Elliott Abrams and Michael Singh: Spoilers: The End of the Peace Process
In December 2000, the president had put forward his far-reaching set of parameters on all the final status issues. . . . He was even prepared to spend his last four days in office negotiating the deal. A desperate Barak was waiting for the call to a final summit meeting. Barak’s foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, was so keen to reach an agreement that he had gone beyond his instructions and informed Arafat that he could even have sovereignty over the Jewish Holy of Holies, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But at the last moment, Arafat reneged.
—Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account
of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East
Typically, explanations for the lack of progress in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians revolve around disagreements over the “core issues,” insufficient diplomatic activism and pressure on Israel from the United States, and Israeli intransigence. Such views share one premise: that Israeli bargaining power overwhelms that of the Palestinians and must be compensated for by action on the part of the international community. They all fail to acknowledge one fact: the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of increasingly attractive Israeli offers.
A better explanation focuses instead on the true value—to both parties—of the agreement that analysts nearly unanimously agree has, in one form or another, been on the table for fifteen years but is today regarded by both sides as problematic. Israel, having little faith in the capacity or durability of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and embittered by recent clashes in Lebanon and Gaza, sees the yield of this agreement as offering diminishing returns relative to the sacrifice it would entail. Many Palestinians, while still placing faith in an agreement that would deliver their long-awaited statehood, see the alternatives—whether engaging in armed conflict or pushing for a single multiethnic state—as increasingly attractive.
Since the end of the Oslo process in 2000, the growing drift between these two positions has produced on the Israeli side a cynicism marked by paroxysms of despair, and on the Palestinian and Arab sides by a hardening of positions. This divergence is not the result of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank. However emotionally charged settlements may be, the idea that they prejudice the final status of disputed territory is belied by the fact that Israel’s territorial offers have increased, rather than diminished, with the growth of settlements. No, the diminishing interest in negotiations comes as the result of demographics, regional dynamics, evolving political realities, and the increasing availability and sophistication of rockets and other asymmetric means of warfare. Overcoming all of this will require something more than diplomacy on the “core issues.”
Demographic trends in the region pose stark choices for both sides. The Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has more than doubled from 1,728,334 at the time of the 1991 Madrid talks to 4,013,126 today, and is growing half again as fast as the Israeli population. (According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the West Bank’s population is growing at 2.2 percent, Gaza’s at 3.3 percent, and Israel’s at 1.7 percent.)
Many Israelis have concluded from these developments that for Israel to remain a democratic Jewish state, it must separate from the Palestinians and allow them their own state. But some Palestinians have reached the opposite conclusion. Given that the Palestinians currently living in the West Bank and Gaza (together with the 3 million refugees theoretically eligible to “return” to Israel) would be numerically overwhelming, why accept a Palestinian state that would be divided into two parts, the West Bank and Gaza, contain some Jewish settlements, consist of only 6,000 square kilometers, and lack resources? Why not push for a single unified state?...
... All these developments have taken place against a weakening of the military superiority Israel has enjoyed for the past half century. After the Arab defeats in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, the peace treaties Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan, and the demise of the USSR, it seemed there was a greater chance for peace because Arab states now understood that they could neither destroy Israel on their own nor count on the Soviets to do it for them. But today the proliferation of rockets and other weapons of terror—and Iran’s nuclear program—gives greater leverage to Palestinian rejectionists who might otherwise remain on the fringe. The future deployment of missile defense systems might help restore Israel’s previous position. But for now cheap rockets smuggled into or assembled in Gaza (which bring more and more of Israel’s cities into range) and guided antitank missiles and other military-grade weaponry provided by Iran make those pulling the trigger less fearful of the consequences than traditional militaries would have been in the past. The most extreme forces among the Palestinians have been given a new power—first by initiating crises when peace prospects seem to be growing, and second by raising hopes of grinding down Israel’s will through endless low-level military conflict.
These new factors, rather than disagreement over the “core issues”—including the delineation of a border between Israel and a Palestinian state, the return of Palestinian refugees, and the division of Jerusalem—have truly blocked the path to peace in the Middle East in recent years. They are what make traditional diplomatic approaches—more international conferences like those in Madrid or Annapolis, more pressure on Israel to “freeze settlements,” more rounds of talks between Israeli officials and Fatah’s West Bank leaders—seem so rote and void of promise. And these factors also demand a very different set of reactions to rehabilitate and increase Israel’s confidence in the value and durability of a peace agreement while also diverting Palestinian leaders from the pursuit of futile and dangerous alternatives. The key to such a new approach would be to leave the negotiating to the two parties and focus U.S. and international efforts on improving the background for those negotiations—by, on one hand, helping build a constituency for peace, and, on the other, countering the designs of spoilers of the peace efforts...