Jerusalem - The administration of President Barack Obama has launched what officials termed a psychological warfare campaign meant to topple Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Sources in the Obama Administration and the US Congress have confirmed to the Middle East Newsline that the White House and State Department have sought to destabilize Netanyahu's government by forcing him to agree to an indefinite freeze on Jewish construction in areas taken by Israel in the wake of the 1967 war as well as the establishment of a Palestinian state by 2012. They said the campaign sought to replace Netanyahu with opposition leader and former foreign minister Tsipi Livni.
"Bibi is extremely vulnerable to pressure," a source familiar with the White House effort said. "We know this from his first term in office and believe he will collapse this time as well."
The sources said the administration's strategy aimed to delegitimize Netanyahu in his government and right-wing constituency. They said Obama and his aides have sought to portray Netanyahu as a weak and unstable politician who will destroy relations with Washington as Israel seeks U.S. support for a military option against Iran.
"There seems to be a general belief in the circle around the president that the democratically-elected government in Israel is drunk at the wheel," Steven Rosen, a veteran pro-Israeli lobbyist now with the Middle East Forum, said. "They clearly will use pressure tactics to bring Israel around."
In April 2010, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, began a series of attacks on Netanyahu in the Israeli media. Indyk, a former assistant secretary of state under then-President Bill Clinton, has called
for the toppling of Netanyahu while his right-wing partners accept a more pliant prime minister.
"Indyk was sent by Obama and encouraged by his American Jewish supporters, particularly [former Rep.] Robert Wexler, to do this," the source said.
In January 2010, Wexler resigned from Congress to become head of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation. The center was founded by Obama supporter Daniel Abraham and a delegation met Netanyahu in February.
The sources said the administration's campaign has included invitations to Defense Minister Ehud Barak to the White House, where he met with Obama on April 26. Barak has been regarded as the most pro-U.S. minister in Netanyahu's Cabinet and has been lobbying ministers to accept Obama's proposals.
"It's not going to be easy to turn this thing around," Rosen told a briefing on April 21. "Some of my friends in Jerusalem believe this crisis will go on for an extended period."
The anti-Netanyahu has alarmed pro-Israeli members in Congress, particularly from the Democratic Party. Several of the Democrats have reported a sharp drop in funds by Jewish donors for congressional elections in November.
"This [campaign against Netanyahu] is counterproductive and has to stop," Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat who has threatened to issue a condemnation of the White House, said.
Some in the pro-Israeli community detect an anti-Semitic tinge to the White House campaign, despite the involvement of Jewish aides. On April 21, National Security Advisor James Jones stunned an audience at the pro-Israel Washington Institute when he told a joke of a Jewish merchant who tricked a thirsty Taliban fighter into buying a tie.
"I wish that I had not made this off the cuff joke at the top of my remarks," Jones later said. "I apologize to anyone who was offended by it. It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: That the United States' commitment to Israel's security is sacrosanct."
Former State Department official Aaron Miller said Obama has surrounded himself with aides who blame Netanyahu for the suspension of the Arab-Israeli peace process. Miller said many of the aides had encountered Netanyahu during his first tenure as prime minister from 1996 to 1999.
"They had seen the Benjamin Netanyahu movie before and were determined not to let their chance at Middle East peace end the same way," Miller said in the magazine Foreign Policy. "Confronted with Netanyahu again, Obama and his team needed no encouragement to talk tough on the growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an issue that experts inside and outside government were clamoring for Obama to raise as the first step in his renewed push for peace. Fresh from his victory on health care, he's [Obama] king of the world again and in no mood to let the king of Israel frustrate his plans."
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
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Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Foreign Policy: Obama's Settlements Ultimatum
by Steven J Rosen for Foreign Policy
U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The belief seems to be that meeting this issue head-on will accelerate progress toward an agreement ending a conflict that has festered for generations. The historical record suggests a different conclusion.
The assumption that a faceoff over construction in Jerusalem will advance negotiations has not been subjected to much scrutiny. But the last two decades show that progress has occurred not when this issue was put first, but when it was finessed and left for the final status negotiations on Jerusalem.
Consider this: If, 17 years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton or Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem, before Arafat would sit down with Rabin, there would have been no Oslo agreements. By Rabin's own account, in comments before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he had to fudge the issue.
"I explained to the president of the United States," he said,"that I wouldn't forbid Jews from building privately in the area of Judea and Samaria... I am sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive."
The same year as the famous handshake on the White House lawn, 1993, the Rabin government completed the construction of more than 6,000 units in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of East Jerusalem, out of a total of 13,000 units that were in various stages of completion in areas of the city that had been outside Israeli lines before 1967.
So Arafat did sit down with Rabin, even while Israel's construction in Jerusalem continued. And, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Oslo peace accord was signed -- by the same Mahmoud Abbas who refuses to sit down today. And on October 14, 1994, Rabin, who built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Altogether, Israel completed 30,000 dwelling units in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the four years of Rabin's government. Even the Jan. 9, 1995, announcement of a plan to build 15,000 additional apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders (especially Pisgat Zeev, Neve Yaacov, Gilo, and Har Homa) did not stop negotiations, which resulted in the Oslo II accord of September 28, 1995. Israeli construction continued while Abbas and Rabin signed an historic accord.
And what was the American policy toward Rabin's construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem? Mild annoyance.
On Jan. 3, 1995, the State Department spokesman said mildly, in response to the Rabin government's announcement of expanded construction, "The parties themselves... have to judge whether it presents any kind of a problem in their own dialogue. The important thing is to continue to meet." The spokesman added on Jan. 10, 1995, "We admit that settlements are a problem, but we... enjoin the parties to deal with these issues in their negotiations."
Clinton's Middle East peace advisor, Martin Indyk, told the U.S. Senate on Feb. 2, 1995, that Rabin's government had recently "given approval for something like 4,000 to 5,000 new housing units to go up in settlements around the Jerusalem area." But, he said, Clinton had decided to stay out of it. "To take action now that would in one way or another... would be very explosive in the negotiations, and frankly, would put us out of business as a facilitator of those negotiations." Had Clinton taken Obama's approach, it might well have exploded the negotiations and brought the Oslo process to a halt.
Nor was this example of construction in Jerusalem while diplomacy made progress an isolated exception. Two years after Oslo II, in January 1997, Abbas and Arafat sat down with another Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, to sign the Hebron Protocol, which provided for the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from 80 percent of the very sensitive area of Hebron in the West Bank. Arafat and Abbas had no illusions that Netanyahu intended to freeze Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. In fact, Netanyahu had announced that he would proceed with the building of Har Homa, a controversial Israeli suburb conceived by Rabin. Nor, another 18 months later, did the Palestinians' fierce objections to Har Homa stop them from joining the Wye Plantation negotiations from October 15-23, 1998. These talks led to an agreement known as the Wye River Memorandum, in which Netanyahu, under considerable pressure from President Clinton, agreed to pull the Israel Defense Forces out of an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. This move was fiercely opposed by Netanyahu's right flank, and it led to his downfall in January 1999 when the hard-liners in his coalition defected.
Had Clinton demanded Netanyahu freeze construction in Jerusalem and Arafat made it a precondition for negotiations, neither the Hebron nor Wye agreements would have been signed.
The Labor government that was elected in the wake of Netanyahu's ouster continued the pattern of building in Jerusalem while moving forward in negotiations with the Palestinians. At the Camp David Summit (July 11-25, 2000), then Prime Minister Ehud Barak went past Israel's past "red lines" and the Palestinians most of the West Bank and a capital in Jerusalem, along with land swaps. But, at the same time that he was taking these unprecedented steps, Barak was accelerating the construction of Har Homa and other Jerusalem communities across the pre-1967 line. While the talks accelerated, Barak also moved ahead with the Ras al-Amud neighborhood on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. President Clinton said he " would have preferred that this decision was not taken." But Clinton added that the United States "cannot prevent Israel from building in Har-Homa." Haim Ramon, Rabin's minister for Jerusalem affairs, said "I would like to make it clear that the government has no intention of stopping the building at Har Homa."
Here again, had Clinton taken Obama's position and issued an ultimatum demanding that all construction in Jerusalem stop, and had Arafat made that American demand a precondition to begin negotiations, the Camp David Summit of 2000 and the Taba talks in January 2001 would not have occurred.
The next Israeli government, headed by retired general Ariel Sharon, did not seek any breakthroughs in negotiations with the Palestinians. But Sharon ordered the most dramatic territorial concession in Israel's history since 1967: the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers from every square inch of Gaza along with the abandonment of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank, in the "unilateral disengagement" of August-December 2005. Sharon pulled 8,000 Israeli settlers from their homes against fierce opposition from his right flank.
President George W. Bush played a key role in making Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza possible by softening U.S. policy on the settlement issue. To offset the concession that Sharon was making, and counter opposition to it from Israel's right, he wrote a letter to Sharon on April 14, 2004, acknowledging that, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.... It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." One implication of the letter was that the United States would treat Israeli construction in communities that all parties knew will remain part of Israel in any future two-state agreement, like the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, differently from settlement activity on controversial areas in the interior of the West Bank.
Elliott Abrams, the White House advisor who negotiated the Bush administration's compromises on the natural growth of settlement, explained the significance of the step Bush took last June in the Wall Street Journal: "There were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.... The prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation... the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza.... There was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to... confront his former allies on Israel's right by abandoning the 'Greater Israel' position.... He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze."
There were expressions of unhappiness by Palestinian leaders and European diplomats about the Bush policy of giving a green light to limited construction in Jerusalem and certain settlement blocs. But the Bush administration defended it as a realistic policy that moved the peace process forward.
