The latest post on Dan Fleshler's Realistic Dove (www.realisticdove.com) is a response to complaints elsewhere in the blogosphere that Egypt ending the peace treaty with Israel would be a good thing. The argument made at Mondoweiss and elsewhere is that the peace treaty allowed Israel to deploy its army and air force to make war on the Palestinians and Lebanese because it had a reasonable expectation that Egypt would keep the peace. This is no doubt true, but it is not the whole story.
Because of the lack of trust between Israel and its Arab neighbors, it has decided as a measure of prudence, because its margin of error is relatively low, to only make peace with those neighboring regimes that demonstrate that they will keep the peace. Because the Israeli electorate can only bear the burden of one peace process at a time, this has meant in practice that Israel began with the easiest negotiations i.e. those with the most trustworthy Arab regimes and the least strategic territory and worked its way down. So far it has made peace with two Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, whose leaders at the time of the peace treaty had a reputation both within Israel and within the West for moderation and trustworthiness. But even with Egypt, the first peace treaty in 1979, Israel tested Egypt first by concluding two separation-of-forces agreements in January 1974 and September 1975. These allowed Israel to establish that the Sadat regime was trustworthy.
Since the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, Israeli actions have depended upon the nature of the coalition government in power. Three different parties have lead coalitions since 1979: the Likud, Labor, and Kadima. Under the Likud Israel invaded southern Lebanon in March 1978, bombed PLO headquarters in Lebanon in July 1981, bombed an Iraqi reactor in June 1981, and invaded Lebanon in June 1982 and occupied Beirut. Under Labor Israel withdraw from the areas of the Likud's conquest of 1982 in 1984-85, started a peace process with the PLO and Syria in 1992-95, and continued negotiations with Syria and the PLO in 1999-2000 and withdrew completely from Lebanon in July 2000. The Likud then reoccupied the West Bank's main cities in 2002 and withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005.
Kadima, elected to power in March 2006, was involved in two separate wars: in Lebanon in July 2006 and in Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. Kadima was supported in these wars by Labor, which also supported Sharon in reoccupying the West Bank in 2002 and withdrawing from Gaza in 2005.
So the lesson one draws from this seems clear--Israeli behavior depends on which parties are in power. The most likely party to go to war is Kadima supported by Labor. The least likely is Labor supported by Meretz. Any Likud government in which Sharon was either defense or prime minister was likely to go to war.
But the Israeli actions also depended on the activity of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah continued to maintain a provocative profile vis a vis Israel despite Israel's complete withdrawal from Lebanese territory according to the UN definition. This was because Hezbollah needed a justification for the maintenance of its guns within Lebanese politics. Hamas also maintained a provocative profile vis a vis Israel throughout the 1990s and 2000s in order to distinguish itself from Yasir Arafat's Fatah and other members of the PLO. It wanted to demonstrate that it offered not only Islamic conformism and discipline but also struggle and steadfastness.
The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty allowed doves and pragmatists to argue convincingly to the Israeli electorate that a surrender of conquered territory could be in Israel's national interest in some circumstances. Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat helped to demonstrate to the same electorate that such a surrender was not in Israel's national interest when dealing with the Palestinians or with the Lebanese government. The Israeli electorate is still divided about whether such a surrender of conquered Arab territory is in Israel's national interest when dealing with the Ba'athist regime in Damascus. If Egypt renounces the peace treaty that question will be decisively answered and decided, perhaps permanently.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
Coping with the "Peace Process"
You are someone who is deeply interested in peace in the Middle East. Imagine that it has just been revealed that Israel turned down serious Palestinian offers during talks with a lame duck Israeli government, that the Labor Party after a decade of constant downsizing has now split in two, that Kadima is divided into two rival factions struggling for control of the party, and that the Palestinians are divided between one faction in Gaza that doesn't want peace under any conditions that Israel could offer and that the other faction in the West Bank probably cannot deliver on any peace agreement made. Just think how you would feel! Oh, all of that actually did happen, so you better pay attention to my step by step guide for maintaining your sanity.
Step One. Choose two other peace processes that are ongoing and that can be followed in the news. In the early 1990s I chose South Africa and Northern Ireland. I chose South Africa because I had written my doctoral dissertation on the country, but I could have chosen El Salvador.
Step Two. Find a good internet site where you can get daily or weekly updates on the state of the peace process and analysis. In the 1990s I had to rely on the press and had to make weekly trips downtown to buy The Irish Voice from New York to follow what was going on in Northern Ireland. In 2001 a prominent Belfast journalist told me about Newshound, an internet site that carried links to articles in the British, Irish and Ulster press on the peace process and events there in general. This made it much easier to follow along.
Step Three. Read as much general literature as you can about the other two peace processes and the conflicts that preceded them. Be sure to read from multiple perspectives.
Step Four. Read some of the theoretical literature on international mediation and conflict resolution. Just deal with a few simple concepts like ripeness, leverage, and bias.
Step Five. Apply these concepts to the peace processes that you are following. Who is mediating? Why are they mediating? Was the situation ripe for resolution when the peace process began? What leverage does the mediator have over the belligerent parties? Is the mediator biased? Does this affect his leverage? How?
Step Six. By now a couple or more years have passed and two of the peace processes have gotten bogged down. Analyse what went wrong.
Step Seven. Peace has actually occurred in one of the three processes. Celebrate!
Step Eight. Continue to monitor events in the country of the successful peace process to make sure that things stay on track.
Step Nine. Read all the editorials proclaiming that we should just do in the Mideast what they did in South Africa, Northern Ireland, etc. Start to seriously compare the conditions in the one success story to those where the peace process has bogged down or failed.
Step Ten. Think back to all the obstacles that the negotiators overcame to make peace in the one success story. Whenever things go badly in the other two situations, just tell yourself that things were just as bad in South Africa, El Salvador, etc. Think back to when the ANC did a forced march over the Ciskei border and a massacre resulted or about the continuing killings in Natal throughout the peace process.
Step Eleven. Find another peace process to replace your success story. I picked Bosnia and Kosovo. Being in the U.S. Army and being deployed there helped with some of the research.
Step Twelve. Repeat steps two through ten.
Step Thirteen. Decide if you want to become a professional peace processor or get a life!
This process can also be applied with slight modifications to other things like observing regional democracy revolutions. But I cannot guarantee the one in three success rate in regions undergoing democratization or political turmoil for the first time, second time, third time, etc. particularly in the Middle East. If you have time you might want to go back through the microfiche or microfilm at your local public library and reexamine the revolutions in the Philippines, in Eastern Europe, and in Africa. If you have access to internet databases of newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post you can pick one of these historical revolutions to study along with those you are currently observing.
Step One. Choose two other peace processes that are ongoing and that can be followed in the news. In the early 1990s I chose South Africa and Northern Ireland. I chose South Africa because I had written my doctoral dissertation on the country, but I could have chosen El Salvador.
