Tuesday, July 9, 2013

To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their Due. By Walter Russell Mead.

Change They Can Believe In: To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their Due. By Walter Russell Mead. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 1 (January/February 2009).

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), herehere 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.