Four months after the disengagement from Gaza, on Jan. 4, 2006, Sharon went into a coma. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister. Olmert sought a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. Following the Annapolis Summit in November 2007, Abbas, who had taken over as president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the PLO after Arafat's death in November 2004, agreed to begin intensive negotiations with Olmert. While Abbas expressed his unhappiness with continued Israeli construction in East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs, he did not make cancelation of these projects a precondition for talks. In fact, Olmert said, "It was clear from day one to Abbas... that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter.... Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Zeev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem... areas [that] will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."
These negotiations produced significant results: on Sept. 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas 93 percent of the West Bank, partition of Jerusalem, and a land swap. Abbas's deputy Saeb Erekat boasted to a Jordanian newspaper that he and Abbas had achieved considerable progress with the Olmert government between the November 2007 Annapolis talks and the end of 2008 in as many as 288 negotiation sessions by 12 committees -- all while Israeli construction continued.
The record is clear and consistent: The United States has never liked Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, and frequently stated that it complicated the peace process. But until Obama, no U.S. president had made its cancelation a precondition for negotiations, and until Obama, Palestinian leaders including Abbas did not make it a precondition either. For 19 years -- from the Madrid conference of October 1991 through the Olmert/Abbas negotiations that ended in 2008, negotiations moved forward while Jerusalem construction continued. Madrid, Oslo I, Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, Camp David, Taba, the disengagement from Gaza, and the Olmert offer to Abbas -- all these events over the course of two decades were made possible by a continuing agreement to disagree about Israeli construction of Jewish homes in Jewish neighborhoods outside the pre-1967 line in East Jerusalem.
Today, for the first time in 19 years, we have an aministration unable to produce Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Abbas is following Obama's lead in demanding an unprecedented precondition that Israel cannot satisfy. This is the same Abbas who negotiated with seven previous Israeli prime ministers -- Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu (in his first term), Barak, Sharon, and Olmert, without the precondition that he now demands of Netanyahu. We have a crisis. Netanyahu is doing something that every past Israeli prime minister of the left and right has done, but Obama is doing something that past American leaders considered unwise. It is the U.S. behavior that has changed.
At this moment, Obama's decision to confront Netanyahu about construction in Jerusalem wins wide praise. Whether Obama's policy will still look good in six months, when people realize he has mired the negotiations in quicksand, remains to be seen.
Obama would do better to take the advice of his own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, who wisely told PBS host Charlie Rose, "For the Israelis, what they're building in is in part of Israel. Now, the others don't see it that way. So you have these widely divergent perspectives on the subject. Our view is, let's get into negotiations, let's deal with the issues and come up with a solution to all of them including Jerusalem.... The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in or construction in East Jerusalem.... There are disputed legal issues.... And we could spend the next 14 years arguing over disputed legal issues or we can try to get a negotiation to resolve them in a manner that meets the aspirations of both societies."
Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum.
See the original article in Foreign Policy
See this and more articles at Israel Behind the News
U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to confront Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli construction activity in East Jerusalem has been greeted by a hail of praise, especially from people impatient to proceed with peace negotiations with the Palestinians. The belief seems to be that meeting this issue head-on will accelerate progress toward an agreement ending a conflict that has festered for generations. The historical record suggests a different conclusion.
The assumption that a faceoff over construction in Jerusalem will advance negotiations has not been subjected to much scrutiny. But the last two decades show that progress has occurred not when this issue was put first, but when it was finessed and left for the final status negotiations on Jerusalem.
Consider this: If, 17 years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton or Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin freeze all settlement construction, including in Jerusalem, before Arafat would sit down with Rabin, there would have been no Oslo agreements. By Rabin's own account, in comments before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he had to fudge the issue.
"I explained to the president of the United States," he said,"that I wouldn't forbid Jews from building privately in the area of Judea and Samaria... I am sorry that within united Jerusalem construction is not more massive."
The same year as the famous handshake on the White House lawn, 1993, the Rabin government completed the construction of more than 6,000 units in the Pisgat Zeev neighborhood of East Jerusalem, out of a total of 13,000 units that were in various stages of completion in areas of the city that had been outside Israeli lines before 1967.
So Arafat did sit down with Rabin, even while Israel's construction in Jerusalem continued. And, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Oslo peace accord was signed -- by the same Mahmoud Abbas who refuses to sit down today. And on October 14, 1994, Rabin, who built homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Altogether, Israel completed 30,000 dwelling units in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the four years of Rabin's government. Even the Jan. 9, 1995, announcement of a plan to build 15,000 additional apartments in East Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the 1967 borders (especially Pisgat Zeev, Neve Yaacov, Gilo, and Har Homa) did not stop negotiations, which resulted in the Oslo II accord of September 28, 1995. Israeli construction continued while Abbas and Rabin signed an historic accord.
And what was the American policy toward Rabin's construction of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem? Mild annoyance.
On Jan. 3, 1995, the State Department spokesman said mildly, in response to the Rabin government's announcement of expanded construction, "The parties themselves... have to judge whether it presents any kind of a problem in their own dialogue. The important thing is to continue to meet." The spokesman added on Jan. 10, 1995, "We admit that settlements are a problem, but we... enjoin the parties to deal with these issues in their negotiations."
Clinton's Middle East peace advisor, Martin Indyk, told the U.S. Senate on Feb. 2, 1995, that Rabin's government had recently "given approval for something like 4,000 to 5,000 new housing units to go up in settlements around the Jerusalem area." But, he said, Clinton had decided to stay out of it. "To take action now that would in one way or another... would be very explosive in the negotiations, and frankly, would put us out of business as a facilitator of those negotiations." Had Clinton taken Obama's approach, it might well have exploded the negotiations and brought the Oslo process to a halt.
Nor was this example of construction in Jerusalem while diplomacy made progress an isolated exception. Two years after Oslo II, in January 1997, Abbas and Arafat sat down with another Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu, to sign the Hebron Protocol, which provided for the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from 80 percent of the very sensitive area of Hebron in the West Bank. Arafat and Abbas had no illusions that Netanyahu intended to freeze Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. In fact, Netanyahu had announced that he would proceed with the building of Har Homa, a controversial Israeli suburb conceived by Rabin. Nor, another 18 months later, did the Palestinians' fierce objections to Har Homa stop them from joining the Wye Plantation negotiations from October 15-23, 1998. These talks led to an agreement known as the Wye River Memorandum, in which Netanyahu, under considerable pressure from President Clinton, agreed to pull the Israel Defense Forces out of an additional 13 percent of the West Bank. This move was fiercely opposed by Netanyahu's right flank, and it led to his downfall in January 1999 when the hard-liners in his coalition defected.
Had Clinton demanded Netanyahu freeze construction in Jerusalem and Arafat made it a precondition for negotiations, neither the Hebron nor Wye agreements would have been signed.
The Labor government that was elected in the wake of Netanyahu's ouster continued the pattern of building in Jerusalem while moving forward in negotiations with the Palestinians. At the Camp David Summit (July 11-25, 2000), then Prime Minister Ehud Barak went past Israel's past "red lines" and the Palestinians most of the West Bank and a capital in Jerusalem, along with land swaps. But, at the same time that he was taking these unprecedented steps, Barak was accelerating the construction of Har Homa and other Jerusalem communities across the pre-1967 line. While the talks accelerated, Barak also moved ahead with the Ras al-Amud neighborhood on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. President Clinton said he " would have preferred that this decision was not taken." But Clinton added that the United States "cannot prevent Israel from building in Har-Homa." Haim Ramon, Rabin's minister for Jerusalem affairs, said "I would like to make it clear that the government has no intention of stopping the building at Har Homa."
Here again, had Clinton taken Obama's position and issued an ultimatum demanding that all construction in Jerusalem stop, and had Arafat made that American demand a precondition to begin negotiations, the Camp David Summit of 2000 and the Taba talks in January 2001 would not have occurred.
The next Israeli government, headed by retired general Ariel Sharon, did not seek any breakthroughs in negotiations with the Palestinians. But Sharon ordered the most dramatic territorial concession in Israel's history since 1967: the withdrawal of all Israeli soldiers from every square inch of Gaza along with the abandonment of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank, in the "unilateral disengagement" of August-December 2005. Sharon pulled 8,000 Israeli settlers from their homes against fierce opposition from his right flank.
President George W. Bush played a key role in making Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza possible by softening U.S. policy on the settlement issue. To offset the concession that Sharon was making, and counter opposition to it from Israel's right, he wrote a letter to Sharon on April 14, 2004, acknowledging that, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.... It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities." One implication of the letter was that the United States would treat Israeli construction in communities that all parties knew will remain part of Israel in any future two-state agreement, like the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, differently from settlement activity on controversial areas in the interior of the West Bank.
Elliott Abrams, the White House advisor who negotiated the Bush administration's compromises on the natural growth of settlement, explained the significance of the step Bush took last June in the Wall Street Journal: "There were indeed agreements between Israel and the United States regarding the growth of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.... The prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation... the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza.... There was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to... confront his former allies on Israel's right by abandoning the 'Greater Israel' position.... He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze."
There were expressions of unhappiness by Palestinian leaders and European diplomats about the Bush policy of giving a green light to limited construction in Jerusalem and certain settlement blocs. But the Bush administration defended it as a realistic policy that moved the peace process forward.
Four months after the disengagement from Gaza, on Jan. 4, 2006, Sharon went into a coma. His deputy, Ehud Olmert, became prime minister. Olmert sought a resumption of negotiations with the Palestinians. Following the Annapolis Summit in November 2007, Abbas, who had taken over as president of the Palestinian Authority and head of the PLO after Arafat's death in November 2004, agreed to begin intensive negotiations with Olmert. While Abbas expressed his unhappiness with continued Israeli construction in East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs, he did not make cancelation of these projects a precondition for talks. In fact, Olmert said, "It was clear from day one to Abbas... that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter.... Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Zeev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem... areas [that] will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."
