Middle East Matters

For the first dozen days of the Trump administration, it seemed to Israelis that they had a free hand to settle the West Bank. Israel announced its intention to build thousands of new houses, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the Knesset and declared that Israel would establish its first new settlement in decades. Washington said nothing. Then, last Thursday night, the White House press secretary issued a statement that caught many in Washington—and Israel—off guard. The statement proclaimed 50 years of American continuity in seeking Israeli-Palestinian peace. It also reiterated President Trump’s personal desire to “achieve peace throughout the Middle East region”—another way of saying a comprehensive Arab-Israeli agreement. But the statement also included two sentences that Israelis have been parsing ever since.   While we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal...The Trump administration has not taken an official position on settlement activity and looks forward to continuing discussions, including with Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visits with President Trump later this month.   Not surprisingly, Israelis are in sharp disagreement over the meaning of these words. Writing in the mainstream Yedioth Ahronoth, Alex Fishman and Orly Azulai stated, “The White House issued a message that new settlements are an obstacle to peace.” In contrast, Ariel Kahane, proclaimed on the pro-settler Israeli website NRG.co.il, “No matter which way you look at it, the White House’s statement about Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria is wonderful news.” No wonder Israelis are confused; packed into those two sentences are a number of messages. First, the Trump administration’s statement represents a dramatically divergence on settlements philosophically from the Obama administration. The Obama administration clearly saw settlement activity as a primary reason for their failed peacemaking efforts, with Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly declaring settlements “illegitimate” and, at least tacitly, illegal. The Trump administration is registering a strong disagreement in principle: analytically, existing Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not an impediment to peace. At the same time, the statement declares the White House philosophically uncommitted on the issue of future settlement activity, and called this an issue for future discussions with the Israeli government. Against this philosophical framework, the new White House at the same time drew a gentle yet unambiguous red line around certain Israeli settlement activities in practice, specifically against new settlements and the expansion of existing settlements “beyond their current borders.” Settlement activity, per se, is not necessarily a problem for President Trump. However expanding settlements territorially—i.e. building on more West Bank land—is not acceptable. This is a repackaging and reaffirmation of the settlement policy adopted by President George W. Bush that essentially said settlement activities are acceptable if they do not go beyond the building lines of existing settlements. That approach sought to neutralize any adverse impact of what Israelis call “natural growth”—expansion of the population among the more than half-million Israelis considered settlers by the international community. At the same time, putting in place a territorial limitation leaves open the potential for a viable, contiguous, and sovereign Palestinian state—something opposed by the ideological hard-right in Israel. Last Thursday’s statement is a huge disappointment to those Israelis who had believed they had a tacit green light from the Trump administration to settle anywhere in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The United States has now clearly set some limits. Yet for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump statement has evident benefits. It is a setback to the prime minister’s right-wing challengers in his party and in his cabinet who have been calling on the prime minister to devote more resources to the settlements. Netanyahu can now say that with its recent spate of building announcements, Israel has tested the limits of the Trump administration and that to go further would be harmful. But the statement was also a clear message to Netanyahu: President Trump plans to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and he expects a constructive discussion about settlements when the two leaders meet in Washington next week.

