotiations until the Israeli government extends the settlement moratorium, and said they would meet again in the coming weeks to discuss any new proposals. Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, chair of the meeting, denied that there is a one-month deadline.