Ripeness and the Arab League

In international mediation theory, ripeness is the key theoretical concept. I.William Zartman, an Africanist and a negotiations expert posits that three conditions are necessary for ripeness, which will allow foreign mediation between two or more warring parties to succeed. These are: 1) a hurting stalemate; 2) representative parties; and 3) a way out or formula. Most theory since then has worked on further defining the characteristics of a hurting stalemate. But I believe that representative parties is at least as important. The parties in the negotiations must represent the sides involved in the conflict.

All too often, one side will refuse to negotiate with the other and instead picks a more acceptable or palatable negotiating partner. This happened with Israel and the Palestinians from 1967 to 1988. It happened in Northern Ireland in 1973 during the Sunningdale initiative. And it has happened elsewhere. In Northern Ireland both the violent Protestants--the loyalists--and the violent Catholics--the republicans--were excluded from a power-sharing experiment. Both conspired against it and after only five months it collapsed. In the Middle East the Israelis refused to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) both because it used terrorism and because it refused to accept Israel's right to exist. Only after the PLO recognized Israel's right to exist in December 1988 did Israel finally choose to negotiate with it in 1993 in Oslo, Norway.

Today, some twenty years later there is a similar problem. The PLO/Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza have been in competition since the founding of the latter in 1988. In January 2006 Hamas defeated Fatah, the main component of the PLO, in open elections in the West Bank and Gaza. Eighteen months later Hamas staged a coup in Gaza and ejected Fatah from power. Since then the split has been an aggravating factor in the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Fatah has been unwilling to offer concessions similar to those demanded of Israel out of fear that Hamas will exploit these concessions in inter-Palestinian politics. When Al-Jazeera published reported minutes of 2008 Israel-Palestine negotiations the PLO was quick to denounce the reported concessions made by it as false slanders.

There may be a solution to the problem posed by competing nationalist organizations. In African nationalist politics in what was then Rhodesia and now is Zimbabwe, there were four veteran nationalist leaders competing for domination in the mid-1970s. The leaders of the Frontline States (FLS) that bordered on Rhodesia and Namibia or provided sanctuary to the guerrillas fighting against the white minority regimes in these two countries, formed an organization in late 1974. This was in order to facilitate negotiations between the ruling white minority Ian Smith regime and the African nationalists. The FLS recognized the problem posed by the lack of nationalist unity and attempted to provide a solution. This was not only to facilitate negotiations but to avoid a repeat of the civil war in Angola between rival liberation movements fighting over power once Portugal decided to pull out of its colony.

First the FLS forced four rival organizations to consolidate within one larger umbrella organization, the African National Council, in December 1974. Eight months later the negotiations with the Smith regime had collapsed before they really started and two rival leaders, Joshua Nkomo and Bishop Abel Muzorewa, had split the ANC into rival wings. Then the FLS attempted to organize a joint guerrilla army out of the armed wings of the veteran ZANU and ZAPU movements. This organization lasted for about eight months before it broke down as a result of inter-organizational fighting in the camps and desertions by ZAPU guerrillas from the joint army.

In October 1976 the two rival leaders of ZANU and ZAPU, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, formed a diplomatic alliance ahead of a Geneva conference on the territory hosted by the British government, which had official legal sovereignty over the territory but no real power. For seven weeks three competing nationalist delegations and the Rhodesian government delegation talked past one another. A few weeks after the conference ended without result in mid-December, the FLS recognized the Patriotic Front as the sole legitimate representative of the Zimbabwean people. A month later the Organization of African Unity (OAU) recognized this decision.

Thirteen months after this the two nationalist leaders without guerrilla armies signed an agreement with the white minority regime in Rhodesia for a form of majority rule with extensive powers reserved in the hands of the whites. The war continued and escalated. Finally in December 1979, exactly seven years after the war began, the war ended after three months of negotiations between the the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government and the Patriotic Front. With the support of the FLS who were suffering from attacks from the Rhodesian military, the British government forced a settlement based on elections.