Step Two. Find a good internet site where you can get daily or weekly updates on the state of the peace process and analysis. In the 1990s I had to rely on the press and had to make weekly trips downtown to buy The Irish Voice from New York to follow what was going on in Northern Ireland. In 2001 a prominent Belfast journalist told me about Newshound, an internet site that carried links to articles in the British, Irish and Ulster press on the peace process and events there in general. This made it much easier to follow along.
Step Three. Read as much general literature as you can about the other two peace processes and the conflicts that preceded them. Be sure to read from multiple perspectives.
Step Four. Read some of the theoretical literature on international mediation and conflict resolution. Just deal with a few simple concepts like ripeness, leverage, and bias.
Step Five. Apply these concepts to the peace processes that you are following. Who is mediating? Why are they mediating? Was the situation ripe for resolution when the peace process began? What leverage does the mediator have over the belligerent parties? Is the mediator biased? Does this affect his leverage? How?
Step Six. By now a couple or more years have passed and two of the peace processes have gotten bogged down. Analyse what went wrong.
Step Seven. Peace has actually occurred in one of the three processes. Celebrate!
Step Eight. Continue to monitor events in the country of the successful peace process to make sure that things stay on track.
Step Nine. Read all the editorials proclaiming that we should just do in the Mideast what they did in South Africa, Northern Ireland, etc. Start to seriously compare the conditions in the one success story to those where the peace process has bogged down or failed.
Step Ten. Think back to all the obstacles that the negotiators overcame to make peace in the one success story. Whenever things go badly in the other two situations, just tell yourself that things were just as bad in South Africa, El Salvador, etc. Think back to when the ANC did a forced march over the Ciskei border and a massacre resulted or about the continuing killings in Natal throughout the peace process.
Step Eleven. Find another peace process to replace your success story. I picked Bosnia and Kosovo. Being in the U.S. Army and being deployed there helped with some of the research.
Step Twelve. Repeat steps two through ten.
Step Thirteen. Decide if you want to become a professional peace processor or get a life!
This process can also be applied with slight modifications to other things like observing regional democracy revolutions. But I cannot guarantee the one in three success rate in regions undergoing democratization or political turmoil for the first time, second time, third time, etc. particularly in the Middle East. If you have time you might want to go back through the microfiche or microfilm at your local public library and reexamine the revolutions in the Philippines, in Eastern Europe, and in Africa. If you have access to internet databases of newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post you can pick one of these historical revolutions to study along with those you are currently observing.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Egypt, Israel and the Peace Process: Three Scenarios
In the past week there have been a number of articles in the American press on how a change in regime in Egypt would affect the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and the overall peace process. Because of the darkness of recent Jewish history, many Israeli and American Jews are quick to imagine the worst possible implications. In this post I will examine three possible scenarios for the peace treaty and then comment on how they will affect Israel's defense and foreign policies.
I see three possible scenarios coming out of the unrest in Egypt as regards the peace with Egypt: the status quo lite; the frozen peace; and the no peace/cold war scenario. The status quo lite is the scenario that would likely prevail if there is no change in the military regime other than its figurehead--Mubarak. In this case the cold peace with Israel would continue under which there are limitations on Egyptian military deployments in the Sinai, there are full diplomatic relations between the two states, and Israeli tourists are free to visit Egypt but in practice very few ordinary Egyptians visit Israel. The main adjustment is that the regime would refrain from holding joint summits with Israeli leaders at Sharm al-Sheikh or in Washington. There would be no more photo ops. Egyptian diplomats in Tel Aviv would continue to supply Cairo with political and military intelligence on Israel and make critical comments about Israeli policies to the Israeli and foreign press.
This scenario would be designed primarily to protect the military regime's relationship with Washington and the $1.4 billion annually in military and food aid. This aid has been seen by Washington, Cairo and Jerusalem as an American bribe for Egypt to continue to honor the provisions of the 1979 peace treaty. It has worked--although both Presidents Sadat and Mubarak withdrew Egyptian ambassadors from Tel Aviv to show anger at Israeli policies when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 and invaded Lebanon in 1982.
The second scenario is the frozen peace. Under it Cairo withdraws permanently its diplomats from Tel Aviv and ends all "normalization" with Israel but avoids renouncing the peace treaty or its military terms. This is the most likely scenario if there is a change of regime with a new civilian government taking power and the military returning to the barracks. This scenario is designed to distinguish the policy of the new government from that of the military regime, to put Washington and Jerusalem on notice that the relationship has changed, but to avoid a war or even a serious crisis with Israel and to possibly preserve some of the annual American aid to Egypt.
Egypt hasn't fought Israel since 1973 when under very favorable circumstances Egypt pulled out a tie and avoided a serious loss due to superpower diplomatic intervention. Egypt last fought a foreign enemy, Libya, in 1977, and since then has been responsible only for protecting the regime from the people. While Egypt's military is now equipped with modern American weapons like Abrams heavy tanks, M-60 tanks, and F-16 fighter bombers rather than the inferior Soviet weapons that it used in four wars with Israel (in 1956, 1967, 1968-70, 1973), its army and air force are still inferior to the IDF in terms of both combat experience and training. It would risk losing these modern weapons, the toys of the generals, with little prospect of having them replaced by the United States or any European country. Washington would not replace arms and risk another war and Egypt lacks the disposal hard currency to purchase weapons from any European countries including Russia.
The third scenario would have Egypt renouncing the 1979 peace treaty but not being provocative in its military deployments. This is likely to come to fruition only in the Muslim Brotherhood gains control of the new regime. And even then, it is not likely to come about immediately but rather gradually. More likely the first move would be the second scenario, frozen peace, with Egypt then waiting for a reaction from Israel. Egypt could then move to the no peace/cold war stance during a crisis between Israel and one of its other neighbors--the Palestinians, Lebanon, or Syria. Hamas or Hezbollah might even be eager to provoke such a crisis in order to trigger this response. Hezbollah could do so under urging from either Tehran or Damascus or both and Hamas might be willing to do so under pressure from Tehran if the conditions were right. Or Jerusalem, under the present government or another one on the Right, could trigger such a reaction by intemperate rhetoric. Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman aided Ankara in its reorientation away from Israel with his clumsy rhetoric and as an opposition figure he spoke of bombing the Aswan dam. If a new regime comes to power in Cairo, Bibi Netanyahu might very well risk provoking a coalition crisis in order to avoid such a scenario by replacing Leiberman with a safer figure.
Thus, as can be seen there are several steps between cold peace and cold war let alone hot war.
How will a new regime in Cairo affect the peace process with Israel's neighbors? In reality, it is likely to have very little effect. As the recent Al Jazeera leaks demonstrated, Israel and the Palestinians are presently incapable of making peace even with a more centrist coalition led by Kadima and Labor. Because of the fallout from the leaks the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has denounced the positions portrayed in the leaks and denied that it ever offered them. Until the split between Gaza and the West Bank/Hamas and Fatah is resolved there will be no peace agreement with Israel.
