Realism in the Middle East. By Emanuele Ottolenghi. Standpoint, May 2014.
Ottolenghi:
President
Obama’s latest attempt to cajole Israel and the Palestinian Authority into
reaching a historic peace accord has floundered. Predictably, the blame game
has now begun. Adding a new twist to the familiar script of failure in Middle
East diplomacy, this time the US administration has chosen to join its European
allies’ instinctive reaction of pointing the finger at Jerusalem, while Israel
has publicly blamed the US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Each
attempt no doubt has its peculiar qualities — the usual mixture of bad timing,
clash of personalities and outside imponderables that make each round of failed
peacemaking the stuff of lectures, essays, memoirs and recriminations.
Yet
they all have much in common. For once one has replaced names or dates — US
special envoy Martin Indyk for George Mitchell, 2008 for 2014 — the dynamics,
stumbling blocks and predictable negative outcomes are the same.
Western
diplomats, who seem keener than anyone else involved — Israelis and
Palestinians included — to bring an end to this conflict, should ask the reason
why. Why does peace remain elusive?
After
all, it is these same diplomats who have insisted for more than 20 years that
the contours of a peace deal are known to all and that the two sides always get
to a point where they are “closer to a deal than ever before,” as John Kerry
optimistically said last December, echoing Ehud Olmert’s almost identical
statement in July 2008.
Funny,
we are always so close, but we never get there. And that is part of the
problem.
After
20 years of trying to find the perfect point of equilibrium in a complex
algorithm of territorial, identity, and religious and material claims, it
should be obvious that the peace-process formula has the wrong ingredients.
Scientists would readily understand that repeating the same experiment over and
over again without changing its elements or their quantities will always yield
the same result.
Diplomats
seem to miss this point. It is easier to blame “the extremists on both sides”
or the craven pressure groups lurking in the shadows; the evils of nationalism
or the perils of a fractious coalition; the shadows of the past or the
narrative of the victor. Every time, something stands in the way whose
nefarious influence could be removed or mitigated if only x, y or z were
altered.
Europeans
are fond of blaming America’s presumed bias towards Israel, forgetting,
conveniently, that their lukewarm, fair-weather friendship for Israel can never
replace American security guarantees. The liberal commentariat loves to go
after Israeli hawks — it gives them a chance to let off their subconscious
anti-Semitism by variously relabeling the object of their hatred with such
anodyne terms as “the Israel lobby,” “neocons” and “settlers,” while
downplaying terrorism, Islamic radicalism and the Arab world’s internal
dynamics.
The BBC
can wash its hands of the obligation to represent a complex story fairly, by
embracing the morally neutered terminology of “bystanderism,” whereby fault
lies with “the extremists on both sides” and other such invented “blame-both-sides”
categories that only inhabit the moral equivalence of a liberal newsroom’s
world.
Nobody,
on the other hand, seems to have grasped the obvious, because it is unpalatable
and inconvenient, especially to those who have spent a lifetime believing in
Middle East peace both as an end in itself and a panacea for other problems.
There is no deal because the cost of peacemaking far outweighs its benefits for
either side.
After
all, consider this. For Israelis and Palestinians alike the stumbling blocks,
over the years, remain the same. The Palestinian demand for refugees to be
granted a right of return, the Israeli demand for Palestinians to recognise
Israel as a Jewish state and their mutually exclusive demands over sovereignty
in Jerusalem are unlikely to change, because if compromised they would
irreparably damage the core components of the national identity of each side.
Israel
is unlikely to relinquish the strategic depth afforded by territorial control
over the Jordan Valley and provided by the West Bank in exchange for vague
international guarantees. Palestinian nationalism cannot leave behind, at least
notionally, the millions of descendants of refugees who escaped the 1948 war,
yet it is doubtful that it could accommodate them physically in a territory as
small as the West Bank and Gaza and financially in an economy as tiny as the
Palestinian one. And though Israel’s enemies would love to impose such an outcome,
Israel is unlikely to commit national suicide.
As if
this were not enough, past failures and regional developments compound the
problem. Why should either side trust their negotiating partner when each
previous attempt collapsed? What has changed to make it better?
Are the
Palestinians less determined on resettling refugees? Have they renounced
delegitimising Israel? Have settlements shrunk in size and demography? Are
their inhabitants streaming back to pre-1967 Israel? Has Islam declared Jerusalem
no longer holy? Has Judaism forgotten it? And how can Israel negotiate a final
deal with the Palestinian Authority while Gaza remains under Hamas rule? Why
should Israel take “risks for peace” when the entire region is in turmoil? Who
can believe that a Palestinian government which signs a peace deal will survive
long enough to make it stick, given the Islamic resurgence currently shaking
the Arab world?
The
Arab-Israeli conflict defies solution. It has always done so. It will continue
to do so in the near future. Trying once more what failed before is doomed to
beget more failure.
It is
time the West recognised that the differences between the two sides are
irreconcilable — and the sooner the better.