In the future, the Arab League, which first recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in October 1974, might perform a similar function of arbitration between the secular nationalist Fatah/PLO and the Islamist Hamas. This could be by forcing Fatah to admit Hamas into the PLO. Or if support for Fatah significantly weakens due to continuing corruption, it could simply delegitimize the PLO in favor of Hamas. 

In the past the authoritarian Arab regimes favored secular Sunni Arab movements supported by them over allies of the Shi'ite Iran. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are seen by both Israel and the Arab regimes as Iranian proxies. But if as a result of the "Arab Spring" more democratic and Islamist governments come to power, then the Sunni Hamas could benefit. Arab regimes supported anti-Zionist and anti-semitic rhetoric but many preferred de facto peace with Israel as a means of ensuring regional stability and their own survival. This was true of Syria and Lebanon as well as Egypt and Jordan. Now with Egypt having deposed its president under popular pressure and the Syrian regime facing significant internal unrest, things could change. We could return to an era in which Palestinian nationalist organizations received regime support from surrounding countries that were competitors to rule the Arab world. This will be a trend that will be worth watching. One potential result of genuine revolutions--regime changes--in either Egypt or Syria or both--might be the Arab League stepping in to play a role like that played by the FLS in Southern Africa over twenty years.

Tehran in Cairo? That's How it Appears to Israelis

This weekend a mob of Egyptian rioters invaded the Israeli embassy in Cairo, (see the Aluf Benn story from Ha'Aretz) forcing a hurried retreat by plane to Israel. The Israeli flag was torn from the flagpole and shredded by the mob. To Americans seeing footage of this, it brings back memories of the capture of the "nest of spies" that the Iranian revolution claimed was the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. That same period saw the regime of the mullahs take over the Israeli embassy and turn it over to the PLO. Many Israelis may well wonder if that is the fate that is in store for the Israeli embassy in Egypt. With the military regime still in charge in Cairo, this seems rather unlikely--unless economic conditions require a foreign scapegoat.

Since Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the prime minister's office in Jerusalem in 2009, the region has seen the makings of a future tinderbox. The elevation of an uneasy coalition of the Right in Jerusalem coincided with the shift in foreign policy by the Tayip Erdogan government in Ankara. The Turkish government, wishing to return at least in terms of influence to the areas of the former Ottoman Empire, started to vigorously compete with Iran for influence in the Arab world. It did this by supporting the demands of Palestinians to have the Israeli blockade of Gaza lifted. Ankara assisted in the dispatch of a flotilla of blockade-busting ships to Gaza last year. They were intercepted by the Israeli army in international waters and boarded when they refused to pull over for inspection. Nine Turkish citizens were killed in clashes with the lightly armed passengers of the ships who offered resistance to the takeover. A recent UN report vindicated the Israeli blockade and criticized the Israeli government for using too much force. Jerusalem has refused to apologize to Ankara as demanded, leading to a break in diplomatic relations.

This followed an incident in which an assistant of Foreign Minister Avigdor Leiberman attempted to humiliate the Turkish ambassador by delivering a diplomatic demarche over programming on Turkish television that was anti-semitic in the most humiliating way possible. Ankara was quite happy to have its revenge.

So now we have a dynamic in which the Egyptian and Turkish governments can exploit the feelings of humiliation at the hands of  a non-Muslim people and government that is seen as foreign to the region. This in turn reinforces the siege mentality of the Israeli electorate who have now lost their closest ally in the Muslim Middle East, Turkey, and risk losing their strategic anchor, Egypt, of their security policy. The only thing worse would be if suddenly the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by the Palestinians. Fortunately for Israel, such a contingency appears rather remote. 

Expect in turn an even further-right government following Israel's next election either later this year or in 2012. How different this is from the first Likud government that came to power in 1977 and made peace with Egypt.