These negotiations produced significant results: on Sept. 16, 2008, Olmert offered Abbas 93 percent of the West Bank, partition of Jerusalem, and a land swap. Abbas's deputy Saeb Erekat boasted to a Jordanian newspaper that he and Abbas had achieved considerable progress with the Olmert government between the November 2007 Annapolis talks and the end of 2008 in as many as 288 negotiation sessions by 12 committees -- all while Israeli construction continued.
The record is clear and consistent: The United States has never liked Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, and frequently stated that it complicated the peace process. But until Obama, no U.S. president had made its cancelation a precondition for negotiations, and until Obama, Palestinian leaders including Abbas did not make it a precondition either. For 19 years -- from the Madrid conference of October 1991 through the Olmert/Abbas negotiations that ended in 2008, negotiations moved forward while Jerusalem construction continued. Madrid, Oslo I, Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, Camp David, Taba, the disengagement from Gaza, and the Olmert offer to Abbas -- all these events over the course of two decades were made possible by a continuing agreement to disagree about Israeli construction of Jewish homes in Jewish neighborhoods outside the pre-1967 line in East Jerusalem.
Today, for the first time in 19 years, we have an aministration unable to produce Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Abbas is following Obama's lead in demanding an unprecedented precondition that Israel cannot satisfy. This is the same Abbas who negotiated with seven previous Israeli prime ministers -- Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu (in his first term), Barak, Sharon, and Olmert, without the precondition that he now demands of Netanyahu. We have a crisis. Netanyahu is doing something that every past Israeli prime minister of the left and right has done, but Obama is doing something that past American leaders considered unwise. It is the U.S. behavior that has changed.
At this moment, Obama's decision to confront Netanyahu about construction in Jerusalem wins wide praise. Whether Obama's policy will still look good in six months, when people realize he has mired the negotiations in quicksand, remains to be seen.
Obama would do better to take the advice of his own Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, who wisely told PBS host Charlie Rose, "For the Israelis, what they're building in is in part of Israel. Now, the others don't see it that way. So you have these widely divergent perspectives on the subject. Our view is, let's get into negotiations, let's deal with the issues and come up with a solution to all of them including Jerusalem.... The Israelis are not going to stop settlements in or construction in East Jerusalem.... There are disputed legal issues.... And we could spend the next 14 years arguing over disputed legal issues or we can try to get a negotiation to resolve them in a manner that meets the aspirations of both societies."
Steven J. Rosen served for 23 years as foreign-policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was a defendant in the recently dismissed AIPAC case. He is now director of the Washington Project at the Middle East Forum.
See the original article in Foreign Policy
See this and more articles at Israel Behind the News
The Future of an Illusion: A piece of paper will not bring peace to the Middle East
by Elliott Abrams in the Weekly Standard
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular "peace process" has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
The patching-up efforts of the last two weeks were impressive, but perversely: They showed how much damage had been done and how little the administration cares about reversing it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom Obama was said to be "boiling with rage" after the Jerusalem housing announcement, got the complete slate of Washington meetings: Clinton, Gates, Biden, Obama. But the meetings were virtually secret: The White House did not permit a single photo to be taken of the Oval Office session, an unprecedented snub. Same at State: no ceremony, no press conference.
For her part, Secretary Clinton told the giant AIPAC meeting, "Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don't agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally." Several recent Palestinian actions, she said, were "provocations" that are "wrong and must be condemned." That was nice, but saying it to a Jewish audience in a kiss-and-make-up session in Washington fools no one, not after her famous 43-minute telephone call to Netanyahu. These "provocations. . . that must be condemned" (note the passive voice) did not after all elicit a timely call to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemning them, nor did she use the Quartet meeting in Moscow on March 19 for that purpose. And general administration protestations that the United States is committed to Israel's security and that relations are "rock solid" now carry little persuasive power; they sound like Obama's (and for that matter Clinton's) campaign rhetoric, and everyone knows how useful a guide to administration policy all of that proved to be.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
1. Israel's flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel, put it this way in his memoirs: "The record. . . suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission." During the George W. Bush years, the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, decided to abandon the idea of a "Greater Israel," impose constraints on settlement construction in the West Bank (no new settlements, no outward expansion of settlement territory), and remove every settlement in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His closest advisers say all of this was possible for him only in the context of unwavering American support for Israel's security steps - including the targeting and killing of Hamas terrorists and the refusal to deal with a terrorist leader like Arafat. What was the turning point for Sharon? Bush's June 24, 2002, speech, where he abandoned Arafat, denounced Palestinian terrorism, and said thorough reforms were the only possible basis for Palestinian statehood. Reassured, Sharon began to act.
Contrast this with the Obama administration, where Israel has been "condemned" - the toughest word in the diplomatic dictionary - for a housing project. Instead of seeking practical and politically feasible limits to settlement activity, the Obama approach has been to say every brick cemented to another was "illegitimate."
Israelis know that these American denunciations of Israel liberate Europeans and others to crank up their own, and so it has been this past year: Israel has been increasingly isolated and criticized internationally. Once we used "condemn," it was impossible (even if we were trying, which we were not) to keep it out of Quartet and EU statements. Add a few other international assaults (the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, for instance) and American acts of distancing (the president visits Cairo and Riyadh but skips Israel, for example), and Israelis are in no mood for additional risktaking. Who, after all, will have their back if things get rough? Hillary Clinton told AIPAC that "the status quo is unsustainable," as if just about anything we can get on paper would be better. Such phrases do not inspire Israeli confidence that their country's security is anywhere near the top of the administration's list. All this should be elementary, but it seems to have escaped the Obama White House.
2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.
In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times. Who can blame Arafat for failing to take seriously criticism of his "alleged links" to terrorism when the invitations kept on coming? For years, American officials of both parties have said the "incitement must end," but they have imposed no penalty for its failure to end. When in March the Palestinian Authority (PA) named a square for a terrorist involved in an attack in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, Obama, Biden, and Clinton were silent. Lower-ranking officials tut-tutted. In Palestinian society, the veneration of this terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, is widespread; Fatah, not Hamas, is the one celebrating Mughrabi. PA radio and television incite hatred of Israel and Jews with regularity, as Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI document every month.
In recent weeks the Obama administration has stated that both sides have responsibilities to meet, but it made no serious demands of the PA. Had there been early and regular insistence that incitement end, the Mughrabi incident would never have taken place. The price for such negligence is being paid in both Israeli and Palestinian society: Every such action and every vicious broadcast helps persuade Israelis that Palestinians do not truly seek peace and helps raise a new generation of Palestinians who see Jews as enemies to hate, not neighbors with whom to reach an accommodation. This infantilization of Palestinian society, moreover, moves it further from the responsibilities of statehood, for it holds harmless the most destructive elements of West Bank life and suggests that standards of decency are not necessarily part of progress toward "peace."
A tough demand that all the incitement end now - no more terrorist squares, a clean-up of Palestinian broadcasting, the replacement of offending school textbooks - would both help Palestinian moderates undertake these actions and reassure Israelis that President Obama shares at least some of their concerns about the ability of Palestinians to negotiate and sustain a peace deal. The silence thus far, the unconvincing and rote handling of this issue, leaves the impression that Obama simply wants a deal signed and doesn't much care about what happens after that. Like his distancing himself from Israel and his apparent lack of concern for Israeli security, this undermines any chance of successful peace talks.
3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.
Israelis learned this the hard way in South Lebanon and Gaza, and it is unquestionably the greatest factor leading them to oppose a similar withdrawal from the West Bank. The Labor party leader Ehud Barak is not viewed in Israel as a hardliner; when he was prime minister he offered Arafat a dramatic peace proposal in 2000. But when, as defense minister, he met with President Bush in 2008 he handed over, and raised repeatedly in later meetings with Secretary Rice, a list of Israel's security needs in the West Bank. He and Netanyahu (and the vast majority of Israelis) are of one mind on this: Terrorism from Gaza is a security challenge for Israel, but terrorism from the West Bank threatens Israel's survival. There has been considerable progress in training Palestinian security forces, but no one believes they can yet maintain order without the presence of the IDF and Shin Bet. Those who say, as George Mitchell - Obama's special envoy to the Middle East - and the Quartet have, that there can be a peace deal in 24 months are saying that fundamental security issues can be finessed or forgotten. Of course they can if your goal is a piece of paper - or, perhaps better put, a paper peace. If you want a real and lasting peace, you must have the answer to the question: What will fill the vacuum when Israeli forces leave? Today the answer is chaos or Hamas, and any prediction that in 24 months these matters will be resolved shows a lack of seriousness. Palestinians who value law and order and seek to build a decent society, as well as Jordanians who worry what forces will be across the river from them, cannot be so cavalier. This brings us back to lesson one: If the United States is intent on a deal in 24 months no matter what, Israelis will understand that we are not going to protect their security and that we'll complain when they assert the need to do it themselves.
4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.
George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers - all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them.
The most perverse misunderstanding along these lines is the thought that supporting Israel is risking American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the war on terror. Vice President Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu that "this is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." White House denials suggest that the quotation is not exact, but there has also been no flat-out denial of the sentiment. David Axelrod, the political hack who appears to be a key foreign policy strategist and spokesman for the president, was asked on one of the Sunday shows if he agreed that settlement construction puts U.S. troops' lives at risk. He replied, "It is important for our own security that we move forward and resolve this very difficult issue." Not exactly a resounding "no." General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate that "clearly the tensions in these issues have an enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command area of responsibility." Once again, not a "No way" or a "Get real." Petraeus had a chance to say the Pakistanis are not thinking hard about West Bank settlement construction when they watch the Taliban and developments in Waziristan, and he failed to do so then or in later explanations. How hard would it have been for him or some other official to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden became a terrorist to overthrow the government in Riyadh, not the one in Jerusalem? The struggles between modernizers and traditionalists, Sunni and Shia, secularists and Islamists are tearing the Islamic and the Arab world apart. They would continue to do so if Israel no longer existed.
Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the "uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry" argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in "1967 issues" related to Israel's size, but in "1948 issues" related to Israel's existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel's existence - not its settlement policy - comes into play.