A change in regime will make Jerusalem less likely to engage in serious peace negotiations with Damascus. But such negotiations were not likely in any case because Netanyahu and Obama wanted Damascus to end its close relationship and military alliance with Iran as the price of peace. A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement would be part of a wider package deal with Washington making payoffs in terms of normalizing its relationship with Damascus and granting military and economic aid. The price for this would be the end of the Damascus-Tehran-Gaza axis. Bashar al-Assad has made clear that he is unwilling to pay such a price. And it is not clear that the present coalition under Netanyahu would be willing to pay the price of giving up the Golan. So we are left with no real change there.
The real change will be in Israel's internal politics. Israel could face a situation in which it is faced with hostile regimes along its southern, eastern and northern borders with only Jordan as a friendly neighbor. Egypt under a civilian government, Gaza under Hamas, Lebanon under or heavily influenced by Hezbollah and Damascus under the House of Assad all add up to a siege state for Israel. Israel would be almost back to where it was before 1979. Almost, because it would still have the peace treaty with Jordan (but it had under the table friendly relations with Amman before 1994). This is likely to intensify the rightward shift in Israeli politics since October 2000.
Israeli politics are very sensitive to regional developments. In this respect Israel is similar to the white minority regime in South Africa from 1975 to 1994. South African white politics were influenced heavily by the collapse of South Africa's white buffer to the north in the form of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique in 1974-75, the Smith government in Rhodesia in 1979-80, and finally Namibian independence in 1990. These changes led to a polarization in white politics with many Afrikaners moving to the right to support the Conservative Party in the 1980s and many English-speakers abandoning the me-too United Party in favor of the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party. Unlike Pretoria, Jerusalem has a friend in Washington and is much more powerful militarily. So expect the present trend in Israeli politics to intensify.
I see three possible scenarios coming out of the unrest in Egypt as regards the peace with Egypt: the status quo lite; the frozen peace; and the no peace/cold war scenario. The status quo lite is the scenario that would likely prevail if there is no change in the military regime other than its figurehead--Mubarak. In this case the cold peace with Israel would continue under which there are limitations on Egyptian military deployments in the Sinai, there are full diplomatic relations between the two states, and Israeli tourists are free to visit Egypt but in practice very few ordinary Egyptians visit Israel. The main adjustment is that the regime would refrain from holding joint summits with Israeli leaders at Sharm al-Sheikh or in Washington. There would be no more photo ops. Egyptian diplomats in Tel Aviv would continue to supply Cairo with political and military intelligence on Israel and make critical comments about Israeli policies to the Israeli and foreign press.
This scenario would be designed primarily to protect the military regime's relationship with Washington and the $1.4 billion annually in military and food aid. This aid has been seen by Washington, Cairo and Jerusalem as an American bribe for Egypt to continue to honor the provisions of the 1979 peace treaty. It has worked--although both Presidents Sadat and Mubarak withdrew Egyptian ambassadors from Tel Aviv to show anger at Israeli policies when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 and invaded Lebanon in 1982.
The second scenario is the frozen peace. Under it Cairo withdraws permanently its diplomats from Tel Aviv and ends all "normalization" with Israel but avoids renouncing the peace treaty or its military terms. This is the most likely scenario if there is a change of regime with a new civilian government taking power and the military returning to the barracks. This scenario is designed to distinguish the policy of the new government from that of the military regime, to put Washington and Jerusalem on notice that the relationship has changed, but to avoid a war or even a serious crisis with Israel and to possibly preserve some of the annual American aid to Egypt.
Egypt hasn't fought Israel since 1973 when under very favorable circumstances Egypt pulled out a tie and avoided a serious loss due to superpower diplomatic intervention. Egypt last fought a foreign enemy, Libya, in 1977, and since then has been responsible only for protecting the regime from the people. While Egypt's military is now equipped with modern American weapons like Abrams heavy tanks, M-60 tanks, and F-16 fighter bombers rather than the inferior Soviet weapons that it used in four wars with Israel (in 1956, 1967, 1968-70, 1973), its army and air force are still inferior to the IDF in terms of both combat experience and training. It would risk losing these modern weapons, the toys of the generals, with little prospect of having them replaced by the United States or any European country. Washington would not replace arms and risk another war and Egypt lacks the disposal hard currency to purchase weapons from any European countries including Russia.
The third scenario would have Egypt renouncing the 1979 peace treaty but not being provocative in its military deployments. This is likely to come to fruition only in the Muslim Brotherhood gains control of the new regime. And even then, it is not likely to come about immediately but rather gradually. More likely the first move would be the second scenario, frozen peace, with Egypt then waiting for a reaction from Israel. Egypt could then move to the no peace/cold war stance during a crisis between Israel and one of its other neighbors--the Palestinians, Lebanon, or Syria. Hamas or Hezbollah might even be eager to provoke such a crisis in order to trigger this response. Hezbollah could do so under urging from either Tehran or Damascus or both and Hamas might be willing to do so under pressure from Tehran if the conditions were right. Or Jerusalem, under the present government or another one on the Right, could trigger such a reaction by intemperate rhetoric. Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman aided Ankara in its reorientation away from Israel with his clumsy rhetoric and as an opposition figure he spoke of bombing the Aswan dam. If a new regime comes to power in Cairo, Bibi Netanyahu might very well risk provoking a coalition crisis in order to avoid such a scenario by replacing Leiberman with a safer figure.
Thus, as can be seen there are several steps between cold peace and cold war let alone hot war.
How will a new regime in Cairo affect the peace process with Israel's neighbors? In reality, it is likely to have very little effect. As the recent Al Jazeera leaks demonstrated, Israel and the Palestinians are presently incapable of making peace even with a more centrist coalition led by Kadima and Labor. Because of the fallout from the leaks the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has denounced the positions portrayed in the leaks and denied that it ever offered them. Until the split between Gaza and the West Bank/Hamas and Fatah is resolved there will be no peace agreement with Israel.
A change in regime will make Jerusalem less likely to engage in serious peace negotiations with Damascus. But such negotiations were not likely in any case because Netanyahu and Obama wanted Damascus to end its close relationship and military alliance with Iran as the price of peace. A Syrian-Israeli peace agreement would be part of a wider package deal with Washington making payoffs in terms of normalizing its relationship with Damascus and granting military and economic aid. The price for this would be the end of the Damascus-Tehran-Gaza axis. Bashar al-Assad has made clear that he is unwilling to pay such a price. And it is not clear that the present coalition under Netanyahu would be willing to pay the price of giving up the Golan. So we are left with no real change there.
The real change will be in Israel's internal politics. Israel could face a situation in which it is faced with hostile regimes along its southern, eastern and northern borders with only Jordan as a friendly neighbor. Egypt under a civilian government, Gaza under Hamas, Lebanon under or heavily influenced by Hezbollah and Damascus under the House of Assad all add up to a siege state for Israel. Israel would be almost back to where it was before 1979. Almost, because it would still have the peace treaty with Jordan (but it had under the table friendly relations with Amman before 1994). This is likely to intensify the rightward shift in Israeli politics since October 2000.