The Troubles of the SDLP

Yesterday Margaret Ritchie announced that she would be stepping down as leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland after less than two years on the job. The party had performed poorly in the election for the Northern Ireland Assembly in May and her deputy, Patsy McGlone, had announced that he would be challenging her in the mandatory leadership election. Her previous challenger, Dr. Alasdair McDonnell, is expected to also contest the election.

Ritchie is the fourth leader of the SDLP. The party was formed in August 1970 out of the remnants of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the body that formulated the strategy of civil rights marches as a means of protesting anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland at the start of The Troubles in 1968. The SDLP was a de facto shotgun marriage of NICRA and two representatives from two other parties, Republican Labour and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, to unite all six of the nationalist members of the Stormont Parliament (the forerunner of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was closed down in March 1972). The party advocated a united Ireland and non-violence as well as an end to discrimination and social democracy. The first leader chosen was Gerry Fitt, who was the only Westmister (British parliament) MP out of the six founding members. But the de facto leader of the party during its first decade was John Hume. In 1979 Fitt was ousted after he advocated cooperating with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in support of voluntary power sharing. Hume took over the party and remained the leader for the next 22 years. During that time he launched the Northern Ireland peace process with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and the Irish government in Dublin.

Hume voluntarily retired as leader of the SDLP in 2001 and named his protege, Mark Durkan, as his successor. Durkan presided over the decline of the party as the other nationalist party, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, overtook it. This first occured in local government elections in 2001 and was then confirmed in the next Westminster election. Durkan benefitted from being the annoited successor to the charismatic Hume. Durkan then stepped down as leader in early 2010 at age fifty to concentrate on serving as MP for his Foyle constituency that he had inherited from Hume. Ritchie, the MP for South Down, beat McDonnell to emerge as the new leader.

The SDLP's decline is due to a number of factors. First, it has never developed an efficient electoral machinery for fighting elections. This really hurt when going up against Sinn Fein, which benefitted on election day from the help of the military wing of the Republican Movement. Sinn Fein and the IRA had developed a very efficient party machinery that had people impersonating voters--the old, sick, and alcoholic who didn't vote--at the polls. Second, once the peace process got going many nationalists wanted to reward Sinn Fein and the IRA for ending the war. So they lent their votes to the Republicans, and eventually the loan became permanent. Third, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair had a policy of appeasement toward the Republicans in order to keep the peace process on track. Sinn Fein became expert on extorting tribute from London in exchange for doing what they had already signed up to do in the Good Friday Agreement. As a result the two moderate parties who had negotiated the GFA, the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists, suffered at the hands of the electorate. Unionist voters punished them for the IRA's failure to disarm and the British policy of appeasement; nationalist voters rewarded Sinn Fein for the benefits that they extracted at (offstage) gunpoint from the British. Here is an article (go to the link on the site for the Belfast Telegraph article by Liam Clarke) discussing the problem's of the party under Ritchie's leadership.

The UUP has actually declined in recent years more sharply than has the SDLP. The only real solution to the problems of both parties is by their weaning themselves from the teets of the Northern Ireland Office and the Executive by going into opposition. This is difficult because the Good Friday Agreement was designed to get all parties to participate and share power rather than to provide voters with efficient democratic government. The way to do this is to form a pact between the two parties in which both go into opposition and present themselves to voters as an alternative government with their own policies. This might prove difficult, as, according to Clarke, those who elected Ritchie last time wanted the party to remain the same and not adapt to new circumstances. The GFA should also be modified to allow for an official opposition as at Westminster. The mother of parliaments has given birth to a bastard child and it needs to be restrained and reformed.  

The Enlightened Homemaker: Forks Over Knives.

