Page 2 of 2 Tearing up the US's Middle East playbook
By Tony Karon
Washington's chosen "moderate" regime, the US responded by imposing sanctions
on the new Palestinian government, while pressuring the Europeans and Arab
regimes on whose funding the PA depended to do the same. These sanctions
eventually grew into a siege of Gaza.
The financial blockade would continue, the US and its allies insisted, until
Hamas renounced violence, recognized Israel, and bound itself to previous
agreements. Exactly the same three preconditions for engaging Hamas were
recently reiterated by incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at her
confirmation hearings.
A failed doctrine
The Gaza debacle has made one thing perfectly clear: any peace
process that seeks to marginalize, not integrate, Hamas is doomed to fail - and
with catastrophic consequences. That's why the position outlined by Obama's
secretary of state-designate is dysfunctional at birth, because it repeats the
mistake of trying to marginalize Hamas. For its part, Hamas officials have sent
a number of signals in recent years indicating the organization's willingness
to move in a pragmatic direction. Its leaders wouldn't bother to regularly
explain their views in the op-ed pages of American newspapers if they did not
believe a different relationship with the US - and so Israel - was possible.
For the new Obama administration reinforcing and, as they say in Washington,
incentivizing the pragmatic track in Hamas is the key to reviving the region's
prospects for peace.
Hamas has demonstrated beyond doubt that it speaks for at least half of the
Palestinian electorate. Many observers believe that, were new elections to be
held tomorrow, the Islamists would probably not only win Gaza again, but take
the West Bank as well. Demanding what Hamas would deem a symbolic surrender
before any diplomatic conversation even begins is not an approach that will
yield positive results. Renouncing violence was never a precondition for talks
between South Africa and Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, or Britain
and the Irish Republican Army. Indeed, Israel's talks with the PLO began long
before it had publicly renounced violence.
"Recognizing" Israel is difficult for Palestinians because, in doing so, they
are also being asked to renounce the claims of refugee families to the land and
homes they were forced out of in 1948 and were barred from recovering by one of
the founding acts of the state of Israel. For an organization such as Hamas,
such recognition could never be a precondition to negotiations, only the result
of them (and then with some reciprocal recognition of the rights of the
refugees).
Hamas' decision to engage the election process created by Oslo was, in fact, a
pragmatic decision opposed by hardliners in its own ranks. Doing so bound it to
engage with the Israelis and also to observe agreements under which those
electoral institutions were established (as Hamas mayors on the West Bank had
already learned). In fact, Hamas made clear that it was committed to good
governance and consensus, and recognized Abbas as president, which also meant
explicitly recognizing his right to continue negotiating with the Israelis.
Hamas agreed to abide by any accord approved by the Palestinians in a
democratic referendum. By 2007, key leaders of the organization had even begun
talking of accepting a Palestinian state based on a return to 1967 borders in a
swap for a generational truce with Israel.
Hamas' move onto the electoral track had, in fact, presented a great
opportunity for any American administration inclined towards grown-up
diplomacy, rather than the infantile fantasy of reengineering the region's
politics in favor of chosen "moderates".
So, in 2006, the US immediately slapped sanctions on the new government,
seeking to reverse the results of the Palestinian election through collective
punishment of the electorate. The US also blocked Saudi efforts to broker a
Palestinian government of national unity by warning that Abbas would be shunned
by the US and Israel if he opted for rapprochement with the majority party in
his legislature. Washington appears to have even backed a coup attempt by
US-trained, Fatah-controlled militia in Gaza, which resulted in Fatah's bloody
expulsion from there in the summer of 2007.
The failed US-Israeli strategy of trying to depose Hamas reached its nadir in
the pre-inauguration bloodbath in Gaza, which not only reinforced Hamas
politically, but actually weakened those anointed as "moderates" as part of a
counter-insurgency strategy against Hamas and its support base.
It is in America's interest, and Israel's, and the Palestinians' that Obama
intervene quickly in the Middle East, but that he do so on a dramatically
different basis than that of his two immediate predecessors.
Peace is made between the combatants of any conflict; "peace" with only chosen
"moderates" is an exercise in redundancy and pointlessness. The challenge in
the region is to promote moderation and pragmatism among the political forces
that speak for all sides, especially the representative radicals.
And speaking of radicals and extremists, there's palpable denial, bordering on
amnesia, when it comes to Israel's rejectionists. Ariel Sharon explicitly
rejected the Oslo peace process, declaring it null and void shortly after
assuming power. Instead, he negotiated only with Washington over unilateral
Israeli moves.
Ever since, Israeli politics has been moving steadily rightward, with the
winner in next month's elections expected to be the hawkish Likud leader
Benjamin Netanyahu. If so, he will govern in a coalition with far-right
rejectionists and advocates of "ethnic cleansing". Netanyahu even rejected
Sharon's 2005 Gaza pullout plan, and he has made it abundantly clear that he
has no interest in sustaining the illusion of talks over a "final status"
agreement, even with Washington's chosen "moderates".
Israelis, by all accounts, have generally given up on the idea of pursuing a
peace agreement with the Palestinians any time soon, and for the foreseeable
future, no Israeli government will willingly undertake the large-scale
evacuation of the West Bank settlers, essential to any two-state solution but
likely to provoke an Israeli civil war.
This political situation should serve as a warning to Obama and his people to
avoid the pitfalls of the Bill Clinton administration's approach to brokering
Middle East peace. Clinton's basic guideline was that the pace and content of
the peace process should be decided by Israel's leaders, and that nothing
should ever be put on the negotiating table that had not first been approved by
them. Restricting the peace process to proposals that fall within the comfort
zone only of the Israeli government is the diplomatic equivalent of allowing
investment banks to regulate themselves - and we all know where that landed us.
It is fanciful, today, to believe that, left to their own devices, Israel and
the Palestinians will agree on where to set the border between them, on how to
share Jerusalem, or on the fate of Palestinian refugees and Israeli
settlements. A two-state solution, if one is to be achieved, will have to be
imposed by the international community, based on a consensus that already
exists in international law (UN resolutions 242 and 338), the Arab League peace
proposals, and the Taba non-paper that documented the last formal final-status
talks between the two sides in January 2001.
Had Obama taken office in a moment of relative tranquility in the fraught
Israeli-Palestinian relationship, he might have had the luxury of putting it on
the backburner. Indeed, any move to change the Bush approach might have been
challenged as unnecessarily risky and disruptive.
In Gaza in the past few weeks, however, the Bush approach imploded, leaving
Obama no choice but to initiate a new policy of his own. Hopefully, it will be
one rooted in the pragmatism for which the new president is renowned.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle
East and other international conflicts. He also runs his own website,
Rootless Cosmopolitan.
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