If this is not the Obama view of the world, the administration should say so quickly and very clearly. Otherwise his administration can fairly be said to be revisiting our own "1948 issues." The argument that Israel would be a great burden and ruin our place in the Arab world was proffered then by George Marshall - and rejected by Harry Truman. In his memoirs, Clark Clifford wrote at length about the State Department's efforts to stop Truman from recognizing the new State of Israel. Clifford quoted Marshall's deputy Robert Lovett as saying on May 14, 1948 - the day Israel declared its independence and Truman offered recognition - "There will be a tremendous reaction in the Arab world. We might lose the effects of many years of hard work with the Arabs. We will lose our position with Arab leaders. It will put our diplomatic missions and consular representatives in personal jeopardy." After 60 years of American leadership and military dominance in the Middle East, it should be as disturbing to Americans - not least to Democrats who venerate Truman - as it is to Israelis that traces of this approach are emerging again in Washington.
Netanyahu answered these poor arguments in his address to AIPAC:
"Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us. To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan."
5. The 'peace process' retards peace.
A single-minded concentration on "the peace process" hurts the cause of peace and moderation throughout the region and does little to build the necessary institutions of Palestinian society. It's obvious that nearly two decades of negotiations have not produced peace. Instead this focus has had two deleterious effects.
First, it means we care more about getting Syria, Egypt, or others to endorse some negotiating plan than we do about their own internal situations. The people, the politics, the alliances of such countries become unimportant, as we focus on whether their rulers will deign to sit at some table we've laid. Human rights and democracy issues evaporate.
Second, we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow "proximity talks" Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel's capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals.
The last week of March brought talk of "reconciliation" between the Obama administration and the government of Israel. Relations are so strained that we, too, appear to need our own set of "proximity talks" now. But reconciliation is not a simple matter, as the Catholic Church knows. In that faith, it is a sacrament consisting of three elements: conversion, confession, and celebration. Conversion is the internal realization of wrongdoing, confession is the external admission of it, and celebration follows when (and only when) the sinner has converted, repented, confessed, and returned. Given the Obama administration's view of Israel and the Middle East, celebration seems a long way off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams
Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948) is an American lawyer and politician who served in foreign policy positions for two Republican U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. He is currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.[6]
During the Reagan administration, Abrams gained notoriety for his involvement controversial foreign policy decisions regarding Nicaragua and El Salvador. During Bush's first term, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, in charge of promoting Bush's strategy of advancing democracy abroad. His appointment by Bush was controversial due to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information fromCongress during the Iran-Contra Affair investigation.
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.
Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular "peace process" has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
The patching-up efforts of the last two weeks were impressive, but perversely: They showed how much damage had been done and how little the administration cares about reversing it. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom Obama was said to be "boiling with rage" after the Jerusalem housing announcement, got the complete slate of Washington meetings: Clinton, Gates, Biden, Obama. But the meetings were virtually secret: The White House did not permit a single photo to be taken of the Oval Office session, an unprecedented snub. Same at State: no ceremony, no press conference.
For her part, Secretary Clinton told the giant AIPAC meeting, "Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don't agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally." Several recent Palestinian actions, she said, were "provocations" that are "wrong and must be condemned." That was nice, but saying it to a Jewish audience in a kiss-and-make-up session in Washington fools no one, not after her famous 43-minute telephone call to Netanyahu. These "provocations. . . that must be condemned" (note the passive voice) did not after all elicit a timely call to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas condemning them, nor did she use the Quartet meeting in Moscow on March 19 for that purpose. And general administration protestations that the United States is committed to Israel's security and that relations are "rock solid" now carry little persuasive power; they sound like Obama's (and for that matter Clinton's) campaign rhetoric, and everyone knows how useful a guide to administration policy all of that proved to be.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
1. Israel's flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel, put it this way in his memoirs: "The record. . . suggests that American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward, rather than attempt to browbeat them into submission." During the George W. Bush years, the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, decided to abandon the idea of a "Greater Israel," impose constraints on settlement construction in the West Bank (no new settlements, no outward expansion of settlement territory), and remove every settlement in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank. His closest advisers say all of this was possible for him only in the context of unwavering American support for Israel's security steps - including the targeting and killing of Hamas terrorists and the refusal to deal with a terrorist leader like Arafat. What was the turning point for Sharon? Bush's June 24, 2002, speech, where he abandoned Arafat, denounced Palestinian terrorism, and said thorough reforms were the only possible basis for Palestinian statehood. Reassured, Sharon began to act.
Contrast this with the Obama administration, where Israel has been "condemned" - the toughest word in the diplomatic dictionary - for a housing project. Instead of seeking practical and politically feasible limits to settlement activity, the Obama approach has been to say every brick cemented to another was "illegitimate."
Israelis know that these American denunciations of Israel liberate Europeans and others to crank up their own, and so it has been this past year: Israel has been increasingly isolated and criticized internationally. Once we used "condemn," it was impossible (even if we were trying, which we were not) to keep it out of Quartet and EU statements. Add a few other international assaults (the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, for instance) and American acts of distancing (the president visits Cairo and Riyadh but skips Israel, for example), and Israelis are in no mood for additional risktaking. Who, after all, will have their back if things get rough? Hillary Clinton told AIPAC that "the status quo is unsustainable," as if just about anything we can get on paper would be better. Such phrases do not inspire Israeli confidence that their country's security is anywhere near the top of the administration's list. All this should be elementary, but it seems to have escaped the Obama White House.
2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.
In the Bill Clinton years, the foreign leader who visited the White House most often was Yasser Arafat - 13 times. Who can blame Arafat for failing to take seriously criticism of his "alleged links" to terrorism when the invitations kept on coming? For years, American officials of both parties have said the "incitement must end," but they have imposed no penalty for its failure to end. When in March the Palestinian Authority (PA) named a square for a terrorist involved in an attack in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, Obama, Biden, and Clinton were silent. Lower-ranking officials tut-tutted. In Palestinian society, the veneration of this terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, is widespread; Fatah, not Hamas, is the one celebrating Mughrabi. PA radio and television incite hatred of Israel and Jews with regularity, as Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI document every month.
In recent weeks the Obama administration has stated that both sides have responsibilities to meet, but it made no serious demands of the PA. Had there been early and regular insistence that incitement end, the Mughrabi incident would never have taken place. The price for such negligence is being paid in both Israeli and Palestinian society: Every such action and every vicious broadcast helps persuade Israelis that Palestinians do not truly seek peace and helps raise a new generation of Palestinians who see Jews as enemies to hate, not neighbors with whom to reach an accommodation. This infantilization of Palestinian society, moreover, moves it further from the responsibilities of statehood, for it holds harmless the most destructive elements of West Bank life and suggests that standards of decency are not necessarily part of progress toward "peace."
A tough demand that all the incitement end now - no more terrorist squares, a clean-up of Palestinian broadcasting, the replacement of offending school textbooks - would both help Palestinian moderates undertake these actions and reassure Israelis that President Obama shares at least some of their concerns about the ability of Palestinians to negotiate and sustain a peace deal. The silence thus far, the unconvincing and rote handling of this issue, leaves the impression that Obama simply wants a deal signed and doesn't much care about what happens after that. Like his distancing himself from Israel and his apparent lack of concern for Israeli security, this undermines any chance of successful peace talks.
3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.
Israelis learned this the hard way in South Lebanon and Gaza, and it is unquestionably the greatest factor leading them to oppose a similar withdrawal from the West Bank. The Labor party leader Ehud Barak is not viewed in Israel as a hardliner; when he was prime minister he offered Arafat a dramatic peace proposal in 2000. But when, as defense minister, he met with President Bush in 2008 he handed over, and raised repeatedly in later meetings with Secretary Rice, a list of Israel's security needs in the West Bank. He and Netanyahu (and the vast majority of Israelis) are of one mind on this: Terrorism from Gaza is a security challenge for Israel, but terrorism from the West Bank threatens Israel's survival. There has been considerable progress in training Palestinian security forces, but no one believes they can yet maintain order without the presence of the IDF and Shin Bet. Those who say, as George Mitchell - Obama's special envoy to the Middle East - and the Quartet have, that there can be a peace deal in 24 months are saying that fundamental security issues can be finessed or forgotten. Of course they can if your goal is a piece of paper - or, perhaps better put, a paper peace. If you want a real and lasting peace, you must have the answer to the question: What will fill the vacuum when Israeli forces leave? Today the answer is chaos or Hamas, and any prediction that in 24 months these matters will be resolved shows a lack of seriousness. Palestinians who value law and order and seek to build a decent society, as well as Jordanians who worry what forces will be across the river from them, cannot be so cavalier. This brings us back to lesson one: If the United States is intent on a deal in 24 months no matter what, Israelis will understand that we are not going to protect their security and that we'll complain when they assert the need to do it themselves.
4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.
George Mitchell once acknowledged that when he talks to Arab leaders they raise Iran first, but no one in the administration wants to allow mere facts to interfere with their ideology. George W. Bush was as close as any American president ever has been to Israel, but had excellent relations with the Moroccan, Algerian, Emirati, Omani, Bahraini, Kuwaiti, Saudi, and Jordanian rulers - all except the Egyptians, who were annoyed that he thought they should have free elections. Paying attention to what Arab political leaders say publicly about Israel is foolish, for their real views consist of tough-minded assessments of the balance of power in the region. What they want most of all is calm; they do not want their streets riled up by Israeli-Palestinian violence. Palestinians are not at the center of their hearts or they would visit the West Bank and bring plenty of cash with them. What preoccupies them is survival and Iran. If they take any lesson from the current coldness between the United States and Israel, it is that the United States is not a reliable ally. If we can ditch Israel, they know we can far more easily ditch them.