The Enlightened Homemaker: Forks Over Knives.: goodman-7@cox.net

APN: Those in Glass Houses Shouldn't Throw Stones

As a past major donor to Americans for Peace Now, I regularly receive solicitations from them. I sympathize with the Israeli Peace Now/Shalom Akshav and think that it does very valuable work particularly when it comes to settlement monitoring, a task that is desperately needed. I also am a big fan of Yossi Alpher's weekly column "Hard Questions, Tough Answers." This week I received in the mail from APN solicitation and two pamphlets. One of these was entitled Indefensible: Misrepresenting the borders issue to undermine Israeli-Palestinian Peace. While I agree with the general tenure of the pamphlet and its conclusions I have a major problem with one statement in it. "They are also trying to eras the fact that Israel long ago agreed with the U.S. an the entire world that the 1967 lines are the basis of negotiations, when it accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (of 1967), which requires Israel to withdraw from 'territories occupied in the recent conflict.'"  This is a gross misrepresentation of Israel's position at the time and of the historical record.

The resolution was authored by the then British ambassador to the UN in consultation with American, Israeli, and Arab ambassadors. As Henry Kissinger makes clear in the first volume of his memoirs, The White House Years, 242 had something for everyone. It called for the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force" in the preamble--which was the key clause for the Arabs, The Israelis have traditionally ignored this claiming that it is not part of the operational text of the resolution. For Israel it spoke of "secure and recognized borders," which the 1949 armistice lines never were in the Middle East. And for both sides it calls for withdrawal from "territories occupied in the recent conflict." Note that it does not call for withdrawal from "all of the territories occupied in the recent conflict" or even "the territories occupied in the recent conflict." This choice of words was very deliberate, although it was muddied by the mistranslation in French that does include the definite article. But the English translation has always been the authoritative one.

Israel could literally claim in 1974 that it had fulfilled this requirement by withdrawing from the east bank of the Suez Canal (not to mention the west bank occupied in October 1973) as part of the January 1974 Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement and in June 1974 from Quneitra and surrounding villages on the Golan Heights as part of the Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreement. It had withdrawn from territories occupied in June 1967. Since then it has gone on to withdraw from all of the Sinai--by far the largest territory captured in June 1967 as well as from Gaza and from major portions of the West Bank.

The Israeli interpretation under the Labor government stated very clearly at the time was that this meant some withdrawal on all fronts. Later the Likud modified this to mean withdrawal on some fronts. The American interpretation was withdrawal with minor mutually-agreed border modifications on all fronts. The Arab interpretation was that Israel should withdraw and the Arabs were not required to do anything to make the borders secure and recognized. It was this latter attitude that was responsible for facilitating Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan. Only because President Sadat of Egypt modified his attitude did Israeli withdrawals take place from Sinai and from the Golan.

Those who do not believe me can take a look at the maps on the inside covers of Michael Breecher's The Foreign Policy System of Israel where he illustrates the territorial plans or ambitions of the Alignment (Labor), Mapam, and the Likud. It was partially because different borders were envisaged by different factions within the Labor Party (Ahdut Ha'Avoda and Rafi were much more hawkish than Mapai), not to mention other parties that the resolution was so vague. In fact the Resolution was authored several months before Ahdut Ha'Avoda, Mapai and Rafi merged to form the Labor Party in the summer of 1968.

While I agree that Israel should withdraw from the vast majority of the West Bank (95% plus) and all of Gaza, I do not think that APN should be in the business of distorting the historical record. Resolution 242 was deliberately worded so that it would partially appeal to all sides, while remaining ambiguous and cloudy in its overall interpretation. This is what allowed Henry Kissinger to use it as the basis of his shuttle diplomacy following the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War.

