The New Israel and the Old. By Walter Russell Mead. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 87, No. 4 (July/August 2008). Also here.
Northern Ireland and Palestine. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, November 22, 2009.
Antisemitism Saturday. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 13, 2010.
Middle East “Realists”: Anti-Semites or Just Dumb? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, February 25, 2010. Also here.
The Night Yasser Arafat Kissed Me. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 9, 2010.
Don’t Blame the Jews. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 10, 2010. Also here.
The Israel Lobby and Gentile Power. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 11, 2010. Also here.
Is This Lobby Different From All Others? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 12, 2010. Also here.
The Israel Crisis. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 15, 2010. Also here.
Obama and the Jacksonian Zionists. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 16, 2010. Also here.
Peace in the Middle East? Not Yet. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 24, 2010.
Settling Zion. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, March 25, 2010.
Why AIPAC Is Good For The Jews — and For Everyone Else. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, April 5, 2010.
The Middle East Peace Industry. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 11, 2010.
The Palestinian Predicament. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 12, 2010.
Silver Linings in the Middle East. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 14, 2010.
Israel’s Strategic Failure. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, June 3, 2010.
The World Must Do More For Middle East Peace. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, June 14, 2010. Also here.
Both
the Israelis and the Palestinians have a lot to answer for in their
100-year-plus conflict over some of the most miserable and hardscrabble but
somehow beloved land on the face of the earth. But the sad and sorry truth is
that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are really responsible for the
mess that they are both in — and neither party can solve the problem on its
own.
We
outsiders love to blame those two squabbling peoples for their long and vicious
war. These days most outsiders blame the Israelis — stronger, richer, mostly
descended from immigrants who’ve only been (back) in the land for a century or
less. Obviously as the stronger and richer party, say these folks, the Israelis
should make the lion’s share of concessions. It is up to Israel to make the
Palestinians happy, says a large fraction of world opinion, and its obstinate
failure to do so is a crime not only against the suffering Palestinians, but
against all the rest of us whose comfortable slumbers are so often and rudely
disturbed by this incessant and distressing conflict. Meanwhile the incessant
Israeli settlements and land seizures inflame both Palestinian and world public
opinion and the brutality and cost of occupation hurts the Palestinians,
frustrates their prospects for economic growth, and infuriates people all over
the world.
Other
outsiders say that the big problem is the Palestinians: they “never miss an
opportunity to miss an opportunity.” If they’d known what was good for them,
they would have accepted either the British proposal or the UN proposal for
partition back before Israel’s War of Independence. If they’d been smart enough
to do that, there would be no Palestinian refugee problem today and they would
have a lot more land. Failing that, they should have made peace in 1967 — they
would have gotten every acre of the territories back without a single Israeli
settlement. (Although there would have been some tough arguments over
Jerusalem.) The chief cause of the endless prolongation of the conflict and of
Palestinian suffering in this view is the repeated failure of the Palestinian
leadership to accept compromise. The compromise they contemptuously reject
today inexorably becomes the utopia they will dream of ten years down the road.
Again,
there is some truth in both stories, but not enough. The largest and most
expansive concessions that the Israelis can make (return to the pre-1967
borders, a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem with Islamic holy places under
Palestinian control, compensation and financial aid to refugees) will not meet
the true minimum Palestinian conditions for an acceptable peace. By the same
token, no Palestinian leadership, however compromise-minded and moderate, can
deliver what Israelis most crave in exchange: credible guarantees of security
and the end of conflict and claims. That is the ugly reality at the heart of
the conflict.
The U.N. and Us
The
status quo in the Middle East isn’t Israel’s fault and it isn’t the
Palestinians’ fault. If the world community seriously wants to understand, much
less address this bitter, destructive and dangerous conflict it needs to spend
some time looking in the mirror. It was decisions taken by the international
community, not by the Israelis and not the Palestinians, that set the stage for
this ongoing tragedy, and it is the international community and only the
international community that can put this conflict on the long glide path
toward final peace.
The
conflict and the refugee crisis are both direct results of decisions made by
the League of Nations (whose award of the mandate for Palestine to Britain
incorporated the terms of the Balfour Declaration promising a homeland for the
Jews) and the United Nations. The United Nations didn’t just propose a
partition plan for Palestine in 1947 (accepted by the Jews and rejected by the
Arabs): when the British announced that they were giving up the mandate and
going home, the United Nations made no provision for the security of the
territory’s inhabitants during the transition period. In the absence of
international peacekeepers or any other guarantees for their security, both the
Jewish and the Arabic communities of British Palestine had to act in self-defense
as each community best understood its interest. The resulting war led directly
to the creation of the refugee problem as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes — and the poisonous and bitter
aftermath of the war led to the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands
of Jews to Israel from all over the Arab world.
Each
community nourished its grudges; to some degree they are both still doing it
now.