The most perverse misunderstanding along these lines is the thought that supporting Israel is risking American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the war on terror. Vice President Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu that "this is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." White House denials suggest that the quotation is not exact, but there has also been no flat-out denial of the sentiment. David Axelrod, the political hack who appears to be a key foreign policy strategist and spokesman for the president, was asked on one of the Sunday shows if he agreed that settlement construction puts U.S. troops' lives at risk. He replied, "It is important for our own security that we move forward and resolve this very difficult issue." Not exactly a resounding "no." General David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, told the Senate that "clearly the tensions in these issues have an enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command area of responsibility." Once again, not a "No way" or a "Get real." Petraeus had a chance to say the Pakistanis are not thinking hard about West Bank settlement construction when they watch the Taliban and developments in Waziristan, and he failed to do so then or in later explanations. How hard would it have been for him or some other official to remind everyone that Osama bin Laden became a terrorist to overthrow the government in Riyadh, not the one in Jerusalem? The struggles between modernizers and traditionalists, Sunni and Shia, secularists and Islamists are tearing the Islamic and the Arab world apart. They would continue to do so if Israel no longer existed.
Israelis listening to official American remarks hear an amateurish interpretation of Arab politics, which as Lee Smith reminded us in his recent book (quoting bin Laden himself) is basically about backing the strong horse. Arab leaders want to know what we will do to stop Iran; they want to know if their ally in Washington is going to be the top power in the region. Israelis wonder where the "uh oh, this will make Islamic extremists angry" argument stops. Does anyone think al Qaeda or the Taliban would be mollified by a settlement freeze? The Islamists are not interested in "1967 issues" related to Israel's size, but in "1948 issues" related to Israel's existence. If henceforth we mean to engage such people rather than to defeat them, Israel's existence - not its settlement policy - comes into play.
If this is not the Obama view of the world, the administration should say so quickly and very clearly. Otherwise his administration can fairly be said to be revisiting our own "1948 issues." The argument that Israel would be a great burden and ruin our place in the Arab world was proffered then by George Marshall - and rejected by Harry Truman. In his memoirs, Clark Clifford wrote at length about the State Department's efforts to stop Truman from recognizing the new State of Israel. Clifford quoted Marshall's deputy Robert Lovett as saying on May 14, 1948 - the day Israel declared its independence and Truman offered recognition - "There will be a tremendous reaction in the Arab world. We might lose the effects of many years of hard work with the Arabs. We will lose our position with Arab leaders. It will put our diplomatic missions and consular representatives in personal jeopardy." After 60 years of American leadership and military dominance in the Middle East, it should be as disturbing to Americans - not least to Democrats who venerate Truman - as it is to Israelis that traces of this approach are emerging again in Washington.
Netanyahu answered these poor arguments in his address to AIPAC:
"Our soldiers and your soldiers fight against fanatic enemies that loathe our common values. In the eyes of these fanatics, we are you and you are us. To them, the only difference is that you are big and we are small, you are the Great Satan and we are the Little Satan."
5. The 'peace process' retards peace.
A single-minded concentration on "the peace process" hurts the cause of peace and moderation throughout the region and does little to build the necessary institutions of Palestinian society. It's obvious that nearly two decades of negotiations have not produced peace. Instead this focus has had two deleterious effects.
First, it means we care more about getting Syria, Egypt, or others to endorse some negotiating plan than we do about their own internal situations. The people, the politics, the alliances of such countries become unimportant, as we focus on whether their rulers will deign to sit at some table we've laid. Human rights and democracy issues evaporate.
Second, we use all our chips for the negotiating sessions, instead of applying them to the hard work of nation building. We ask Arab states to reach out to Israel (which they will not do) when we should be demanding that they reach out to the Palestinians (which they might). We explode, and damage U.S.-Israeli relations, over a tiny construction announcement because it might slow "proximity talks" Mitchell has cooked up. We use American influence with Israel not to promote economic growth in the West Bank, but to try and impede Jewish (never Arab) construction in Israel's capital city. This set of priorities is perverse and will not lead to peace. Instead, a pragmatic approach that seeks to create in the West Bank a decent society and a state that will maintain law and order should be our goals.
The last week of March brought talk of "reconciliation" between the Obama administration and the government of Israel. Relations are so strained that we, too, appear to need our own set of "proximity talks" now. But reconciliation is not a simple matter, as the Catholic Church knows. In that faith, it is a sacrament consisting of three elements: conversion, confession, and celebration. Conversion is the internal realization of wrongdoing, confession is the external admission of it, and celebration follows when (and only when) the sinner has converted, repented, confessed, and returned. Given the Obama administration's view of Israel and the Middle East, celebration seems a long way off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams
Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948) is an American lawyer and politician who served in foreign policy positions for two Republican U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. He is currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.[6]
During the Reagan administration, Abrams gained notoriety for his involvement controversial foreign policy decisions regarding Nicaragua and El Salvador. During Bush's first term, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, in charge of promoting Bush's strategy of advancing democracy abroad. His appointment by Bush was controversial due to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information fromCongress during the Iran-Contra Affair investigation.
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Sunday, January 17, 2010
The Palestinians' Unilateral "Kosovo Strategy": Implications for the PA and Israel
The Palestinians' Unilateral "Kosovo Strategy": Implications for the PA and Israel
Published January 2010
The Jerusalem Viewpoints series is published by the Institute for Contemporary Affairs, founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation.
No. 575 January-February 2010
Mahmoud Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood.
Senior Palestinian officials note that Palestinian unilateralism is modeled after Kosovo's February 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. European and U.S. support for Kosovo's unilateral declaration has led the Palestinian leadership to determine that geopolitical conditions are ripe to seek international endorsement of its unilateral statehood bid, despite the fact that leading international jurists have suggested that the cases of Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are historically and legally different.
The Palestinians are legally bound to negotiate a bilateral solution with Israel. Unilateral Palestinian threats to declare statehood have been rebuffed thus far by the European powers and the United States.
The Palestinian "Kosovo strategy" includes a campaign of delegitimization of Israel, seeking to isolate Israel as a pariah state, while driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The unilateral Palestinian bid for sovereignty will also likely turn the Palestinians into the leading petitioner against the State of Israel at the International Criminal Court. Although the PA is not a state and therefore should have no legal standing before the court, the petition it submitted to the court after the Gaza war was not rejected by the ICC.
Finally, a unilateral Palestinian quest for the 1947 lines may well continue even if the 1967 lines are endorsed by the United Nations. The PLO's 1988 declaration of independence was based on UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which recognizes the 1947 partition plan for Palestine, not the 1967 lines, as the basis for the borders of Israel and an Arab state.
Have the Palestinians Abandoned a Negotiated Settlement?
Washington's intensive shuttle diplomacy as well as Arab pressure may convince Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to return to the negotiating table with Israel. However, Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood.1
Senior Palestinian officials have also noted that Palestinian unilateralism is modeled after Kosovo's February 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia.2 European and U.S. support for Kosovo's unilateral declaration, plus Palestinian confidence in its own international case, appear to have led the Palestinian leadership to determine that geopolitical conditions are ripe to seek international endorsement of its unilateral statehood bid, with the 1967 lines as its future borders.3
This assertive Palestinian shift to unilateralism has also been bolstered by a changing balance of power between the Palestinian Authority that was established at Oslo, and its "parent," the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has embraced a unilateral approach to statehood since its 1988 unilateral declaration of independence but has not operationalized it. On December 15-16, 2009, the PLO Central Council convened in Ramallah where it unilaterally assumed the PA's legislative authority, resolved to extend Abbas' term indefinitely, and even voted to replace the PA Legislative Council that had been established as part of the internationally-sanctioned Oslo peace accords.4
The PLO Central Council meeting and its far-reaching resolutions provide another illustration of unilateral intentions that are rooted in former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's 1988 PLO statehood declaration. However, despite Palestinian determination and a largely sympathetic international community, it's unlikely that the Palestinian "Kosovo strategy" will end the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, it may signal the final unraveling of the Middle East peace process.
Palestinians Invoke Kosovo's Unilateral Statehood Model
Since February 2008, when the Albanian Muslim majority government in Kosovo unilaterally declared independence and secession from Christian Serbia, winning U.S. and European support, the Palestinian leadership has publicly invoked Kosovo as a model for a prospective Palestinian state. Yasser Abed Rabbo, senior advisor to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, told Agence France Presse immediately following the Kosovo declaration, "Our people have the right to proclaim independence even before Kosovo. And we ask for the backing of the United States and the European Union for our independence."5
In late 2008, the collapse of the Annapolis peace negotiations between Abbas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who, as Abbas acknowledged publicly, had made unprecedented concessions,6further motivated the Palestinians to embrace a unilateral approach to statehood as a default option. Abed Rabo confirmed at the time that, "we have another option. Kosovo is not better than Palestine."7
The Palestinians strengthened their bid for unilaterally-declared statehood in late 2009 and into 2010 while lobbying Europe, South America, and the UN for support, and simultaneously setting unprecedented preconditions for restarting negotiations with Israel.8 In November 2009, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat threatened to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, arguing that "the EU recognized the state" of Kosovo before other official channels supported its claim for independence. However, U.S. and European opposition to the move would force Erekat to deny his intentions. Instead, he insisted that the Palestinian Authority merely sought UN Security Council endorsement of a Palestinian state, which also mirrors Kosovo's quest for a UN Security Council resolution proposing independence.9
Two leading international jurists have suggested that the cases of Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are historically and legally different.10 However, from a Palestinian point of view, it seems that legal and historical context are less important than the sympathetic political perceptions that can be created in the international community by promoting what appear to be some external similarities.11 The Palestinians liken themselves to Kosovo's profile in the West as a besieged, indigenous population seeking freedom and independence from its brutal Serbian sovereign overlord, which in the Palestinian analogy is the State of Israel's "occupation" of the disputed West Bank.12
True, both Palestinians and Muslim Kosovars enjoy international support for their respective bids for independence.13 Both have established internationally-sanctioned, self-governing authorities, receive European security backing and UN financial support, and work with UN-appointed special envoys, while each has penned a constitution. However, Kosovo enjoys a NATO security presence, which Palestinian negotiators have failed to introduce into the West Bank despite several attempts to do so in past peace negotiations with Israel.14
Another point of similarity between Kosovars and the Palestinians involves territory. The Kosovo model did not require a territorial compromise on the part of the Albanian Muslim Kosavar government to take into account areas where concentrations of Serbian Christian population remained.15 Similarly, the Palestinian leadership has been reluctant to compromise with Israel over Israeli population centers and vital security requirements in the West Bank.