Israeli politics are very sensitive to regional developments. In this respect Israel is similar to the white minority regime in South Africa from 1975 to 1994. South African white politics were influenced heavily by the collapse of South Africa's white buffer to the north in the form of the Portuguese colonies in Angola and Mozambique in 1974-75, the Smith government in Rhodesia in 1979-80, and finally Namibian independence in 1990. These changes led to a polarization in white politics with many Afrikaners moving to the right to support the Conservative Party in the 1980s and many English-speakers abandoning the me-too United Party in favor of the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party. Unlike Pretoria, Jerusalem has a friend in Washington and is much more powerful militarily. So expect the present trend in Israeli politics to intensify.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Who is Next?
Now that the pundits have seen the writing on the wall indicating that Mubarak's days are numbered, and we've seen the hundreds of thousands of fingers doing the writing, who will be the next Arab autocrat to go?
To begin to examine that question intelligently, we must first examine the nature of the regimes in the Arab world. Broadly speaking Arab regimes can be divided into two categories--monarchies (kingdoms, emirates) and military dictatorships. The former can then be further divided into the Gulf States with their oil wealth and the monarchies that lack this--Morocco, Jordan and Oman. The military dictatorships can be divided into two groups: the hereditary republics and the ordinary dictatorships. While there is quite a bit of difference between the Gulf States on one hand and the traditional military dictatorships on the other, there is little effective difference between the non-oil monarchies and the hereditary republics. Both types are repressive and both types suffer from serious economic problems. And members of both groups are aligned with Western powers such as France and the United States.
There have been four Arab countries that fit the description of hereditary republic.(North Korea is the only non-Arab country in this category that comes to mind, which should tell everyone something about the Arab world.) These are/were: Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Only in Syria has the first despot been able to transfer the imaginary crown to the head of his son and heir. This is not because Hafiz al-Assad was necessarily wiser than Kaddafi, Mubarak, and Saddam Hussein, but merely because he died first. None of the others wants to transfer power while they are still capable of ruling. Saddam Hussein and his sons are now dead. The senior dictator sentenced to death and hanged by the Shi'ites that he once persecuted; the dictators apparent, Udai and Qusay, killed by American troops that discovered their safe house. It is now too late for Hosni Mubarak to transfer power to his son Gamal. It is still possible that Muammar Kaddafi might yet transfer power to his son Saif--apparently the sole son who doesn't have a reputation as a playboy.
In the Arab world the secret to remaining in power is to buy off the potential classes that could cause problems, retain the confidence of the military, and either buy off, exile or murder any serious potential threats within the regime. The Gulf States buy off the population and especially the middle class with generous education benefits and make-work jobs. These are funded from oil revenues. The clergy is then bought off by funding Wahhabite missionary activities throughout the region and the Arab diaspora in Europe and the United States. The military dictatorships that are aligned with the U.S. use American aid to subsidize heating oil, food, and other basic staples for the lower classes. Formerly the Soviet Union also provided this function for its regional allies, but it is gone. This has forced Damascus to turn to Tehran for an alliance.
Potentially the two countries most immediately in danger are Yemen, which has already experienced political unrest following the fall of the regime in Tunis, and Syria. Syria has not experienced unrest yet and is trying to preempt it with new reforms that have been announced. Bashar al-Assad feels that unlike Mubarak he can breathe easier as he is on the right side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not having signed a peace treaty with Israel. That is why the hope of getting Assad to switch alliances in order to make peace with Israel is probably a pipe dream--he needs the conflict in order to legitimize his heretical Alawite regime (the Alawis are an offshoot of the Shia).
Jordan is also at risk as well over 60 percent of the country's population is made up of Palestinians--those who fled in 1948 and 1967 and their descendants. Jordan's King Abdullah II inherited from his father, King Hussein, the knowledge of how to periodically change prime ministers while running a show parliament and a facade of democracy. He has just put in place a "new" prime minister--who has ruled before. He, like the king, is a former major general in the army. The security of the regime rests on the army and secret police, which are both manned mostly by Jordanians of Beduin extraction from either Jordan or originally from the Red Sea coast of Arabia. The Hashemite monarchs claim legitimacy as direct descendants of Muhammad. But the king's biggest asset is a light ruling hand and good economic management over the decades that he inherited from his father.
The ruling house in Morocco could also potentially be at risk as there are tensions between the Arabs and Berbers in the country and it is rather poor. Europe is an escape valve for many poor Arabs throughout North Africa. Libya, located between Tunisia and Egypt, is also at risk. Muammar Kaddafi has been in power since 1969--41 years. He should either begin transferring power to his son or be prepared for political unrest.
Lebanon is sui generis. It is neither a monarchy nor a military dictatorship but a collection of mutually hostile sectarian groups of Christians and Muslims. It is sitting on a powder keg because of the UN investigation of the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005. Hezbollah, which maintains a large private militia in defiance of an agreement by all the political parties to disarm following the fifteen-year civil war, has threatened that it will regard anyone who supports the UN tribunal as an enemy. Its enemies usually experience premature deaths. Syria and Iran both back Hezbollah--it served both as a pressure on Israel and a client militia for the former and was trained by the latter. So far Shi'ite Lebanon is the most successful example of the export of Iranian revolution. Its powder keg has a fuse that is independent of the regional unrest, but could be sped up if Syria experiences significant unrest.
To begin to examine that question intelligently, we must first examine the nature of the regimes in the Arab world. Broadly speaking Arab regimes can be divided into two categories--monarchies (kingdoms, emirates) and military dictatorships. The former can then be further divided into the Gulf States with their oil wealth and the monarchies that lack this--Morocco, Jordan and Oman. The military dictatorships can be divided into two groups: the hereditary republics and the ordinary dictatorships. While there is quite a bit of difference between the Gulf States on one hand and the traditional military dictatorships on the other, there is little effective difference between the non-oil monarchies and the hereditary republics. Both types are repressive and both types suffer from serious economic problems. And members of both groups are aligned with Western powers such as France and the United States.
There have been four Arab countries that fit the description of hereditary republic.(North Korea is the only non-Arab country in this category that comes to mind, which should tell everyone something about the Arab world.) These are/were: Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Only in Syria has the first despot been able to transfer the imaginary crown to the head of his son and heir. This is not because Hafiz al-Assad was necessarily wiser than Kaddafi, Mubarak, and Saddam Hussein, but merely because he died first. None of the others wants to transfer power while they are still capable of ruling. Saddam Hussein and his sons are now dead. The senior dictator sentenced to death and hanged by the Shi'ites that he once persecuted; the dictators apparent, Udai and Qusay, killed by American troops that discovered their safe house. It is now too late for Hosni Mubarak to transfer power to his son Gamal. It is still possible that Muammar Kaddafi might yet transfer power to his son Saif--apparently the sole son who doesn't have a reputation as a playboy.