But the
international community could have prevented this if it had either enforced the
partition plan it endorsed or at the very least taken up its legal and moral
responsibility to provide basic security in Palestine while discussions
continued. Neither the Jews nor the Arabs could do this in 1947-48. Today, 0nly
the international community has the resources to move the dispute toward some
kind of closure.
This is
the ugly and uncomfortable truth that the world so often ignores as we get on
our moral high ground and lecture to the squabbling Israelis and Palestinians
about their stubborn failures to make peace: Israeli concessions alone cannot
bring dignity and a decent future for a significant group of Palestinians. There
is not enough room in the Holy Land for all the Jews and Arabs who want to live
there. The future Palestinian state based on the 1967 pre-war armistice lines
cannot provide a place where all the refugees in the West Bank and Gaza — to
say nothing of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere — can live decent lives. This
is one reason why the right of return remains the third rail of Palestinian
politics; even Palestinian leaders trying to negotiate a two state solution
with Israel cannot abandon this central demand from their public speeches and
sloganeering — although they have always known that the two state solution
means that most Palestinians will never go “home.”
If it
were just a question of the West Bank, we could probably fudge a solution. An
Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (including Arab Jerusalem), plus
compensation to refugees and financial and development assistance to help the
new state get on its feet, would likely provide enough satisfaction to enough
West Bankers to make the peace stick. Violence would continue, but in a worst
case scenario the future might look something like Northern Ireland’s past. That’s
not brilliant, but it’s not disaster. Better Belfast than Beirut.
Unfortunately,
even on the West Bank it’s not about just the West Bank. That is, West Bankers
feel that they are part of a larger whole, and unless a solution is found for
the problems of the Palestinian people (on the West Bank, in Gaza, and
scattered abroad in the Palestinian diaspora) the West Bank could not
permanently settle down as an independent Palestinian state.
And
make no mistake about it, the two state solution as currently advocated does
not solve enough problems for enough Palestinians in Gaza, Lebanon and
elsewhere to be viable. The Palestinians in Gaza live in a desert without
resources and practically without hope. There are other densely inhabited,
resource-poor territories whose inhabitants have become rich thanks to
geography, culture and good leadership, but Gaza is not and likely never will
be Singapore. (And Singapore has resources like a world class harbor and a
natural location on the world’s major shipping lines that Gaza does not.) Currently
many Gazans depend on outside charity for food, housing, education and medicine
(the United States gives more to Palestinian relief than any other country);
presumably once there is a two state peace treaty and the Palestinians enjoy
the “right of return” to Palestine, they will no longer count as refugees and
will no longer receive the kind of international assistance they now get. The
right to starve in your own hovel under your own flag is not and never has been
the goal of the Palestinian national movement and there can be no stable or
lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that does not meet the
essential needs of Gazans. Currently Gaza is a deeply dysfunctional welfare
state sustained largely by international charity and under harsh military rule.
For many Palestinians in Gaza it is overwhelmingly obvious that the two-state
solution without a right of return to pre-1967 Israel is no solution at all. They
have been fighting for more than sixty years to get out of the camps in Gaza and
back “home”; they will not stop because Mahmoud Abbas and Binyamin Netanyahu
sign a piece of paper on the White House lawn.
The
Palestinians scattered abroad have even less to gain from the two-state
solution. The “right to return” to an
overcrowded, under-resourced Palestinian state is derisory. What passport will
Palestinians now resident in Lebanon (and deprived of basic economic rights by
the local Arabs who, while working themselves into frenzies over Israel’s sins
against Palestine, treat their own Palestinians worse than the Israelis treat
Arabs in Israel) carry? What rights will they have? Where will they go to
university, what businesses and professions can they enter? Where can they
live? (Currently, Palestinians in Lebanon face severe restrictions in every one
of these essential aspects of life; there is no international human rights
movement to gain them their rights, no Turkish aid flotillas sail to their
rescue.)
Quite
naturally and understandably, these Palestinians will reject any peace
agreement that ignores their rights and needs; many other Palestinians will
share their outrage and the outrage of the Gazans at what will be perceived as
an unprincipled sellout of the Palestinian national cause. Between the
financial resources of the Palestinian diaspora and the much larger resources
of the regional troublemakers who will see political advantage in supporting
the Palestinian cause, violent resistance against the pro-peace Palestinians
and against Israel will continue and perhaps even grow.
Israel
cannot solve these Palestinians’ problems; neither can the conventional, Camp
David two-state solution. But unless these problems are addressed, the
Palestinians who sign peace agreements will lack legitimacy among Palestinian
nationalists, and Israelis will continue to live with the threat of violence —
and will continue to be blamed worldwide for Palestinian grievances.
Send Visas, Jobs and Money
If the
international community is serious about solving this problem, as opposed to
making moralistic statements and giving vent to its feelings of moral
superiority, it has to come up with solutions to the problems that millions of
Palestinians will face even after the creation of an independent Palestinian
state covering about 22% of Mandatory Palestine. We need a Camp David Plus
approach to the two-state solution.
