Decisive Arab and Israeli leadership is needed for a breakthrough, writes RICHARD BOUDREUXin Jerusalem
INFURIATED BY pressure from Washington, Israel’s prime minister summoned the US ambassador.
“You have no moral right to preach to us,” he lectured the envoy. “What kind of talk is this, ‘punishing Israel’? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic?” The scolding by the late Menachem Begin 28 years ago echoes today as a cautionary tale as US president Barack Obama pushes a reluctant Israeli government to halt the growth of Jewish settlements and embrace the goal of a Palestinian state.
In the 1981 showdown, Begin held his ground after the Reagan administration suspended a strategic co-operation pact to protest Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. The territory, captured from Syria in 1967, remains in Israel’s hands.
Now, as Obama launches an audacious effort to make peace in the Middle East, his influence will be limited in similar ways by the regional leaders. “We have a ‘yes we can’ president who believes he can make it happen, but he faces a ‘no you can’t’ reality in a region that has changed for the worst over the past eight years,” said Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East negotiator.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has pledged to resist Palestinian independence. The Palestinian movement is in disarray, with the US-backed leadership in the West Bank at odds with militant Hamas rulers in the Gaza Strip over a permanent peace with Israel.
Shlomo Avineri, a former Israeli diplomat who teaches political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, notes the US has sometimes managed to rein in Israeli military advances when regional stability was at risk, as it did in Egypt at the end of the 1973 war, and has helped secure agreements when Israel and its adversaries were close.
But “absent local political will, and when confronted with a peace-making project that may take years to complete”, he added, “the United States is virtually powerless”. That hasn’t discouraged Obama. His special envoy to the region, George Mitchell, told Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week that the administration is “fully committed to working toward comprehensive peace throughout the Middle East”. Mitchell then travelled on to Lebanon and Syria.
The administration has demanded a halt to Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank as a first step to unravel the conflict. By signalling an end to his predecessor’s tilt towards Israel, Obama is trying to position the US as an impartial broker. In so doing, he is testing the limits of America’s clout with Israel.
Israeli leaders such as Begin, Yizhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon defied their superpower ally. Netanyahu has something of a mandate to follow suit: his right-leaning coalition took office on a wave of voter apprehension that withdrawing Israeli troops and settlers would turn the West Bank into a base for militant rocket attacks, as the 2005 pullout from Gaza did.
Obama has made clear he expects Netanyahu to fall in line.
“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu will recognise the strategic need to deal with this issue,” he said last week. Netanyahu “may have an opportunity that a . . . more left leader might not have,” he added.
Torn between demands of a popular US president and of allies at home who could turn on him, Netanyahu has scheduled an address tomorrow to spell out his policy on the conflict. He is widely expected to stake out a middle ground, signalling acceptance of previous Israeli agreements to work for a “two-state solution” but insisting on limits to Palestinian sovereignty and avoiding mention of settlements. Even that vague formula, reported in Israeli media speculation about the speech, has provoked cries of protest inside his conservative Likud Party.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’ position is also tenuous. The would-be leader of an independent Palestine appears to have no strategy to reassert control over Gaza, which Hamas took by force two years ago, and is so hamstrung by infighting in his own Fatah movement that he’s scarcely able to govern the West Bank. His weakness helps explain Netanyahu’s reluctance to negotiate with him on the core issues of a peace accord: borders, conflicting claims to Jerusalem, and the status of refugees.
Such constraints are wearingly familiar to US mediators, whose efforts to carve out a permanent accord have persisted over the decades out of a belief that “left to themselves, the Israelis and the Palestinians can make only war, not peace”, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said.
US pressure sometimes works, but not always as intended. Goaded to limit settlement growth and negotiate with the Palestinians, Sharon rebuffed the Bush administration, but withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza. The move enabled him to win quiet US acquiescence to continued enlargement of West Bank settlements.
Former president Bill Clinton met the limits of his influence when an all-out push late in his presidency fell short of a deal on Palestinian statehood. It invariably takes decisive Arab and Israeli leadership to achieve a breakthrough. Anwar Sadat’s bold decision to break from the Soviet orbit, for example, led to Egypt’s 1979 peace accord with Israel. Carter sealed that agreement, showing US diplomacy works best when adversaries are willing to take risks to end conflicts.
In the absence of such political will, “it’s really hard to imagine how you get Abbas and Netanyahu into a negotiation that leads to a conflict-ending agreement”, said Miller, who served in Republican and Democratic administrations as a negotiator. “Why inflate expectations in such a grandiose manner when the odds of a breakthrough are so low?”
Mouin Rabbani, an independent Palestinian analyst based in Jordan, said: “They’d be in the same situation as always, with Israel strong enough to resist a two-state solution and the Palestinians too weak to force one. I don’t see Obama imposing a solution on Israel.”
More optimistic analysts believe the administration is in a better position than its predecessors to muster Arab support for a compromise. Obama’s conciliatory address to the Muslim world will help, they say, as will Egyptian and Saudi wariness of Iran’s ambitions to dominate the region.
Mitchell is trying to encourage Syria and other Arab states to start normalising relations with Israel, and is expected to play a far more active role in mediating any Israeli-Palestinian talks than US officials did under George W Bush.
“When you realise how quickly Obama has repositioned the United States, you have to say he has a fighting chance of making peace in the Middle East,” said Robert A Pastor, professor of international relations at American University in Washington. “Everybody in the region is waiting for Obama’s next move, and it’s coming . . . The United States is going to be right there, listening to all sides, drafting papers, helping to bridge differences.” –