In the Arab world the secret to remaining in power is to buy off the potential classes that could cause problems, retain the confidence of the military, and either buy off, exile or murder any serious potential threats within the regime. The Gulf States buy off the population and especially the middle class with generous education benefits and make-work jobs. These are funded from oil revenues. The clergy is then bought off by funding Wahhabite missionary activities throughout the region and the Arab diaspora in Europe and the United States. The military dictatorships that are aligned with the U.S. use American aid to subsidize heating oil, food, and other basic staples for the lower classes. Formerly the Soviet Union also provided this function for its regional allies, but it is gone. This has forced Damascus to turn to Tehran for an alliance.
Potentially the two countries most immediately in danger are Yemen, which has already experienced political unrest following the fall of the regime in Tunis, and Syria. Syria has not experienced unrest yet and is trying to preempt it with new reforms that have been announced. Bashar al-Assad feels that unlike Mubarak he can breathe easier as he is on the right side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not having signed a peace treaty with Israel. That is why the hope of getting Assad to switch alliances in order to make peace with Israel is probably a pipe dream--he needs the conflict in order to legitimize his heretical Alawite regime (the Alawis are an offshoot of the Shia).
Jordan is also at risk as well over 60 percent of the country's population is made up of Palestinians--those who fled in 1948 and 1967 and their descendants. Jordan's King Abdullah II inherited from his father, King Hussein, the knowledge of how to periodically change prime ministers while running a show parliament and a facade of democracy. He has just put in place a "new" prime minister--who has ruled before. He, like the king, is a former major general in the army. The security of the regime rests on the army and secret police, which are both manned mostly by Jordanians of Beduin extraction from either Jordan or originally from the Red Sea coast of Arabia. The Hashemite monarchs claim legitimacy as direct descendants of Muhammad. But the king's biggest asset is a light ruling hand and good economic management over the decades that he inherited from his father.
The ruling house in Morocco could also potentially be at risk as there are tensions between the Arabs and Berbers in the country and it is rather poor. Europe is an escape valve for many poor Arabs throughout North Africa. Libya, located between Tunisia and Egypt, is also at risk. Muammar Kaddafi has been in power since 1969--41 years. He should either begin transferring power to his son or be prepared for political unrest.
Lebanon is sui generis. It is neither a monarchy nor a military dictatorship but a collection of mutually hostile sectarian groups of Christians and Muslims. It is sitting on a powder keg because of the UN investigation of the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in 2005. Hezbollah, which maintains a large private militia in defiance of an agreement by all the political parties to disarm following the fifteen-year civil war, has threatened that it will regard anyone who supports the UN tribunal as an enemy. Its enemies usually experience premature deaths. Syria and Iran both back Hezbollah--it served both as a pressure on Israel and a client militia for the former and was trained by the latter. So far Shi'ite Lebanon is the most successful example of the export of Iranian revolution. Its powder keg has a fuse that is independent of the regional unrest, but could be sped up if Syria experiences significant unrest.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
What are American interests in the Middle East?
In 2005 Palgrave Macmillan published a book by Leon Hadar, who like myself both has a doctorate in international relations and is a graduate of Hebrew University, called Sandstorm. The book appears to be largely a continuation of his earlier book, Quagmire, published in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War a year later. In Sandstorm Hadar argues that most of America's policies and difficulties in the region stem from a failure to reexamine the Cold War era Middle East Paradigm (MEP), which dominated from the time of the Truman Doctrine to the end of the Cold War. The MEP had three overriding American interests in the region: 1) Guaranteeing the supply of oil at a reasonable price; 2) combating Soviet expansion and influence in the region; 3) and ensuring the security of Israel. The only concession to reality since 1990 has been to substitute Al Qaeda and Iran for the Soviet Union.
Hadar reminded me of a fact that I knew but had forgotten: the United States gets ninety percent (90%) of its oil from outside the region. Protecting the oil flow from the region was largely a factor of the United States leading the anti-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. It allowed Europe and Japan to become free riders on the back of the American tax payer during the Cold War and has continued that policy since.
America's support for the peace process stems largely from an attempt to reconcile the incompatibility of the first two goals with the third i.e. American support for Israel hurts America's standing in the Muslim countries of the region. Hadar argues persuasively that it is really Europe and Japan (and South Korea) who have much more at stake in the region than the United States does. America's fixation with the region is really a symptom of Washington's imperial complex--its desire to function as a hegemon on the world stage. Europe is unwilling to back financially Washington's policies in the region without an equal input into determining those same policies. America's propensity to use military force and to back the policies of the Israeli Right in the occupied territories have been gradually causing a rift with Europe. The 2002-03 rift over the war in Iraq between "Old Europe" and America was almost a mirror image of the November 1956 Suez Crisis argument between Washington on one hand and London and Paris on the other.
I agree with Hadar that America can best reconcile its real opposing interests in the region by making a much smaller footprint. This can be accomplished through a gradual military withdrawal from the region. This would force the EU and Japan to play a greater role. It would also mean that Israel would have to make adjustments--funneling money away from settlements and into defense.
Now is a very opportune point to begin this process for two reasons. First, the publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera demonstrates how incompatible the Israelis and Palestinians still are. A Kadima-Labor coalition government was afraid of making concessions to match major Palestinian concessions out of fear of the Right. A Likud-led government of the Right is unlikely to be even as forthcoming, while the approach of the Palestinian Authority has been to deny that it made any concessions to Israel. Internal politics on both sides combined with the power gap prevent an implementation of the two-state solution at this time and for some years to come.
Second, the Arab world is in upheaval with autocratic Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen being challenged. Washington can either opt to sacrifice democracy for stability in the hope of delaying a major upheaval or risk dealing with unknown forces taking over in possibly two or three Arab countries including important American allies like Egypt and Jordan. Either result poses considerable risks for America. Better to lower our identification with the local regimes.
My own research into the peace process in Northern Ireland pointed to imitating the Anglo-Irish dual mediation in the Middle East with a peace process co-sponsored by the European Union and the U.S. Brussels has been trying to get into Mideast diplomacy since 1980 with the Venice Declaration. It played an observer role during the Oslo process. By shifting some of the burden on to Brussels, Washington can hope to accommodate its interests as well as cancel its own pro-Israel bias. Brussels can offer Jerusalem a bribe that Washington cannot match--membership in the EU in exchange for peace. But this is for the future.
Hadar reminded me of a fact that I knew but had forgotten: the United States gets ninety percent (90%) of its oil from outside the region. Protecting the oil flow from the region was largely a factor of the United States leading the anti-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. It allowed Europe and Japan to become free riders on the back of the American tax payer during the Cold War and has continued that policy since.
America's support for the peace process stems largely from an attempt to reconcile the incompatibility of the first two goals with the third i.e. American support for Israel hurts America's standing in the Muslim countries of the region. Hadar argues persuasively that it is really Europe and Japan (and South Korea) who have much more at stake in the region than the United States does. America's fixation with the region is really a symptom of Washington's imperial complex--its desire to function as a hegemon on the world stage. Europe is unwilling to back financially Washington's policies in the region without an equal input into determining those same policies. America's propensity to use military force and to back the policies of the Israeli Right in the occupied territories have been gradually causing a rift with Europe. The 2002-03 rift over the war in Iraq between "Old Europe" and America was almost a mirror image of the November 1956 Suez Crisis argument between Washington on one hand and London and Paris on the other.
