The Politics for Peace Are Missing

Long after most observers left it for dead, Arab-Israeli peacemaking remains a priority in the waning days of the Clinton administration. With violence continuing between Arabs and Israelis, President Bill Clinton persists in cajoling, prodding, encouraging and strong-arming Ehud Barak, Israel’s caretaker prime minister, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat into making some sort of deal before he leaves office Jan. 20.

Clinton’s efforts are not born out of lunacy or delusion. They represent an effort to apply lessons learned from failed Syrian-Israeli negotiations last year. But his efforts obscure the fact that the sticking point in these negotiations is not process nor substance, but politics. The domestic politics in both Israeli and Palestinian communities have moved strongly away from compromise. Little that is constructive can occur until that situation changes.

In proposing principles for a framework agreement last month, Clinton sought to avoid two major pitfalls of the failed Israeli-Syrian talks. Those negotiations were torpedoed when a U.S. “bridging document” leaked to the press. The document revealed some potential Syrian concessions as points of agreement between the two sides, but other reciprocal Israeli concessions remained as differences to be resolved. Syrians felt burned by the experience, which doomed efforts to get negotiations back on track.

The whole tenor of the Israeli-Syrian interaction remained extraordinarily tense, however, because the parties could never agree where previous Israeli-Syrian negotiations had left off. The parties circled for months trying to agree where to begin, and each insisted that U.S. mediators knew that the truth lay with its version. In many ways, the negotiations were never able to overcome this obstacle.

The current Clinton proposal is an explicit effort to avoid these two problems. It seeks to establish a firm starting point for future negotiations, and it avoids setting down a written document until the last moment. The problem with this approach is that it is woefully mistimed.

A “framework agreement on principles” between Palestinians and Israelis has remained just out of reach for the better part of a year. Deadlines in February, May and September passed unmet, although U.S. negotiators continued to say that more common ground existed between the two sides than was publicly acknowledged. The Camp David summit in July was an effort to wrap up many of the remaining issues, reflecting Barak’s preference for making concessions all at once rather than gradually. After its failure, U.S. negotiators sought to lock in some of the progress by getting the two sides to state their points of agreement. In fact, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were meeting quietly in the Washington area when violence broke out in the region on Sept. 28, and were reportedly close to agreeing on such a document.

Since then, the political situation in both Israeli and Palestinian communities has spun rapidly downward. Barak, who faced parliamentary pressure at home at the time of Camp David, confronted continued defections from his government, rising criticism of his leadership and plummeting poll ratings. His unexpected decision to resign and seek a new mandate soon looked like a desperate gamble, and increasingly looks like a gamble he will lose. Arafat, with a public angry at Israelis who refused to meet many Palestinian demands, faced violence in the streets largely beyond his control.

Sentiment in both communities is now leaning hard against precisely the sorts of compromises Clinton’s proposal requires them to contemplate. If there is something overwhelming majorities in each community agree on now, it is that the other community cannot be rewarded for the violence it has employed.

Indeed, sentiment in each community mirrors that of the other community to an extraordinary degree. Deep down, many Israelis fear that Palestinians want to wipe them off the face of the earth. Palestinians feel the same about Israelis. Deep down, even dovish Israelis worry that agreements with Palestinians are useless, since they find the Palestinians’ implementation of the Oslo accords wanting. Palestinians worry the same way about Israelis and are especially wary of being drawn into a process whereby Israelis lawyer them to death, eviscerating the meaning of any Israeli concessions while producing list after list of supposed Palestinian violations of agreements. Perhaps most disturbingly, recent months of clashes have led many Israelis to believe that Palestinians will only listen to the language of violence, and many Palestinians feel the same way about Israelis. In this regard, both Palestinians and Israelis regard their ability to inflict losses on the other side to be greater than the other side’s ability to absorb such losses, thereby paving the way for more inconclusive bloodshed.

Ultimately, peacemaking is a political act between communities, not just leaders. But violence has poisoned the air, and rejectionists attributing the most extreme motives to the other side are gathering more and more people into their fold.

In this there is another strange parallel. Both Israeli and Palestinian leaderships believe that there is nothing they can do to affect politics in the other community. Yet, if only the leadership of the other community would say or do certain things, it would make their own peacemaking efforts far easier. In fact, peace will not come until an Israeli leader speaks frankly to the Palestinian people, and a Palestinian leader speaks frankly to the Israeli people. Equally important, a Palestinian leader must speak to his own people with the same frankness with which he addresses international audiences. Doing so would both lower the level of rhetoric in the Palestinian community and assuage Israeli fears.

The Israeli leader must send a message of respect. He must welcome the establishment of a Palestinian state that is a viable and equal partner in the community of nations, and renounce territorial expansion. He must explicitly acknowledge Arabs’ legitimate attachment to Jerusalem as both a major Arab city and a site holy to both Christians and Muslims.

The Palestinian leader must send a message of coexistence. Mindful that most Israelis believe that their Arab neighbors dream of “throwing the Jews into the sea,” the Palestinian leader must explicitly assure Israelis that the nascent Palestinian state has no territorial designs on pre-1967 Israel. He must unequivocally state that violence has no place in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, and explicitly recognize Jews’ legitimate attachment to Jerusalem as their spiritual home.

Not only must he deliver such a message to the Israeli public, he must send the same message to his own public. Israelis closely monitor the Palestinian media, and they are dismayed that, all too often, Palestinian messages of conciliation and limited demands are delivered in English while messages of steadfastness and maximalist demands are delivered in Arabic. While Israelis have a badly skewed picture of what is said in the Arab media, words of conciliation and compromise all too rarely come from the Palestinian political leadership.

Rather than pushing for a deal now, Israelis and Palestinians have to begin to create the environment in which a deal is conceivable. There are two options.

The first is that the parties work on building trust in the other community, reducing the perception of the conflict from one that threatens the very existence of the two communities to one in which the parties are seeking to protect their interests. Such a conflict can be resolved through traditional negotiations.

The alternative is to go down a route so bloody that one side decides that the interests it deems vital today are, in fact, not worth the bloodshed. We cannot know when that point will be reached, but given the stakes on both sides, it seems likely that the hundreds of deaths from violence since September will turn out to be only a small fraction of the final number before peace is at hand.