The last decade destroyed the last illusions: hence the fence. The courageous have departed the Middle East. A peace of the brave must yield to a truce of the mediocre — at best.  At least until Intifada-traumatized Israeli psychology shifts. I agree with the Israeli author David Grossman when he writes: “We have dozens of atomic bombs, tanks and planes. We confront people possessing none of these arms. And yet, in our minds, we remain victims. This inability to perceive ourselves in relation to others is our principal weakness.”

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But here it is in a nutshell:

The problem with the two-state idea as it has been construed is that it does not truly address what it purports to resolve. It promises to close a conflict that began in 1948, perhaps earlier, yet virtually everything it worries about sprang from the 1967 war. Ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is essential and the conflict will persist until this is addressed. But its roots are far deeper: for Israelis, Palestinian denial of the Jewish state’s legitimacy; for Palestinians, Israel’s responsibility for their large-scale dispossession and dispersal that came with the state’s birth.

This logic is devastating:

If the objective is to end the conflict and settle all claims, these matters will need to be dealt with. They reach back to the two peoples’ most visceral and deep-seated emotions, their longings and anger. For years, the focus has been on fine-tuning percentages of territorial withdrawals, ratios of territorial swaps, and definitions of Jerusalem’s borders. The devil, it turns out, is not in the details. It is in the broader picture.

The problem was built into the structure of the negotiations. It is only a slight exaggeration to describe them as a confidence game, a tacit understanding by all sides to elude the historic core of the matter through disingenuous ambiguity. Palestinians hoped they could achieve their goals even as they persisted in denying the Jewish people’s entitlement to even part of the land; Israelis trusted that if they granted Palestinians some kind of state the whole problem would fade away. The US assumed the role of a willing participant. Others, Europeans included, lazily followed.

A kind of “bipartisan consensus” exists among the leadership of both sides:

Establishing two states would resolve the occupation, but that is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of a problem that arose decades before the occupation began. An Israeli leader will be loath to relinquish territory and permit the emergence of an indisputably sovereign Palestinian state at least as long as suspicion lingers that Palestinians have not genuinely made their peace with the new reality, that they are biding their time, and that a future of renewed strife lies in store.

In turn, a Palestinian leader cannot credibly proclaim that the conflict has come to a close if the solution ignores the genesis of the Palestinian plight and the historic core of its national cause. To adopt such a stand would be tantamount to conceding that the refugees—who make up a majority of the Palestinian population, were once its political vanguard, and could well regain that position—had waged six decades of struggle by mistake and endured six decades of suffering in vain. Internal challenges to such an arrangement might not be immediate. But they would be certain and severe, laying bare the fragility of a supposedly historic accord.

It seems to me the Peace Process has been built (at least since the 80s) on the foundation of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords.  In that case, you had two already existing states working diplomatically with each other.  One state (Egypt) found a modicum of a victory in the Yom Kippur War.  The Israelis had something to offer in exchange for peace, a deal that was preferable to both sides.  That precedent guided the Clinton-era Jordan-Israel peace deal.

And even during the first Bush administration, then Sec. of State James Baker wanted to make a deal first with Syria along these lines.  The thinking was that if they could get Syria on board, Lebanon would be brought in (via Syria’s de facto control), Jordan would join (which they later did anyway), and Saudi Arabia would at least not stand in the way, if not declare its acceptance of the Israeli state.  The theory was that if all of the Arab states were in that would then push Arafat  to accept the deal–that latter point is a hypothetical one now so it’s impossible to really know.

Whatever the case, that moment is long gone and these faux attempts to revive it are nothing but a case of going through the motions politically, further engendering corrosive cynicism on both sides.

Notice the commonality between all prior peace deals.  Israel wins (takes/occupies depending on your point of view) territories from various pre-existing nation-states in the 1967 war (or later, the invasion of Lebanon in the 80s): the Sinai, Sheeba Farms (Lebanon), Golan Heights (Syria), and areas like Peace Island (Jordan) and then gives them back in exchange for diplomatic rapprochement.  Minus Syria’s decision under both Assads to maintain power through opposition to the West, the logic of quid pro quo is undeniable.  At least insofar as the regimes in all those Arab countries are non-democratic and authoritarian and can therefore make treaties in the face of public reistance.

But Palestine is not like any of these other Arab countries.  It’s not a country, for example, which is why having discussions as if there were two states at various points of disagreement doesn’t work in this context.

The point is not to provoke another in the endless round of “Whose to blame?”  between Israel and Palestine. Rather, the point is to show the logic of Malley and Agha’s thesis that the Peace Process is fundamentally flawed and should therefore be scrapped in favor of a more a reduced (but realizable) set of goals–like a de facto truce.

But even lowering the bar has many difficulties.  Agha and Malley raise the possibility of a Jordanian quasi-protectorate over the Palestinian territories–probably only The West Bank–in order to build the institutions of the Palestinian state that could then be declared, either unilaterally, with (some?) international support, and/or with Israeli agreement.