I agree with Hadar that America can best reconcile its real opposing interests in the region by making a much smaller footprint. This can be accomplished through a gradual military withdrawal from the region. This would force the EU and Japan to play a greater role. It would also mean that Israel would have to make adjustments--funneling money away from settlements and into defense.
Now is a very opportune point to begin this process for two reasons. First, the publication of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera demonstrates how incompatible the Israelis and Palestinians still are. A Kadima-Labor coalition government was afraid of making concessions to match major Palestinian concessions out of fear of the Right. A Likud-led government of the Right is unlikely to be even as forthcoming, while the approach of the Palestinian Authority has been to deny that it made any concessions to Israel. Internal politics on both sides combined with the power gap prevent an implementation of the two-state solution at this time and for some years to come.
Second, the Arab world is in upheaval with autocratic Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen being challenged. Washington can either opt to sacrifice democracy for stability in the hope of delaying a major upheaval or risk dealing with unknown forces taking over in possibly two or three Arab countries including important American allies like Egypt and Jordan. Either result poses considerable risks for America. Better to lower our identification with the local regimes.
My own research into the peace process in Northern Ireland pointed to imitating the Anglo-Irish dual mediation in the Middle East with a peace process co-sponsored by the European Union and the U.S. Brussels has been trying to get into Mideast diplomacy since 1980 with the Venice Declaration. It played an observer role during the Oslo process. By shifting some of the burden on to Brussels, Washington can hope to accommodate its interests as well as cancel its own pro-Israel bias. Brussels can offer Jerusalem a bribe that Washington cannot match--membership in the EU in exchange for peace. But this is for the future.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Was George W. Bush really at fault?
During both the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections the Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Barack Obama, as well as several unsuccessful presidential candidates criticized Bush for not doing enough to make peace between Israel and the Arabs on his watch. In this post I'd like to examine if that criticism was justified, but I should also confess that during his term I signed several letters from Americans for Peace Now (APN) and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom calling for a more vigorous peace effort. Brit Tzedek is now the local grassroots arm of J Street.
Former State Dept. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller in his 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam) described how the outgoing Clinton administration briefed the incoming Bush administration on Camp David and the Al-Aksa Intifada and blamed it all on Yasir Arafat. Everyone from National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Clinton himself blamed the failure on Arafat--the Liar. Bush quickly concluded that he didn't want to waste time and precious political capital on a fruitless quest for peace. A month after Bush came to power, Ariel Sharon replaced Ehud Barak as prime minister in Jerusalem. Sharon thought that peace with the Palestinians was for subsequent generations, not his. This meant that as long as either of them remained as leader of his country, peace was unlikely. Bush until September 9, 2011 as a minority-vote president had very little political capital to spend and none to waste.
Sharon and Arafat spent the first eighteen months of the Bush administration trying to get rid of each other. The Al-Aksa Intifada soon deteriorated from conventional warfare to terrorism with suicide bombings rapidly escalating as Hamas's armed wing, the Izzadine al-Kassem Brigades, and Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, held a body bag competition. In March 2002 the IDF reinvaded the West Bank and gradually destroyed the terrorist infrastructure there. In June 2002 Bush made a presidential speech on the Middle East in which he declared Arafat persona non grata and openly invited the Palestinians to come up with a new leadership.
In 2002 as Bush organized the upcoming invasion of Iraq with British Prime Minister Tony Blair he was urged by the latter to follow Blair's example in Northern Ireland and wage a peace process as well as a war. An American peace initiative became the price for getting Britain's involvement in the war. It also became the price of support from Jordan's King Abdullah II. As a result, in 2003 Bush announced the road map for peace. He forced Arafat to create the post of prime minister in his administration and tried to force him to turn over all executive power to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat easily outmaneuvered both Abbas and Secretary of State Colin Powell and so Abbas soon resigned in frustration.
Arafat died of a mysterious ailment (some said poison, others said AIDS) in November 2004. Abbas became interim president until he was elected president in early 2005. But throughout 2005 Sharon was preoccupied with carrying out an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This was the first major Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory since Lebanon in 2000 and the first voluntary withdrawal of Israeli settlers in Israeli history. Then, after the withdrawal, he was preoccupied with creating a new political party based on "liberal" Likudniks and a few Labor people, Kadima, which was launched in November 2005.
Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2006 and was replaced as Kadima's leader by former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. That month parliamentary elections were held in the Palestinian Authority at American insistence, despite Israeli warnings that Hamas would improve its status and maybe even win. But Bush equated democracy with elections and wanted to be the president to bring democracy to the Arabs and the Middle East. Hamas won the election and a majority in the Palestinian Assembly. Hamas refused to accept the preconditions that the U.S. and the European Union insisted on for being involved in the peace process. Sharon now had an official excuse not to deal with the Palestinians.
During Bush's second term from January 2005 to January 2009 his new secretary of state was his former National Security Advisor Condi Rice. Dr. Rice, a former Soviet specialist--trained by Madeleine Albright's father, was new to the Middle East. She had spent much of her time since 2001 dealing with Al Qaeda and with Iraq and Afghanistan. Largely because she was afraid of her legacy, she pushed for a new peace initiative in the Arab-Israeli conflict in late 2007.
The Annapolis Conference in November 2007, like the Madrid Conference of 1991, kickstarted a peace process. But it was a peace process that was doomed from the start. Ehud Olmert and his government had been fatally weakened by Israel's poor performance in the July 2006 Second Lebanon War, which Hezbollah began by kidnapping a pair of Israeli soldiers. Olmert had the first defense minister in decades who was not a former general or defense industry technocrat, but simply a civilian novice. In the summer of 2007 Hamas had driven Fatah out of Gaza and seized control of the strip after two decades of power struggle finally boiled over into open warfare. The result was that the Palestinians were deeply-divided politically between two rival parties and two rival territories. The Annapolis initiative got nowhere as the sand ran out on the Bush administration.
Clinton administration veterans and apologists are quick to explain Clinton's failure to negotiate a peace treaty in the Middle East in terms of the failings of Arafat, Netanyahu, Sharon, and even Barak. But they don't extend the same courtesy to Bush. If Bush can be faulted for not being vigorous enough in pushing for peace between Arafat's death and the Palestinian elections of January 2006, then Clinton can be faulted for not pushing hard enough for peace between Rabin's assassination in November 1995 and Netanyahu's election in June 1996 or during Barak's first year in office.
American presidents cannot handpick the Israeli, Palestinian and Syrian leaders that they have to work with in the Middle East. Their best bet is to wait until conditions make the situation ripe for peace and then use all the influence they have to conclude realistic agreements. In order to do this they must realize what is doable--the best is the enemy of the good in the Middle East as elsewhere. An American president whose campaign biography was Why Not the Best had to learn this the hard way in 1977. But once Carter had set his sights lower and on a realistic target--a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty rather than a comprehensive peace--he went flat out until he was successful.