Politically, many in the Palestinian leadership assess that adopting a unilateral "Kosovo strategy" and seeking international legitimacy to impose the 1967 borders on Israel is their best option, which, in their view, would automatically solve the issues of Jewish settlements and the status of Jerusalem without having to negotiate with Israel, while leaving the refugee issue to be decided according to the "agreed-upon solution" specified in the Arab peace initiative.16
Israel as the Palestinians' "Serbian" War Criminal
Palestinian efforts to delegitimize Israel in the international community play a key role in their unilateral quest for independence. Mindful of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was indicted by the Hague-based International War Crimes Tribunal for the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, the Palestinian leadership has aggressively pursued a diplomatic intifada against Israel as a tool of "resistance" to criminalize and isolate the Jewish state in international circles, while simultaneously "leveraging up" the PA's case for statehood.17 For example, Palestinian leaders have for years charged Israel with being an "illegal occupier" of Palestinian lands, and of building an "apartheid wall" - Israel's security fence - in the West Bank. The Palestinian leadership has also promoted internationally its denial of any historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem.18
In January 2009, following the Gaza war with Hamas, Palestinian Justice Minster Ali Khashan petitioned the International Criminal Court to charge Israel with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.19Israel's Foreign Ministry noted that the PA was also a driving force behind the establishment of the Goldstone mission by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), and led the campaign in the HRC and the UN General Assembly to implement its conclusions.20 Pro-Palestinian groups have filed scores of war crimes petitions in London and in other European courts, using the Rome Statute and laws of universal jurisdiction to seek the arrest of senior Israeli leaders.21
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has also advanced the notion of a "popular intifada" and has overseen the organization of committees for non-violent popular resistance against Israel that are expressed in the weekly, high-profile, Palestinian-led protests at Bil'in, Maasara, Ni'ilin, and more recently in Sheikh Jarah in Jerusalem.22 In December 2009, Fayyad characterized PA diplomacy as launching an "international intifada against Israel."23
The Influence of Fayyad's Unilateral Statehood Plan
The Palestinian leadership's numerous references to Kosovo's unilateral statehood quest, in the context of public threats by Abbas and Erekat in November 2009 to unilaterally declare Palestinian statehood, must be seen against the backdrop of the August 2009 publication of Prime Minister Fayyad's unilateral two-year statehood plan.
Western policymakers and observers have embraced the Fayyad plan as a positive development - a unilateral, "bottom up," state-building plan whose main goal is to build the infrastructure for eventual Palestinian independence.24 Some Israeli officials and legal experts have also praised aspects of the plan. However, its firm two-year deadline, and its massive state-building projects slated for Area C of the West Bank - which is under full Israeli control and includes the strategically vital Jordan Valley and its protective 3,000-foot hilltops overlooking Israel's main airport and cities - renders the plan more of a pretext to unilaterally declare statehood.25 In fact, Fayyad has provided clear indications that after two years, the establishment of a de facto Palestinian state will occur with or without Israel's agreement.26
In January 2010, Fayyad said, "Our people are determined to expunge all the distorted definitions described as Areas A, B, and C," and that "Palestinian markets should burn products coming out of Jewish settlements."27 This would seem to suggest that Fayyad advocates sidelining the principle of a negotiated agreement that was enshrined and agreed upon in the Oslo accords, even to the point of resisting such previous agreements on the ground.
Favorable Geopolitical Conditions for the Palestinians
The Palestinian leadership did not adopt the unilateral "Kosovo strategy" ex nihilo. Leading members of the European Union encouraged the Palestinians to move in this direction. PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat credited former EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana with engineering the idea.28 In July 2009, Solana told a British forum that after a fixed deadline, the UN Security Council should unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines.29 Palestinian unilateralism also received a boost in early December 2009 when Sweden, in the final thirty days of its rotating EU presidency, proposed that EU foreign ministers back its draft proposal recognizing east Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, thus implying EU acceptance of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.30
The EU Foreign Policy Council partly softened its final statement days later. However, as former UN ambassador Dore Gold notes, the final EU statement still retained the proposal that envisioned Jerusalem as the future capital of two states. Additionally, the statement said that the EU "would not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders including with regard to Jerusalem," thereby enshrining the 1967 lines - a key Palestinian demand - as a previous political border.31 Palestinian unilateralism has also drawn encouragement from the United Nations itself. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has reportedly issued expressions of support for such moves, according to former PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan and Saeb Erekat in a November 14, 2009, interview with the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam.32
U.S. Policy
The Palestinians' roller-coaster relationship with the United States over the past two years has ended up giving the Palestinians' "Kosovo strategy" a push forward. In 2008 the Bush administration had rejected the Palestinian comparison between Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority, encouraging the PA to continue to pursue the Annapolis process.33 However, the Palestinian Authority rejected Washington's opposition, despite Palestinian participation at Annapolis. Abbas' spokesman, Yasser Abed Rabo, noted, "Our people have the right to proclaim independence as the people of Kosovo did. We were occupied long before the Kosovo problem emerged."34
Since then, Palestinian disappointment with the Obama administration's policy reversal on an Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition to negotiations has fueled the unilateral Palestinian statehood bid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's praise of Israel's settlement moratorium and her calls for an unconditional resumption of peace talks convinced Palestinians that the United States would not "deliver" Israel.35 Abbas was also worried about Secretary Clinton's statement noted in the Arabic press during her visit to Qatar that negotiations are about "give and take." He inferred that Clinton meant removing the principle of the 1967 borders from the table - which the Palestinians took as a hint that the Obama administration may have been reviving President Bush's 2004 presidential letter to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that provided U.S. presidential backing for Israeli settlement blocs and denied the right of return to Palestinian refugees. Abbas contrasted Clinton's latest statements with her much tougher statements on Israeli settlements in May 2009, when she said, "Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions."36
Former PA Minister Ziad Abu Ziad assessed that "the Palestinian leadership had thought that Obama had become more Palestinian than the Palestinians, that he would stop settlements, remove them, and establish a Palestinian state."37 Rather, U.S. pressure on Abbas to return to negotiations with Israel without preconditions has appeared to weaken Abbas both among the political echelons of Fatah and on the Palestinian street,38 and has severely compromised his ability to negotiate with Israel. Additionally, the terms of reference which Clinton had used in January 2010, to try to reconcile Israeli demands for secure and recognized boundaries with Palestinian demands for a state on the 1967 lines, seem to justify Abbas' concerns.
Despite Palestinian disenchantment with Washington, there are signs that the Obama administration position supports the Palestinian demand for a state along the 1967 lines and a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem,39 which are central objectives of the Palestinian "Kosovo strategy." According to one assessment, Obama may have even supplied the Palestinians with a letter of guarantee to that effect.40While the U.S. is publicly committed to the principle of a negotiated solution between the sides, it has grown impatient with the bilateral process. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly expressed deep frustration with both the PA and Israel, which supports the Palestinian sense that they are on the right track in pursuing a unilateral "Kosovo" option.
Internal Palestinian Considerations
The Palestinians' "Kosovo strategy" has also been bolstered by a shift in the balance of power from the internationally-sanctioned Palestinian Authority to its parent organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization. Abbas' refusal to stand for re-election and the PA's failure to hold new parliamentary elections has led to a governmental deadlock. Hamas' nominal control of the PLC since its 2006 electoral victory, as well as its rule in Gaza and its refusal to reconcile with Fatah or to cooperate in holding elections for the PA in January 2010, is another major source of the PA's paralysis. Abbas also fears a Hamas takeover of the West Bank.41
At the PLO Council's mid-December meeting, it unilaterally assumed the PA parliament's legislative authority and extended Abbas' leadership indefinitely, recognizing Abbas as Chairman of the PLO, as opposed to Chairman of the PA. By definition, the PLO move sidelined Hamas' majority control in the PA parliament.42 Despite the PLO Council's decision to delay the official replacement of the PA parliament, the meeting unilaterally restored the PLO's power in Palestinian parliamentary politics that had characterized the period under Arafat's rule.43
Should the PLO implement its recent resolution, collapse the PA, and rule the West Bank, it will create a vacuum of international legal legitimacy, as the PA was recognized by the Oslo agreements as an interim governing body. Therefore, this latest internal move will likely accelerate PLO decision-making regarding a unilateral declaration of statehood. The case has a precedent: in 1999, it was precisely this consideration that caused the Palestinian leadership to consider unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state as Oslo's five-year interim period was about to expire.