While the plan sounds very compelling in theory, I have my doubts about its effectiveness.  But at least it’s a legitimate idea instead of the farce that is the US Sec. of State going over to the Middle East and praising Israel for kinda/sorta but not really slowing down illegal construction in the occupied territories.

Whatever the exact mechanisms that need to be worked out, Agha and Malley are 100% correct that the Peace Process as such should be scrapped in favor of this alternative approach.

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Scott’s intriguing counterintuitive post got me thinking.  He thinks Obama should hold off on diving into a Middle East Peace Process.  It appears however Obama–at least in his public rhetoric–is headed in from the beginning.

The more I think about this issue, the more I think it’s a Middle East finger trap.  I still think I’m of the school that believes you have to get a Syrian-Israeli peace deal first before you can get a Palestinian-Israeli one.  [If you get Syria, you get Lebanon gets thrown into the deal as well.]  But after the recent Gaza incursions, the backdoor Syrian-Israeli peace talks mediated by the Turkish government appear dead.  Mostly the Syrians play the cat-and-mouse game of looking like they want peace and then not actually going for it.  If the Syrians brokered a deal with the Israelis, they would by Egypt tomorrow:  i.e. still a totally autocratic repressive, economically backwards regime, which should be a decent regional power, and all the fury will be turned on the government.  The Assad regime gets a pass on a great deal of its domestic repression by supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, as well as shrewdly staying connected to all sides in the Iraqi civil war (Kurd, Sunni resistance, and Shia government).

There’s always the Arab Peace Initiative.  Obviously there are a huge number of concerns with that document on the Israeli side.  Particularly since Hamas has never officially endorsed the plan.  Hamas did abstain from comment on it at the 2007 Riyadh meeting, which I take to mean that if it ever were actually enacted, they would have no choice but to ultimately accept it.

If Obama is going to go in for this, he has to take (I think) Walter Russell Mead’s advice and put the Palestinian political reality/needs first.  Mead is by no means some raging lefty.  That depends, I suppose, on whether Israel feels safer now or not relative to its Gaza operation.  Mahmoud Abbas is weaker than ever, which both Mead’s plan the Arab Initiative rely heavily on the Fatah movement.

In other words, I don’t know where Obama goes after doing whatever he can to make sure the ceasefire sticks for now.

It could be argued, however, that any non-involvement from the beginning on the part of Obama will be taken as a sign of the continuation of the Bush policy in the region.  Bush came into office and did nothing with the reegion, basically signalling to the Israelis that they could have a pretty much free hand in the region.  Whatever one’s views of the actions, that signal clearly led to Ariel Sharon’s trip to the Temple Mount, The unilateral pull out of Gaza, the Lebanon-Israel war, and then the Gaza bombardment. Well, at least Bush didn’t let the Israelis bomb Iran.

That being said, one constant in this whole bloody god-awful history of the region, is that the Arab regimes will talk a tough game but ultimately sell the Palestinians up the river as soon as they can.  A far darker possibility for Obama’s regime is the potential for one of the so-called (and not actually) “moderate” Arab regimes falling–most likely candidate being Egypt.  If that were to occur, who knows what happens then—increased voltality against Iran or at least Shia in the Gulf States?  Qatar trying to use the fight to gain leverage over Saudi Arabia by backing more resistance-based groups?   The rise of an Islamist regime in the region with The Muslim Brotherhood taking over in Egypt?  Who knows.

My fear more and more is that Obama is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Here’s the wiki solution on escaping the finger trap:

The solution to escaping the trap is to push the ends inward toward the middle, which enlarges the openings and frees the fingers, before slowly twisting them out of the trap so as not to trigger the tightening reflex again. A second form of escape is to push one’s fingers together and then grab the ends of the trap with one’s middle fingers and thumbs. The fingers can then easily be pulled out.

If I’m right that the region is a finger trap (and I might not be), I still have no idea what the parallel equivalent is to the region.  Maybe I’m taking the metaphor too literally or it breaks down at this point.

Scott is right that there is the question of global, big power multipolarity with the US having to learn to live with China, Russia, EU in whatever form all these governments survive the economic crash. But there is multipolarity within the Middle East itself now.  In the US media it’s usually (and rather stupidly) portrayed as this axis of moderates versus axis of radicals with Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas lined up against Egypt-Jordan-Saudi Arabia.  But it’s far more complicated than all that–for one reason so many of those government are autocracies and do not represent the will of their citizenry necessarily.

Obama ran on a hardline position against Hamas and I can’t seem him (especially so early in his administration) doing anything but taking that kind of line.  Trying to balance Israeli and “moderate” Arab government into a process.  When he put in his calls he called Olmert, Abbas, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Mubarak of Egypt.  Surprise and surprise.  I don’t see how such a move does anything but grip the trap tighter.

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