The Arab Spring or Revolution? A Reply

Beirut editor Rami Khouri published this piece in the Toronto Globe & Mail this week on the Arab Spring. The article is full of typical Arab attitude about Western condescension towards the Arabs. Supposedly the term Arab Spring is implying that the Arab movement against Arab authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is doomed to failure. Khouri castigates Western journalists and opinion makers for not using the term thawra (plural thawrat) meaning revolution for the various movements. But Khouri knows very well that this is the term used by those very same authoritarian and totalitarian regimes for the coups d'etat that put them into power in the first place. In Arab usage, copying the Soviets, a revolution is termed to be a military putsch followed by a banning of political parties, an arrest of political opponents, and the creation of a new class of nomenklatura or those with influence. On the other hand the term spring was applied by historians both to the failed popular revolts in Europe ("springtime of nations") and to the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in the spring and summer of 1968 ("Prague spring"). It has almost always been a positive reference by Western historians.

Had Western journalists applied the term revolutions to these popular movements, Khouri and his ilk would likely have castigated them for tarring them with the vocabulary used by Arab autocrats. Instead of posing and simpering Khouri should spend his time analyzing why the Prague Spring and the 1848 revolutions failed and passing this information along to his Arab readers. He then might analyze why the revolutions in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989 were successful. Just as mature people take their fate in their own hands and make what they can of their lives, mature nations must act under the circumstances that they find themselves in instead of continually blaming outsiders.

As George Friedman has pointed out, so far the only successes of the Arab Spring, Tunisia and Egypt, are well short of revolutions. In both cases the militaries stepped in and removed the presidents. In Egypt it was the military regime that had placed Mubarak in charge in the first place. The military has ruled Egypt since 1952. The military decided that the octogenarian leader was more of a liability than an asset and removed him. He was also partially toppled by American pressure. 

The Arabs are now confronted by two Arab regimes, the products of the Libyan and  Syrian thawrat, that are fighting back instead of going quietly into the night. Both of these were Soviet clients during the Cold War. It was NATO that took it upon itself to neutralize Kaddafi's military advantage by grounding his air force. It is now up to the Libyan opposition to either succeed or fail. In Syria the West has acted through economic sanctions aimed against the leadership of the regime. The success or failure of the revolution or intifada--a name that until now has been reserved for Palestinian revolts against the Israeli occupation--in Syria is now up to the Syrian people. Maybe that is what Khouri is worried about.

For a much more nuanced take see James Traub's piece in Foreign Policy.

The Arab Spring Hits Israel

The Arab Spring has hit its first non-Arab society--Israel. For a month now there have been tent camps in Tel Aviv of protesters demonstrating against Israel's housing shortage. Because much of new housing construction by the government has been beyond the green line (the 1949 armistice line) in the West Bank and Gaza, there has been a housing shortage in Israel. Then add to this the fact that many wealthy Jews from abroad maintain second homes or apartments in Israel that they use only for a few weeks or months out of the summer, and there is a serious problem for ordinary Israelis. So far the demonstrations, which reached a peak of 300,000 in Tel Aviv last Saturday and have spread to major cities throughout the country and include Arabs in Haifa, have ignored the "Arab question." They are thus deemed to be non-political. In modern Hebrew the term politics is often interchangeable with "high politics" meaning issues of war and peace, diplomacy, etc.

Here is an analysis by American Jewish political scientist Michael Walzer on the movement. There is a definite connection between the settlement enterprise in the territories and the lack of housing within Israel. But if the movement's leadership and that of the parties of the left are smart they will avoid going beyond the immediate demands. Meretz has drastically shrunk since 2000 because it was focused solely on the Arab question in general and the Palestinian question/peace process in particular. There is a big opportunity for center-left parties to rebuild their base by expanding their issue focus. By developing a critique of the laissez-faire capitalism that Benjamin Netanyahu has imported from America, and attacking the special privileges that have been granted to settlers and ultra-Orthodox groups (housing subsidies, draft exemptions) they can build up a following among ordinary Israelis. They can then latter use that to convert these new supporters into supporters of the peace process over time. But they must not rush. This is like a courtship with a psychologically-damaged woman--it must be taken slowly. If it is rushed there will be no marriage and no birth to a successful peace.