Re-energizing International Support for the PLO's 1988 Statehood Declaration
The PLO Council meeting also illustrated a strategic shift from the bilateral negotiations with Israel of the past 17 years. The PLO Council reenergized the Palestinian National Council's 1988 declaration of independence in Algiers, which had been endorsed by 104 countries and resulted in UN recognition of the PLO's proclamation.44 Beginning in 1989, this brought the UN to refer to the PLO as "Palestine," but without formal statehood status in view of firm U.S. and European opposition to the PLO declaration, since the PLO did not satisfy the basic criteria for statehood under international law.45
The PLO's unilateral statehood declaration was never shelved even during the Oslo years, despite the signed agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel affirming a negotiated solution based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which also governed all subsequent peace initiatives including the Quartet-sanctioned Roadmap and the Annapolis process.46 In fact, Arafat and other senior PLO and PA representatives had repeatedly asserted their right to declare statehood unilaterally during the Oslo period without prior coordination or agreement with Israel, and even threatened to make such a declaration on several occasions, including at the United Nations in 2000.47
That explains the far-reaching significance of the PLO Central Council's sudden reemergence as the Palestinian legislative authority. It established a new pretext to cancel previously signed agreements, both with respect to the exchange of letters with the PLO in September 1993 at the White House and to the 1995 interim agreement with the Palestinian Authority. A reinvigorated PLO strategy now seeks UN Security Council endorsement of the 1988 PLO declaration of statehood in an effort to impose the 1949 armistice lines (the 1967 borders) on Israel - which Abbas and other senior Palestinian leaders publicly sought in November 2009.48 On January 8, 2010, Abbas reiterated this threat if the United States failed to impose Palestinian preconditions on Israel as part of Washington's efforts to jump-start peace talks.49 Waleed al-Awad of the former communist Peoples Party noted that the goal of the PLO Central Council meeting was to "place an international siege on Israel."50
Prospects for Palestinian Success
The Palestinian gambit for pursuing a "Kosovo strategy" is anything but certain. The Palestinians are legally bound to negotiate a bilateral solution with Israel. Unilateral Palestinian threats to declare statehood have been rebuffed thus far by the European powers and the United States. However, the Palestinians believe that under fluid political conditions and growing U.S. impatience over getting the parties to return to the negotiating table, support for Palestinian unilateralism is possible and necessary for success. Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malki told the London-based Asharq Alawsatthat the main goal of Palestinian diplomacy is winning U.S. support, so that when the Arab countries jointly appeal to the UN Security Council, the Obama administration will not veto a resolution that will finally affirm the pre-1967 lines as the borders of a Palestinian state.51
There is also a wide gap between Palestinian aspirations for unilateral statehood and their poor performance on the ground. Palestinian governance has been marked by several failures. The PA has not delivered reforms to its constituency. Government corruption and unemployment are still major issues. The PA failed to hold the promised 2010 elections, which resulted in the PLO Central Council resolution to replace the PA Legislative Council. But that decision has also been tabled for the interim. Meanwhile, the split between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank may prove to be irreconcilable.
The Palestinian leadership's rush to act already as a de facto state has not succeeded, even in the basic administrative tasks of issuing passports and currency.52 In December 2009, Maan, a leading Palestinian news organization, raised doubts as to the effectiveness of the PLO's "Kosovo strategy" and questioned the wisdom of turning the international arena into a confrontation line between the Palestinians and Israelis. It emphasized that unilateral "success will benefit the Palestinians, while failure will inflict political catastrophe."53
Implications for Israel
The Palestinian "Kosovo strategy" contains several major implications for Israel. First, the Palestinian delegitimization of Israel in the interim poses a strategic threat. The Palestinian state-building process has succeeded in painting Israel as a pariah state, while the hidden foreign policy agenda of the PA and PLO leaderships is to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. Although unlikely, if the Palestinians win international endorsement of sovereignty along the 1967 lines, Israel will become persona non grata anywhere east of the "green line," including in many central neighborhoods within its own capital city, Jerusalem, that have been developed since the 1967 war.
The unilateral Palestinian bid for sovereignty will also likely turn the Palestinians into the leading petitioner against the State of Israel at the International Criminal Court. An early indication of what can be expected if the PA's "Kosovo strategy" comes to fruition may be seen in the petition submitted to the court by the PA after the Gaza war. Although the PA is not a state and therefore should have no legal standing before the court, its petition was not rejected by the ICC.
Finally, the unilateral Palestinian quest for the 1947 lines may well continue even if the 1967 lines are endorsed by the United Nations. The PLO's 1988 declaration of independence was based on UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which recognizes the 1947 partition plan for Palestine, not the 1967 lines, as the basis for the borders of Israel and an Arab state.
This threat is not theoretical. In 1999, former Palestinian UN Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwa, today a senior Palestinian official and a major proponent of UN endorsement of a unilaterally-declared Palestinian state, submitted a letter on behalf of the PLO asserting that Resolution 181 and its corresponding 1947 partition plan are accepted by the PLO and cannot be annulled, as they provide the legal basis for the existence of both Jewish and Arab states in Mandatory Palestine.54 Since then, Resolution 181 has been invoked by other Palestinian leaders. In view of the PLO's intention to replace the PA as the legitimate legal authority to carry out the Palestinians' Kosovo model, the implications of unilateral Palestinian action are far-reaching.
Dan Diker is Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where he is also a senior foreign policy analyst. He is also an Adjunct Fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington.
* * *
Notes
1. Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon, "Recognition of ‘67 Border Before Talks," Jerusalem Post, December 15, 2009. Abbas announced at the PLO Central Council meeting on December 15, 2009, that the Palestinians will not resume peace talks with Israel unless the international community recognized the "1967 borders" as the boundaries of a Palestinian state. Abbas' latest precondition, as well as the complete Palestinian rejection of all Israeli concessions and gestures since the failed Annapolis peace process - including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recognition of a demilitarized Palestinian state, a virtually complete settlement moratorium in the West Bank, and the granting of amnesty to hundreds of members of Palestinian terror groups - illustrates a Palestinian refusal to negotiate with Israel. See "The Palestinian Refusal to Negotiate Peace," Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 4, 2010, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Palestinian_refusal_negotiate_peace-Jan_2009.
2. "Erekat: It's Time to Recognize a Palestinian State," Ma'an News, November 17, 2009. See also, "Palestinians Should Follow Kosovo Example: Negotiator," Agence France Press, February 20, 2008, http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iS_5y-7raxAQIhNgJDtMOIhadGrg.
3. "Palestinians Unveil Two-Year Development Plan for Statehood," Ha'aretz, November 15, 2009.
4. http://www.mofa-gov.ps/ar/index.php?p=main&id=22. The PLO Central Council also voted to delay implementing the replacement of the Oslo-sanctioned Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), extending the PLC's role in the interim until elections can be called "at the earliest possible date."
5. Yaakov Katz, "Taking a Cue from Kosovo," Jerusalem Post, September, 3, 2009.
6. Abbas acknowledged to the Washington Post 's Jackson Diehl after the failure of Annapolis that Olmert's offer of 97 percent of the West Bank and the recognition of the right of return (that included the return of 100,000 refugees - DD) was more generous to the Palestinians than the offers of either George Bush or Bill Clinton, and yet Abbas said: "The gaps were wide." See Jackson Diehl, "Abbas' Waiting Game,"Washington Post, May 29, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803614.html.
7. Ali Abunimah, "Kosovo and the Question of Palestine," Electronic Intifada, February 25, 2008.
8. "Erekat Unimpressed with New U.S. Attitude," January 9, 2009, Jerusalem Post,http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1262339435514 & pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull.
9. Tova Lazeroff and Herb Keinon, "Erekat Denies PA Unilateralism Plans," Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2009, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258489190816&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter. In the Kosovo case, UN Security Council Resolution 1244, passed in 1999, established Kosovo as a UN Protectorate. However, similar to the Palestinian case, Kosovo has not yet won a UNSC resolution for independence, since the Security Council has been unable to agree on a resolution backing supervised independence. See International Crisis Group Analysis, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3225&l=1.
10. Separate conversations with international law experts Professor Ruth Lapidot and Professor Irwin Cotler, former Justice Minister of Canada, in Jerusalem, December 21, 2009.
11. Kosovo - a province of Serbia - has been under international trusteeship since NATO's armed intervention in 1999. UN Security Council Resolution 1244 provided international sanction for UN trusteeship. For Serbs, Kosovo is an ancestral homeland and the site of many important Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries. They insist that the area remain under Serbian sovereignty. The current state of limbo, tension, and sporadic violence between Kosovo's Albanian majority, which is mostly Muslim, and the Serbian minority, which is mostly Orthodox Christian, has mobilized international support away from the notion of a multi-ethnic society there and ratcheted up support for Kosovo's break from Serbia.
12. Clearly, the legal analogy does not work. Kosovar independence, currently being considered by the International Court of Justice, requires the consent of Serbia, the sovereign power, notwithstanding exceptional cases of brutality that would obviate agreement of the sovereign. Ironically perhaps, legally, the Palestinians must also receive Israel's agreement in any final status arrangement over final borders, as enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 242, and as agreed upon at Oslo and in the 2002 Roadmap.
13. The Kosovo case was referred by the UN General Assembly to the International Court of Justice on October 8, 2008, for an advisory opinion as to the legality of Kosovo's unilateral declaration. The ICJ opinion is still pending. See http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/141/14797.pdf.
14. http://reut-institute.org/en/Publication.aspx?PublicationId=3679.
15. A map of Kosovo reveals that its ethnic composition leaves the minority Serb population contained in the provinces in Kosovo's north, leaving the majority of the land to the Muslim Kosovar majority without the risk of geographical interlocking or overlapping communities.
16. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative referred to the issue of refugees thus: "Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/mar/28/israel7.
17. Dan Diker, "Why Israel Must Now Move from Concession-Based Diplomacy to Rights-Based Diplomacy," Jerusalem Viewpoints #554, June-July 2007,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp ? DRIT=2&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=253&PID=0&IID=1607&TTL= Why_Israel_Must_Now_Move_from_Concessions-Based_Diplomacy_to_Rights-Based_Diplomacy. See also "Palestinian Refusal to Negotiate Peace."
18. See examples of Palestinian leadership denials of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2007), pp. 10-11.
19. John Quigly, "The Palestine Declaration to the International Criminal Court: The Statehood Issue,"Rutgers Law Record, vol. 35, (Spring 2009), http://www.lawrecord.com/files/35-rutgers-l-rec-1.pdf.
