Thirty years ago, I wrote a book, Missed Opportunities for Peace: US MIddle East Policy, 1981-86, praised by supporters of both sides, and by foreign policy experts. The book reflected three years my wife Carol and I spent living in Jordan, traveling regularly for Quaker agencies in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon listening to Arab and Israeli views about the challenges and opportunities for peace and what the United States could do to help. Since then, there have been a half dozen wars and as many US peace initiatives that sometimes seemed hopeful, but none achieved the goal of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's been seventy years since the the creation of modern Israel based on the UN Partition Plan and fifty years since the 1967 war and UN Security Council Resolution 242 provided the territorial and international legal basis for a two-state solution of the conflict
In the intervening years, there have been many missed opportunities for peace, and each one has deepened the distrust and frustration of people on both sides. At the same time, encouragingly, years of official negotiations and informal talks marked out the elements for a fair, realistic two-state peace agreement. While there's blame to go around for the failure to achieve peace, in PART ONE of this post I will comment on problems with the US Peace Initiatives over the years, and in PART TWO, I will focus on why a two-state solution is still the most realistic, best solution for peace, and what can be done now to help keep the prospect for peace alive. It's very late, but still not too late for peace. READ MORE.
In 1967, shortly after the Six Day War, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg attended a conference in Jerusalem where he heard David Ben Gurion, the retired, first Prime Minister of Israel, warn against Israel holding on to the territories captured in the war. Ben Gurion urged Israel as soon as possible to arrange a way to return the territories, including the West Bank and Gaza, to the Arabs. The 1967 Arab Summit's "three no's - no to negotiations, no to recognition, and no to peace with Israel - presented both a huge obstacle and an excuse for Israel not following Ben Gurion's wise, practical advice. In the 1970s, General Matti Peled, who worked with Lova Eliav and Palestinian Isam Sartawi to organize the Arab-Israeli Committee for Israeli-Palestinian peace, publically opposed building Jewish settlements in the territories. In part based on international law, the US could have/should have strongly opposed settlements from the start, including exacting consequences for settlements expansion.
After the 1973 war, which Arab countries launched and, like the 1967war lost, President Anwar Sadat's historic initiative opened the way, with President Carter's help, for the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. including Israel's abandoning settlements and withdrawing from all of the Sinai. While Carter's creative, determined diplomacy set a model for achieving an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, as he became preoccupied with the Iran hostage crisis, unfortunately the US made no significant progress on the core conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The next opportunity came in 1982, following the war in Lebanon. President Reagan's intitiative recognized that peace required balancing Israel's right to security with Palestinian rights, though unlike our European allies, the US still did not recognize the Palestinians' right of national self-determination or the need to talk with the PLO. Carol and I remember in those years how often in talking "off the record" with US diplomats, they would say that these US positions were unrealistic and not helpful to making peace. President Reagan also recognilzed that getting Israel to stop settlement expansion was essential to the prospect of peace. Despite senior Labor Party leaders, apparently including Abba Eban and Shimon Peres, then out of power, encouraging the US to use the pressure of threatening to hold back some economic aid to Israel unless settlements stopped, the Reagan Administration did nothing but talk about stopping the settlements. Israel's Jerusalem Post editorialized that President Reagan didn't demonstrate nearly the determination that President Carter showed. The Reagan Initiative died in 1985.
In 1991, during the lead-up to the US-Russia cosponsored Madrid Peace Conference, President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker threatened to withhold loan guarantees for Israel to help resettle Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union unless Israel halted settlement expansion. This was the first and only time the US promised to exact any consequences for continued settlement expansion. This contributed to creative controversy in Israel which led to Likud losing the election and Yitzhak Rabin of the more peace-oriented Labor Party becoming Prime Minister.