Presidents cannot produce the conditions for peace with an inspiring speech, or what appears to be a successful war. They must wait until the parties themselves are forced by events to seek peace. American Jewish organizations wanting to relieve the discomfort of American Jews over the actions of Israel do not have this luxury. Like other politicians or political interest groups they must appear to be constantly in motion fighting the good fight.
There is another alternative suggested by Leon Hadar in his 2005 book Sandstorm. I will discuss this in my next post.
My last post was picked up and reproduced by Ralph Seliger at the MeretzUSA blog.
Former State Dept. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller in his 2008 book The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Bantam) described how the outgoing Clinton administration briefed the incoming Bush administration on Camp David and the Al-Aksa Intifada and blamed it all on Yasir Arafat. Everyone from National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Clinton himself blamed the failure on Arafat--the Liar. Bush quickly concluded that he didn't want to waste time and precious political capital on a fruitless quest for peace. A month after Bush came to power, Ariel Sharon replaced Ehud Barak as prime minister in Jerusalem. Sharon thought that peace with the Palestinians was for subsequent generations, not his. This meant that as long as either of them remained as leader of his country, peace was unlikely. Bush until September 9, 2011 as a minority-vote president had very little political capital to spend and none to waste.
Sharon and Arafat spent the first eighteen months of the Bush administration trying to get rid of each other. The Al-Aksa Intifada soon deteriorated from conventional warfare to terrorism with suicide bombings rapidly escalating as Hamas's armed wing, the Izzadine al-Kassem Brigades, and Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, held a body bag competition. In March 2002 the IDF reinvaded the West Bank and gradually destroyed the terrorist infrastructure there. In June 2002 Bush made a presidential speech on the Middle East in which he declared Arafat persona non grata and openly invited the Palestinians to come up with a new leadership.
In 2002 as Bush organized the upcoming invasion of Iraq with British Prime Minister Tony Blair he was urged by the latter to follow Blair's example in Northern Ireland and wage a peace process as well as a war. An American peace initiative became the price for getting Britain's involvement in the war. It also became the price of support from Jordan's King Abdullah II. As a result, in 2003 Bush announced the road map for peace. He forced Arafat to create the post of prime minister in his administration and tried to force him to turn over all executive power to Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Arafat easily outmaneuvered both Abbas and Secretary of State Colin Powell and so Abbas soon resigned in frustration.
Arafat died of a mysterious ailment (some said poison, others said AIDS) in November 2004. Abbas became interim president until he was elected president in early 2005. But throughout 2005 Sharon was preoccupied with carrying out an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This was the first major Israeli withdrawal from Arab territory since Lebanon in 2000 and the first voluntary withdrawal of Israeli settlers in Israeli history. Then, after the withdrawal, he was preoccupied with creating a new political party based on "liberal" Likudniks and a few Labor people, Kadima, which was launched in November 2005.
Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2006 and was replaced as Kadima's leader by former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. That month parliamentary elections were held in the Palestinian Authority at American insistence, despite Israeli warnings that Hamas would improve its status and maybe even win. But Bush equated democracy with elections and wanted to be the president to bring democracy to the Arabs and the Middle East. Hamas won the election and a majority in the Palestinian Assembly. Hamas refused to accept the preconditions that the U.S. and the European Union insisted on for being involved in the peace process. Sharon now had an official excuse not to deal with the Palestinians.
During Bush's second term from January 2005 to January 2009 his new secretary of state was his former National Security Advisor Condi Rice. Dr. Rice, a former Soviet specialist--trained by Madeleine Albright's father, was new to the Middle East. She had spent much of her time since 2001 dealing with Al Qaeda and with Iraq and Afghanistan. Largely because she was afraid of her legacy, she pushed for a new peace initiative in the Arab-Israeli conflict in late 2007.
The Annapolis Conference in November 2007, like the Madrid Conference of 1991, kickstarted a peace process. But it was a peace process that was doomed from the start. Ehud Olmert and his government had been fatally weakened by Israel's poor performance in the July 2006 Second Lebanon War, which Hezbollah began by kidnapping a pair of Israeli soldiers. Olmert had the first defense minister in decades who was not a former general or defense industry technocrat, but simply a civilian novice. In the summer of 2007 Hamas had driven Fatah out of Gaza and seized control of the strip after two decades of power struggle finally boiled over into open warfare. The result was that the Palestinians were deeply-divided politically between two rival parties and two rival territories. The Annapolis initiative got nowhere as the sand ran out on the Bush administration.
Clinton administration veterans and apologists are quick to explain Clinton's failure to negotiate a peace treaty in the Middle East in terms of the failings of Arafat, Netanyahu, Sharon, and even Barak. But they don't extend the same courtesy to Bush. If Bush can be faulted for not being vigorous enough in pushing for peace between Arafat's death and the Palestinian elections of January 2006, then Clinton can be faulted for not pushing hard enough for peace between Rabin's assassination in November 1995 and Netanyahu's election in June 1996 or during Barak's first year in office.
American presidents cannot handpick the Israeli, Palestinian and Syrian leaders that they have to work with in the Middle East. Their best bet is to wait until conditions make the situation ripe for peace and then use all the influence they have to conclude realistic agreements. In order to do this they must realize what is doable--the best is the enemy of the good in the Middle East as elsewhere. An American president whose campaign biography was Why Not the Best had to learn this the hard way in 1977. But once Carter had set his sights lower and on a realistic target--a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty rather than a comprehensive peace--he went flat out until he was successful.
Presidents cannot produce the conditions for peace with an inspiring speech, or what appears to be a successful war. They must wait until the parties themselves are forced by events to seek peace. American Jewish organizations wanting to relieve the discomfort of American Jews over the actions of Israel do not have this luxury. Like other politicians or political interest groups they must appear to be constantly in motion fighting the good fight.
There is another alternative suggested by Leon Hadar in his 2005 book Sandstorm. I will discuss this in my next post.
My last post was picked up and reproduced by Ralph Seliger at the MeretzUSA blog.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Three New Developments
Three events have recently occurred, all of which would normally be worth commenting and editorializing about, but they have tended to drown each other out.
First, the IDF's internal enquiry into the Mavi Marmara boarding incident cleared the IDF. This was to be expected. The terms for the enquiry were whether or not Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal under international law and whether Israel used excessive force. Blockade is a well established belligerent practice in both international and internal conflicts. During the American Civil War President Lincoln held that the Confederate States of America had committed an illegal rebellion and refused to recognize that they had any legitimate rights under international law. At the same time he carried out a blockade of the South as if the CSA were a recognized belligerent. As recently as the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and more recently the Tamil Tiger rebellion in Sri Lanka blockades were used.
The second point is excessive force. It has been well established that the supposedly humanitarian ship was outfitted with a number of "peace activists" well armed with riot weaponry--iron pipes, knives, edged weapons, etc. The IDF was justified in using force to protect the life of its soldiers the same as if Iranians had attacked a U.S. Navy ship carrying out search duties during the UN trade embargo on Iraq and American sailors had fired back. What is inexcusable is that the IDF, an army descended from the prestate Hagana/Palmakh militia that carried out blockade running against the British during the 1940s, was unprepared for this resistance.