That
solution will involve two things that the international community does NOT want
to provide: visas and money. The human problems of the Palestinian people
cannot be solved unless hundreds of thousands and quite possibly more than a
million people have the opportunity to emigrate to countries where they will
enjoy full economic, social and citizenship rights. None of the other mass
refugee problems of the 1940s (in India, Pakistan, Germany, Poland and many
others) was solved without giving refugees full citizenship and economic rights
and the ability to build new homes and new lives for themselves. This one won’t
be solved without that either.
Some
think that integrating Palestinians should be the responsibility of the Arab or
Muslim worlds alone. This is wrong. The
whole international community helped cook up this stew, and the whole
international community must help make things right. Self-righteous Europeans
will have to interrupt their Israel-bashing to make room for some new
Palestinian immigrants who will have the full right to become citizens.
Money
also matters. There has been much talk about refugee compensation even in the
conventional peace process, but much more remains to be done. Money is
important for two reasons. First, the Palestinians need and deserve the
recognition and justice that monetary compensation affords. The dignity of the
Palestinian people needs to be recognized and their suffering acknowledged. Some
of the money needs to come from Israel, but the international community as a
whole must also make good — and also assume responsibility for any further
financial claims. (I also believe that Jewish refugees from the Arab world
should be compensated at the same time and to the same measure; this would not
only do justice, but it would create support for peace and concessions in
Israeli politics.)
Second,
Palestinians need money to start new lives. Peace for Palestinians means that
every Palestinian will have a passport and enjoy full citizenship rights in a
recognized state, with full economic, social and political rights wherever he
or she lives. But to make those rights effective, Palestinians must have the
means to get started. Even the very
large financial payments needed to provide symbolic as well as actual justice
pale into insignificance compared to the costs and risks of prolonged conflict
— to say nothing of the continuing cost of maintaining the original refugees
and the growing number of their descendants in a kind of refugee limbo in
settlements and camps.
I wrote
about some of these ideas in Foreign Affairs as the Obama administration took office. Obviously, that advice was
not taken. I still think that the Obama administration has a unique opportunity
to advance the cause of peace in ways that allow it to be more pro-Palestinian
without becoming less pro-Israel. Developing a vision of a Camp David Plus
peace proposal and building the international support that can make it a
reality would strengthen American leadership, improve relations with the
peoples of the Islamic world and advance the cause of just and lasting peace. The
alternatives, frankly, are not very appealing.
Even if
the United States decides to lead the world toward this kind of comprehensive
approach to Palestinian suffering, peace is unlikely to come quickly. The idea
of the right of a literal, physical return by refugees and their descendants is
deeply etched into Palestinian history, culture and emotion. To accept anything
else will feel like betrayal to many people whose lives have been shaped by
this struggle. But moving the world to recognize a common responsibility to the
Palestinian people and to take the lead in developing just and dignified
solutions to their problems will help strengthen the bridges between the United
States and thoughtful Muslim (and European) opinion without forcing the United
States into politically unsustainable confrontations with Israel.
The Problem With J Street. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, October 16, 2010.
Report From the Middle East: Part One. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, September 25, 2011.
America, Israel, Gaza, the World. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, November 18, 2012. Also here.
From this perspective, in which war is an elemental struggle between peoples rather than a kind of knightly duel between courtly elites, the concept of proportionality seems much less compelling. Certainly if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking targets in the United States, the American people would demand that their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed. Those Americans who share this view of war might feel sorrow at the loss of innocent life, of the children and non-combatants killed when overwhelming American power was used to take the terrorists out, but they would feel no moral guilt. The guilt would be on the shoulders of those who started the whole thing by launching the missiles.
Thus when television cameras show the bodies of children killed in an Israeli air raid, Jacksonian Americans are sorry about the loss of life, but it inspires them to hate and loathe Hamas more, rather than to be mad at Israel. They blame the irresponsible dolts who started the war for all the consequences of the war and they admire Israel’s strength and its resolve for dealing with the appalling blood lust of the unhinged loons who start a war they can’t win, and then cower behind the corpses of the children their foolishness has killed. The whole situation strengthens the widespread American belief that Palestinian hate rather than Israeli intransigence is the fundamental reason for the Middle East impasse, and the television pictures that drive much of the world away from Israel often have the effect of strengthening the bonds between Americans and the Jewish state.
This automatic Jacksonian response to the Middle East situation overlooks some important complexities in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in the past America’s Jacksonian instincts have gotten us into trouble. But anyone trying to analyze the politics of the Middle East struggle as they unfold in American debates needs to be aware of the power of these ideas about war in American life.
The Key to Peace: Selling the Two State Solution in Palestine. By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, January 5, 2013.
The False Religion of Middle East Peace. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, May/June 2010. Also here (JSTOR copy), here, here and here.
Five Reasons Why the Two-State Solution Just Won’t Die. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, July 16, 2012.
Peace Offensive. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, June 5, 2013.
Preserving Israel’s Uncertain Status Quo. By Aaron David Miller. New York Times, August 14, 2012.
