One of the most remarkable talents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is his ability to “influence” American public opinion as he once bragged to a family of colonists, unaware that he was being filmed.
In the space of a few months, he managed to dampen US President Barak Obama’s enthusiasm for a settlement for the Israeli Palestinian conflict. He frustrated American and European efforts at restarting the stalled peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. And he defiantly refused to accommodate Obama’s request for a freeze on colony construction in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Perhaps Netanayahu’s most remarkable achievement has been his ability to move American leaders to espouse Israel’s priorities. The most cogent example of this extraordinary feat has been the elevation of israel’s concern about Iran’s perceived nuclear ambitions to the top of American foreign policy agenda; and the downgradingl of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process from the list of American foreign policy priorities.
The peace process has died a thousand deaths in the past, but it refused to be buried. That is because as long as it was perceived to be going somewhere it was judged to be better than the alternative-perpetual conflict.
The fallacy of this premise is evident from the fact that various Israeli leaders rhetorically accepted the peace process while actively working to undermine it and strengthen its alternative-perpetual occupation and unending conflict. Netanyahu boasted about his role in destroying the Oslo Accords — a short-lived meagre achievement of the peace process.
The other contradiction that plagued the peace process was that although the process was officially sponsored by the Quartet (US, Russia, EU and UN), it was practically driven by the US. Given the nature of American politics, the peace process necessarily became a domestic politics issue. This created a fatal tension that sooner or later was bound to lay bare the inherent contradiction of the American conduct of the peace process.
Washington claims to be an honest broker in the peace process, while evidently siding with one of the parties. This became palpably clear when Obama, addressing the UN General Assembly last September, admitted his inability to move the peace process forward and devoted a substantial part of his speech towards making the case for Israel.
This left the Palestinians with little alternative but to try to internationalise the issue by seeking membership in the UN and Its various agencies. Washington openly sided with Israel and threatened to block Palestinian request to the UN Security Council.
In a letter to Netanyahu, in April, President of the Palestine Authority Mahmoud Abbas called for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and for an end to colony construction in the occupied territories. Abbas warned that in the absence of a peace settlement, the two sides were drifting towards a one-state solution.
“As a result of actions taken by successive Israeli governments,” he stated, “the Palestinian National Authority no longer has any authority and no meaningful jurisdiction in the political, economic, territorial and security spheres,”
In a letter delivered to Abbas last week, Netanyahu is reported by the Israeli press to have repeated the Israeli position, rejecting a freeze on colony construction as a condition for the resumption of peace talks.
Two proposals have recently emerged, seeking to fill the void created by American paralysis in the long-suffering peace process.
One comes from a group of distinguished figures (Shlomo Ben-Ami, Thomas C. Schelling, Jerome M. Segal and Javier Solana) and published in the New York Times last week. The authors note that there was no prospect of meaningful negotiations between the Palestinians and the Netanyahu government. They compared their approach to that of the UN Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 (UNSCOP), which, in 1947, had submitted the Partition Resolution, 181. They call it UNESCOP 2.
The authors propose the establishment of a committee that will go and listen to the Palestinian people and the Israeli people themselves. If the committee determines that there is sufficient basis for an agreement, it will draft a plan for an end of the conflict and submit it to the UN Security Council which will call on the Israelis and Palestinians to use UNESCOP 2 as the starting point for negotiations.
This proposed new peace process suffers from serious flaws. First, the comparison with UNESCOP in 1947 is misleading. In 1947, Palestine was under British mandatory rule and the British were anxious for the UN to relieve them of that growing burden. Today, the prospect of Israeli leaders supporting anything that remotely looks like UNESCOP are close to nil.
The ultimate goal of UNESCOP 2 is to get a landmark UN Security Council resolution. But for what purpose? And why would the fate of another UN Security Council resolution be any different from that of previous UN SC resolutions?
The authors conclude by proposing that the US could be invited to play the role of “honest broker.” But it was precisely Washington’s inability to play that role that doomed the defunct peace process. Why would it be any different now?
The second contender for leadership of a new peace process is none other than a more assertive European Union. In a recent statement, the EU notes that Washington is now hanging a sign that says the peace process is now “closed for business.” It regrets “settler extremism”, and twice refers to the “forced transfer” of Palestinians, and warms of the receding “viability of the two-state solution”.
Here again, despite the good intentions, enforcement mechanism and crucially leverage over Israel are lacking. And this bodes ill for the two contenders for a new peace process.
The Palestinian leadership ought to pursue the internationalisation of the peace process through membership in the UN and its various agencies. It may be, however, that with the end of the peace process the two-state solution has also come to an end.
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