The second major event is the introduction in the Security Council of a draft resolution by the Palestinians condemning Israeli settlements as illegal. Numerous former diplomat have weighed in urging the Obama administration not to veto the resolution. Nearly everyone except Israel and American administrations--but not the State Dept.--consider the settlements to be illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from deporting or voluntarily settling its population in occupied territory. Israel's claim is that the West Bank and Gaza are not occupied but rather disputed territory, because Jordan had illegally occupied the West Bank and Egypt Gaza, previous to Israel seizing them in 1967. The near universal belief is that until clear legal title to the territories is established, no foreign power may settle them. That makes sense to me. I disagree with Michael Lame at rethinktheme.org (http://www.rethinktheme.org/) that this would jeopardize the peace process. Something that is already dead cannot be killed again before being revived.
In a Wikileaks-like development Al Jazeera news agency published documents that are purported to be the minutes of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of 2008 under the Annapolis peace initiative. The leaks seem to indicate that the Palestinian side was much more flexible than the Israeli side. At the time there was a coalition government consisting of Kadima and Labor as the main parties. The prime minister was Ehud Olmert, who was effectively a lame duck due to both his performance during the Second Lebanon War of July 2006 and corruption allegations. It was nearly a mirror image of Oslo. At Oslo Arafat considered himself to be under political threat from the Islamists led by Hamas, and thus not in a position to make any concessions. Ehud Barak's Labor coalition did make substantial concessions but important gaps remained on Jerusalem and refugees. Barak was denounced by the Israeli Right for the concessions that he made. Today it is the Palestinian Right of Hamas and parts of Fatah that are denouncing the purported Palestinian concessions of 2008.
The papers, whether genuine or not, were probably leaked by someone who is either connected with the Fatah hawks or with Hamas. From 1968 until 2004 it was Palestinian policy that the conflict could only be resolved through armed conflict rather than through negotiation and compromise. The papers seem to strengthen this preexisting fundamental belief.
Even during the Oslo process Arafat was quoted several times making a reference to a truce that Muhammad had made with Arabian Jews and then broke when it suited him. The message was that what was good enough for Muhammad was good enough for him, and that Oslo would result in a coerced peace made under duress that could then be broken at will.
This illustrates the difficulties of negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For this to happen four things are necessary: 1) A Palestinian government with credibility among the people must be willing to make an offer that realistically some Israeli government could accept; 2) an Israeli government must make an offer that some Palestinian government could realistically accept; 3) an American administration must be willing to take a vigorous role in mediating the conflict; 4) most difficult of all--the first three things need to take place at the same time. So far, at least one of the players hasn't been ready when the others have been. The PLO wasn't ready in 1999-2000; Israel hasn't been ready since 2000; and the U.S. hasn't been ready from 2000 to 2009.
In my next post I will examine President George W. Bush's Palestine policy and what it says about the Middle East conflict and American policy.
First, the IDF's internal enquiry into the Mavi Marmara boarding incident cleared the IDF. This was to be expected. The terms for the enquiry were whether or not Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal under international law and whether Israel used excessive force. Blockade is a well established belligerent practice in both international and internal conflicts. During the American Civil War President Lincoln held that the Confederate States of America had committed an illegal rebellion and refused to recognize that they had any legitimate rights under international law. At the same time he carried out a blockade of the South as if the CSA were a recognized belligerent. As recently as the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and more recently the Tamil Tiger rebellion in Sri Lanka blockades were used.
The second point is excessive force. It has been well established that the supposedly humanitarian ship was outfitted with a number of "peace activists" well armed with riot weaponry--iron pipes, knives, edged weapons, etc. The IDF was justified in using force to protect the life of its soldiers the same as if Iranians had attacked a U.S. Navy ship carrying out search duties during the UN trade embargo on Iraq and American sailors had fired back. What is inexcusable is that the IDF, an army descended from the prestate Hagana/Palmakh militia that carried out blockade running against the British during the 1940s, was unprepared for this resistance.
The second major event is the introduction in the Security Council of a draft resolution by the Palestinians condemning Israeli settlements as illegal. Numerous former diplomat have weighed in urging the Obama administration not to veto the resolution. Nearly everyone except Israel and American administrations--but not the State Dept.--consider the settlements to be illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from deporting or voluntarily settling its population in occupied territory. Israel's claim is that the West Bank and Gaza are not occupied but rather disputed territory, because Jordan had illegally occupied the West Bank and Egypt Gaza, previous to Israel seizing them in 1967. The near universal belief is that until clear legal title to the territories is established, no foreign power may settle them. That makes sense to me. I disagree with Michael Lame at rethinktheme.org (http://www.rethinktheme.org/) that this would jeopardize the peace process. Something that is already dead cannot be killed again before being revived.
In a Wikileaks-like development Al Jazeera news agency published documents that are purported to be the minutes of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of 2008 under the Annapolis peace initiative. The leaks seem to indicate that the Palestinian side was much more flexible than the Israeli side. At the time there was a coalition government consisting of Kadima and Labor as the main parties. The prime minister was Ehud Olmert, who was effectively a lame duck due to both his performance during the Second Lebanon War of July 2006 and corruption allegations. It was nearly a mirror image of Oslo. At Oslo Arafat considered himself to be under political threat from the Islamists led by Hamas, and thus not in a position to make any concessions. Ehud Barak's Labor coalition did make substantial concessions but important gaps remained on Jerusalem and refugees. Barak was denounced by the Israeli Right for the concessions that he made. Today it is the Palestinian Right of Hamas and parts of Fatah that are denouncing the purported Palestinian concessions of 2008.
The papers, whether genuine or not, were probably leaked by someone who is either connected with the Fatah hawks or with Hamas. From 1968 until 2004 it was Palestinian policy that the conflict could only be resolved through armed conflict rather than through negotiation and compromise. The papers seem to strengthen this preexisting fundamental belief.
Even during the Oslo process Arafat was quoted several times making a reference to a truce that Muhammad had made with Arabian Jews and then broke when it suited him. The message was that what was good enough for Muhammad was good enough for him, and that Oslo would result in a coerced peace made under duress that could then be broken at will.
This illustrates the difficulties of negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For this to happen four things are necessary: 1) A Palestinian government with credibility among the people must be willing to make an offer that realistically some Israeli government could accept; 2) an Israeli government must make an offer that some Palestinian government could realistically accept; 3) an American administration must be willing to take a vigorous role in mediating the conflict; 4) most difficult of all--the first three things need to take place at the same time. So far, at least one of the players hasn't been ready when the others have been. The PLO wasn't ready in 1999-2000; Israel hasn't been ready since 2000; and the U.S. hasn't been ready from 2000 to 2009.
In my next post I will examine President George W. Bush's Palestine policy and what it says about the Middle East conflict and American policy.
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