The Madrid peace conference in 1991 to launch comprehensive Arab-Israeli negotiations was a diplomatic triumph. The 2007 Annapolis conference relaunched peace-making and a new, well-prepared three track security, economic, and political process on pre-negotiated terms of reference just a few years after the violent second Intifada. These were important moments—historically, and diplomatically. Despite best intentions, the 2017 Paris peace conference was neither historic nor constructive. The meeting was both poorly timed and ill-prepared, such that the two main parties—the Israelis and Palestinians—stayed away. Even Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was otherwise occupied. The absence of the two main protagonists to the conflict was the least of it. The meeting simply underlined outdated thinking that, left uncorrected, will harm future international diplomatic efforts to deliver peace to the Holy Land. In an article penned several days ago for the Israeli daily Haaretz, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault laid out several core reasons for the conference: Ayrault argued that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, left unattended, will “continue to fuel frustration and will ultimately only worsen the vicious cycle of radicalization and violence. It will continue to give budding terrorists excuses for enlisting.” The dubious implication is that heinous and deadly terrorist attacks and violence unleashed recently in Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul—not to mention Damascus, Aleppo, and Raqaa—were the product of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Further justifying the conference he wrote, “I have a very strong conviction…that only a two-state solution will in time bring stability to the region and enable Israel to live in security.” This statement is rooted in thinking from an era, long passed, when the Israeli-Arab conflict was the primary source of regional instability. Moreover, it implies, that former colonial powers such as France know better than Middle Easterners themselves what is in their best interests. This sheer arrogance was remarkably explicit in the conference final communique yesterday in which the participants expressed their expectation of how the democratically elected Israeli and Palestinian governments should relate to their own government’s officials: The conference “participants expect (emphasis added) both sides to restate their commitment to the two-state solution, and to disavow official voices on their side that reject this solution.” Israeli and Palestinian leaders were explicitly called upon yesterday to disavow their own officials whose policy preferences are deemed disagreeable to the Paris conferees. This type of call to intervene in the domestic politics of a democratically elected government is what led British Prime Minister Theresa May to chastise Secretary of State Kerry’s valedictory peace speech several weeks’ ago. It may even explain, at least in part, why the British government limited its representation at the Paris conference to that of observer. Saving Israelis and Palestinians from their leaders is clearly what France had in mind for their conference. As French minister Ayrault put it, “promises of peace from both sides have disappeared and have been replaced by mistrust, resignation, and even false hope that the current situation can go on indefinitely. Saving the two state solution and safeguarding a future of peace and prosperity for peoples in the region is why the international community has decided to take action with the impetus of France.” But experience demonstrates that Western appeals to Middle Eastern peoples over the heads of their governments doesn’t work. President Obama delivered a pitch-perfect speech in Jerusalem to Israelis in 2013 on the virtues of peace that had no discernible effect. Secretary of State John Kerry lectured Israelis and Palestinians about the need to take immediate action for four years—all with no result. Why Ayrault believes Israelis and Palestinians would want to listen to the French government, rather than their own leaders, is unclear. It is tempting to dismiss the Paris meeting as simply a harmless, yet heroic, effort to advance the noble cause of Middle East peace. But does it make sense for significant amounts of taxpayer euros and dollars to be devoted to a pointless conference when Europe and the Middle East are host to the world’s largest refugee crisis since World War II? Against the backdrop of over a million recently displaced Middle Easterners, not a single Palestinian or Israeli life was enhanced by yesterday’s conference. Nor was the cause of Palestine, Israel, or peace between them, in any way advanced. The Paris conference squandered another precious and vital asset to the peaceful conduct of nations: diplomatic capital. Each time world leaders stand before microphones and espouse the need for Middle East peace without actually doing anything about it, the more they debase the currency of diplomacy, and the more they undermine the faith among Israelis and Palestinians that statecraft—appropriately prepared and pursued—can ever help the cause of peace. Trust among Israelis and Palestinians in the possibility of peace is further eroded by ill-timed and ill-conceived diplomatic efforts that seem more designed to express international moral outrage than to produce actual results. International meetings to help Israelis and Palestinians prepare conditions for peace can be constructive. But to be helpful, they must be pursued in ways that are considered legitimate to both parties to the conflict under dispute. A basic prerequisite for all diplomatic efforts—one that French, American and other diplomats have refused to accept recently—is that the views and positions of the protagonists to the conflict need to be taken into account for progress to be made. If would-be peace-makers conclude that the parties themselves are not prepared to offer such views, or make necessary concessions, then diplomatic assets should not be wasted for a certain bad outcome. Better to focus instead on the tedious and unglamorous type of spadework that seeks to prepare the ground for a time when high-level conferences can actually help. This type of daily diplomacy never makes it into the headlines, but it is far more critical right now to explore what limited steps might be possible to help prepare conditions for a time when the parties are actually ready and empowered to negotiate in earnest. It’s not hard to see that neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli governments right now are positioned to move forward toward the two-state peace that the conveners of yesterday’s meeting seek. If nothing else, the peripatetic efforts of outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry have provided a real-world experiment that tested the hypothesis that international goodwill and hard work can prevail upon the Israelis and Palestinians to make concession that they are not prepared to make. This reality makes Paris’ call for a return to negotiations right now not only pointless, but misguided. It is not the message that international leaders should be sending to a new American president who takes office later this week.