From 1993 to 1995, following the historic Israel-PLO Declaration for Peace, negotiated secretly in Oslo Norway, Prime Minister Rabin pressed forward in negotiations with Chairman Yasser Arafat of the PLO. All during the 1990s, Israel continued to expand settlements and the US did nothing but talk about the need to stop them. Recognizing the political and religious significance of Jerusalem to both Jews and Palestinians, Rabin resisted Republican Party efforts to force the US to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem before a final peace agreement. Another missed opportunity at this time was President Clinton's failure to act on an idea apparently circulated in the State Department for the US to commit to establishing two embassies in Jerusalem, one on the West side of the city for Israel and one on the East side for the Palestinians. While it would have been controversial, such an announcement would have demonstrated a principled US stand on the necessity for the two peoples to share Jerusalem. The assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist in 1995 struck a devastating blow to the Oslo peace process.
After several suicide attacks by Palestinians killing more than 300 Israeli civilans, Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres of the Labor Party, was defeated in 1996 elections, the Likud returned to power, and "BiBi" Netanyahu became Israel's Prime MInister. Then, in swifty shifting Israeli political winds, Ehud Barak of Labor was elected Prime Minister in 2000. In early 2001, President Clinton, trying to wrap-up the Oslo process before leaving office, convened a hastIly prepared Israeli-Palestinian Summit for Peace at Camp David. One key issue that the US failed sufficiently to prepare was what would happen about Jerusalem. The Summit collapsed, leaving each side to blame the other. A second more violent Palestinian Intifada erupted deepening distrust and cynicism of many Israelis. Two prestigious US commissions, headed by Senator George Mitchell and CIA Director George Tenet, made realistic recommendations about how to get negotiations for peace back on track, but the new adminstration of Geroge W. Bush did nothing to implement the recommendations.
Indeed, initially President George W. Bush seemed inclined to follow anything but Clinton's (ABC) example of active peacemaking. While after 9/11, Bush was focused on Afghanistan and Iraq, he did launch the "Roadmap to Peace," in coordination with the EU, Russia and the UN Secretary General's office (the Quartet), which made realistic constructive demands on both sides and was supposed to regularly hold the sides accountable for what they committed to do. Israeli and Palestinian supporters of peace were skeptical but hopeful that this time would be different. I remember an interfaith delegation meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Burns at which a prominent Reform Rabbi criticicized the Bush Admininistration for not being tougher in demanding that Israel halt settlement expansion. Sadly, like what happened with the Reagan Initiative, within a few years it became apparent that the US-led Roadmap wasn't going anywhere.
In 2005, frustrated by lack of progress and finally accepting Ben Gurion's and Peace Now's view about the danger to Israel's future of holding on to the territories, Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, unfortunately acting unilaterally rather than in coordination with President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas, the radically anti-Israel governing authority in Gaza, now not occupied but walled-in by the Israeli military, launched rocket attacks on Israel, fueling Israeli frustration with the Palestinians and leading to two devastating Gaza/Palestinian-Israeli wars. The US stubbornly, and I would say stupidly, refused to deal with Hamas, having labeled it a "terrorist organization," and therefore played almost no constructive role in ending the violence or in addressing the aftermath of the wars.
President Barack Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton (2008-2012), and John Kerry (2012-2016) brought a renewed sense of hope in the US commitment to help achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace. Their initiatives failed. Late in 2016 the US controversially abstained rather than veto a UN Security Council resolution condemning settlements, and Secretary Kerry gave a speech outlining principles that have guided US policy for peace. Clearly, the rightwing government in Israel and the weak, divided Palestinian government contributed to the failure to achieve peace, but so did the US.
Speaking at a national meeting of Pro-Israel/Pro-Peace J-Street, Daniel Kurtzer, the first Jewish American Ambassador to Egypt and to Israel sharply summed up a fundamental problem with the US role over the years. Agreeing with the oft-repeated US view that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a very high priorty for the United States, as he reviewed the US record, Kurtzer commented, "I am dumbfounded when I recognize with how little determination the US pursued its own initiatives for peace."
Sent from Hue, Vietnam March 19. I encourage you to subscribe to Carol's Blog on our current three week trip in Vietnam.
PART TWO - "Why Two States and How To Preserve Peace Prospects" follows soon.
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