Secretary of State John Kerry just delivered the speech he’s been eager to give for several years. Following the abrupt failure of his ambitious all-or-nothing peace initiative in April 2014, Kerry and some of his aides have suggested that their efforts had actually broken important diplomatic ground, and that they had produced new innovative formulas for a conflict-ending comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. The secretary apparently wanted to share these ideas, if for no other reason than to document publicly the seriousness of his efforts and as one final plea over the urgency of solving a problem he is convinced will soon become insoluble due to dynamic changes on the ground—namely Israeli settlement activity. President Obama, Kerry’s boss, has not been convinced that the United States should play one of its last remaining diplomatic cards by laying out a detailed vision of comprehensive peace in the waning days of his administration. Obama himself had tried it in May 2011 when, after considerable internal squabbling, he laid out his own partial vision of a solution of Middle East peace in two precisely crafted speeches—one at the State Department and a second one before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Rather than break the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, however, Obama’s 2011 speeches were marked by an absence of follow-up diplomacy. American peacemaking efforts went into hibernation until John Kerry returned to them almost two years later upon becoming secretary of state. No doubt, the impending inauguration of Donald Trump helped convince Obama to let Kerry make today’s speech, if only for legacy purposes. Trump, who previously donated money to a West Bank settlement in honor of his recently named ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, clearly shares few if any of the assumptions on which American peacemaking diplomacy has been conducted over the past eight years. Obama probably surmised that even if it does not advance the cause of peace, at least Kerry’s remarks could help contain the uproar unleashed by the United States’ abstention from last week’s Security Council Resolution 2334, which is strongly critical of Israel. And today, Kerry clearly sought to explain and justify the administration’s thinking in not vetoing the resolution. Yet that today John Kerry, rather than the president himself, went before the cameras suggests that Obama either remains ambivalent over the utility of laying out a comprehensive American vision or doesn’t really see there being much more left to say. Instead, as with Kerry’s peripatetic Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, Obama appeared willing to let his lead diplomat once again scratch a longstanding itch and devote time and effort to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kerry has already made many remarks on the need for Israelis and Palestinians to make peace, including some delivered just several weeks ago. So why not one more? After listening to Kerry’s speech, the president must feel that his disinclination to give his own speech was correct. For what was striking about Kerry’s 75-minute long address was not what was new, but rather how little new there really was for him to say. Just about everything Kerry said today he has said in one form or another previously in multiple speeches as secretary of state. Kerry has long warned of the danger that settlements pose to a two-state solution, cautioned that time is running out for such a solution to be viable, noted the dangers of a one-state reality in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and stressed the need for Israel to chose soon if it wants to be both a Jewish and democratic state. Perhaps even more striking is that despite the lengthiness of the speech, it failed to deliver on the one thing it had promised: New American parameters for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead, Kerry offered up a set of “principles” for the basis of a peace settlement. Kerry did not go further than his boss had done in May 2011. And the ideas that Secretary Kerry offered were remarkably similar to those offered up by President Clinton at the end of his presidency in January 2001. Also missing was any sense of how the principles he articulated can or should be realized. What Kerry seemed to be calling for was something he has been calling for four years: Israeli and Palestinian leaders to become reasonable and prioritize peacemaking in the way Secretary of State Kerry does. Completely absent was a new path to get there, other than through face-to-face negotiations. Inherent in Secretary Kerry’s speech was a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, the premise of the speech was that a two-state solution is just about unrealizable, owing largely to continued Israeli settlement activity. At the same time, the purpose Kerry gave for delivering the speech was that some future American peacemakers can pick up and build upon on the principles articulated by Kerry. Presumably Kerry doesn’t expect that President-elect Donald Trump will do so. So then how could a two-state solution along the lines Kerry articulated be viable sometime down the line if time is just about to run out on such an outcome? For years, American leaders have said that the United States cannot want peace more than the parties themselves. While Kerry himself has parroted that line, there is no evidence that the secretary of state actually believes it. Instead, he appears to be driven by a belief that American wisdom and willpower can still prevail over the absence of Israeli and Palestinian urgency. That passionate sense was palpable again today. Absent was a compelling explanation as to why he seems more determined and urgent to make fateful choices for peace right now than Israelis and Palestinians are themselves.