20. "Palestinian Refusal to Negotiate Peace." Daniel Reisner, former head of the Israel Defense Forces' International Law Department, pointed out in interviews on January 6, 2010, on Army Radio and Channel 10 that Fayyad's government successfully appealed to the International Criminal Court without having the status of a sovereign state. Surprisingly, Reisner noted, the court did not dismiss the appeal, which underscores the vigorous efforts of PA Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malki to upgrade the status of the PA to a sovereign state, which would in turn leverage up the number and effectiveness of Palestinian petitions to the ICC against the Israeli government and military officials.
21. In late 2009, Defense Minister Ehud Barak narrowly escaped arrest while on an official visit to London, while Israeli opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzippi Livni cancelled a planned visit to London, fearing arrest. http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/international/Israeli_Military_Delegation_Cancels _Britain_Trip_Fearing_Possible_War_Crime_Charges_25944716.
22. On March 22, 2009, Fayyad convened in his bureau the committees of the "popular intifada," as opposed to the military one. These committees were charged with organizing public activities against the security barrier and the settlements. Fayyad told them: "This example of resistance received respect, appreciation and support worldwide." Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, March 22 2009. See also Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari, "Is the Palestinian Authority Stable Enough for Peace Talks? Assessing the Resignation and Return of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad," Jerusalem Issue Brief, vol. 9, no. 3, June 16, 2009,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp ? DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=3007. For a typical anti-Israel protest website, see http://www.awalls.org/.
23. http://www.aawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&article=548758&issueno=11341.
24. U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, visiting Ramallah in November 2009, said, "I know some people concerned that this is unilateral, but it seems to me that it is unilateral in the healthy sense of self-development." See "Fayyad, PA Getting Ready for Statehood," Jerusalem Post, November 15, 2009. See also Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari, "Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's Two-Year Path to Palestinian Statehood: Implications for the Palestinian Authority and Israel," Jerusalem Issue Brief, vol. 9, no. 11, October 2, 2009,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID =442&PID=0&IID=3096.
25. Alan Baker, "A Paradox of Peacemaking: How Fayyad's Unilateral Statehood Plan Undermines the Legal Foundations of Israeli-Palestinian Diplomacy," Jerusalem Viewpoints, no. 574, November-December, 2009,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID =1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=3185.
26. Diker and Inbari, "Fayyad's Two-Year Path."
27. http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=252188.
28. "Erekat: PA May Declare State via UN," Ynet News, November 14, 2009, http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3804948,00.html.
29. Assaf Uni, Jack Khoury, and Yanir Yagna, "EU Chief Urges UN to Set Unilateral Timetable for Palestinian Statehood," Ha'aretz, July 13, 2009.
30. Barak Ravid, "EU Draft Document on Division of Jerusalem," Ha'aretz, December 2, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1131988.html.
31. Dore Gold, "Europe Seeks to Divide Jerusalem," Jerusalem Issue Brief, vol. 9, no. 14, December 10, 2009.
32. Baker, "A Paradox of Peace Making."
33. "Washington Rejects Palestinian Kosovo Comparison," AFP, February, 20, 2008.
34. Ibid.
35. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1124825.html.
36. Isabel Kershner, "Israeli Settlement Growth Must Stop, Clinton Says," New York Times, May 28, 2009.
37. Khaled Abu Toameh, "Palestinians and Obama, End of a Honeymoon," Hudson Institute New York, November 24, 2009.
38. Khaled Abu Toameh, "Why Is Abbas Stonewalling?" Jerusalem Post, December 24, 2009.
39. "Obama Tells Abbas Committed to PA State," Ynet News, October 23, 2009. Following Obama's phone call to Abbas, his spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeinah, said, "It was a very important conversation for the future of the peace process and the region." As the Palestinians' sole priority has been to win U.S. and international endorsement for the 1967 lines, the PA's uncharacteristically positive reaction to Obama after Washington's reversal of its former precondition of a total Israeli settlement freeze strongly suggests an Obama commitment on the central Palestinian demand.
40. Amidst the growing tensions between the U.S. and Israel over Israeli construction in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar wrote, "The Obama administration has recently begun discussing how to appease Abbas. For example, by giving him letters spelling out U.S. support for a final status arrangement based on the 1967 borders and reaffirming Washington's position that Jerusalem is divided into eastern and western parts." See Akiva, Eldar, "Will Netanyahu's Behavior Push Obama into Abbas' Arms?" Ha'aretz, November 19, 2009.
41. Abbas reportedly revealed to a Kuwaiti newspaper that he had "verified information that Hamas was planning to take over the West Bank. Khaled Abu Toameh, "Can Hamas Be Stopped from Seizing the West Bank," Hudson Institute New York, January 5, 2010, http://www.hudsonny.org/2010/01/can-hamas-be-stopped-from-seizing-west-bank.php.
42. While many Hamas PLC lawmakers remain in Israeli custody, the Palestinian leadership wanted to remove Hamas from even formal majority control of the Palestinian Authority's Legislative Council.
43. Salim Zanoun, Chairman of the PLO's National Council, noted that the Palestinian Authority was the legal child of the PLO and the Central Council which the PNC established in 1994. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs further explained the proposed but yet to be implemented PLO takeover of the PA Parliament, saying: "The PA's duty is only to provide services to the Palestinians." Hence, the PLO and not the PA is the only legal body empowered to declare a state, http://www.mofa-gov.ps/ar/index.php?p=main&id=22. Ironically, perhaps, the PLO Council did not uproot the PA and endorsed the continued functioning of the Palestinian Authority's legislative council, in order to enjoy the ongoing receipt of billions of dollars in international donor contributions. The PA received $3 billion in 2008, according to French estimates, while the December 2007 Paris donors' conference pledged over $7 billion in aid to the PA over the years 2008-2010. See Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh, "Can the Palestinian Authority's Fatah Forces Retake Gaza?" Jerusalem Viewpoints, no. 569, January-February 2009, http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=2842.
44. While not recognizing Palestine as a state, 104 countries recognized the 1988 Palestine Liberation Organization's Declaration of Independence. See John Quigly, "The Palestine Declaration to the International Criminal Court." See also Palestinian National Council, Declaration of Independence, November 15, 1988, UN Doc. A/43/827, S/20278, Annex III, November 18, 1988, reprinted in 27 I.L.M. 1668 (1988). The August 2009 publication of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's "Two-Year Plan to Palestinian Statehood" is seen by most Western and many Israeli observers as a unilateral state-building plan in its initial phases, but not necessarily one in which Fayyad or the PA will unilaterally declare a Palestinian state in 2011, thereby maintaining the framework of a negotiated solution.
45. Tal Becker, "International Recognition of a Unilaterally Declared Palestinian State, Legal and Policy Dilemmas," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, http://www.jcpa.org/art/becker1.htm.
46. Baker, "A Paradox of Peacemaking."
47. Becker, "International Recognition of a Unilaterally Declared Palestinian State."
48. "Erekat: It's Time to Recognize a Palestinian State," Ma'an News. See also "Abbas: Only Solution Is to Declare Palestinian State," Ha'aretz, November 25, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1128786.html.
49. Hilary Leila Krieger, "Jerusalem Rejects 2-Year Peace Deadline," Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2010.
50. Maan News (Arabic), December 12, 2009, http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=245977.
51. http://www.aawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&article=548758&issueno=11341.
52. For example, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malki signed a state-to-state agreement with Francewhich is an upgrade of the PA's political status on the declarative level, but the Palestinians had to backtrack from practical decisions expressing unilateral statehood, such as issuing a Palestinian currency or issuing Palestinian passports. The Lebanese daily al-Akhbar reported that one of the main purposes of Abbas' visit to Beirut was to deal with the rejection of issuing passports to the Palestinian refugees inLebanon, as they believed passports would cost them the right of return. Abbas, according to the report, accepted the claim and rescinded the issuing of passports.
53. http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=245885.
54. See the letter submitted by PLO Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwa to the General Assembly, http://www.jcpa.org/art/jid-apx.htm#plo181.
Published January 2010
The Jerusalem Viewpoints series is published by the Institute for Contemporary Affairs, founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation.
No. 575 January-February 2010
Mahmoud Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood.
Senior Palestinian officials note that Palestinian unilateralism is modeled after Kosovo's February 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. European and U.S. support for Kosovo's unilateral declaration has led the Palestinian leadership to determine that geopolitical conditions are ripe to seek international endorsement of its unilateral statehood bid, despite the fact that leading international jurists have suggested that the cases of Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are historically and legally different.
The Palestinians are legally bound to negotiate a bilateral solution with Israel. Unilateral Palestinian threats to declare statehood have been rebuffed thus far by the European powers and the United States.
The Palestinian "Kosovo strategy" includes a campaign of delegitimization of Israel, seeking to isolate Israel as a pariah state, while driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The unilateral Palestinian bid for sovereignty will also likely turn the Palestinians into the leading petitioner against the State of Israel at the International Criminal Court. Although the PA is not a state and therefore should have no legal standing before the court, the petition it submitted to the court after the Gaza war was not rejected by the ICC.
Finally, a unilateral Palestinian quest for the 1947 lines may well continue even if the 1967 lines are endorsed by the United Nations. The PLO's 1988 declaration of independence was based on UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which recognizes the 1947 partition plan for Palestine, not the 1967 lines, as the basis for the borders of Israel and an Arab state.
Have the Palestinians Abandoned a Negotiated Settlement?
Washington's intensive shuttle diplomacy as well as Arab pressure may convince Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to return to the negotiating table with Israel. However, Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood.1
Senior Palestinian officials have also noted that Palestinian unilateralism is modeled after Kosovo's February 2008 unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia.2 European and U.S. support for Kosovo's unilateral declaration, plus Palestinian confidence in its own international case, appear to have led the Palestinian leadership to determine that geopolitical conditions are ripe to seek international endorsement of its unilateral statehood bid, with the 1967 lines as its future borders.3
This assertive Palestinian shift to unilateralism has also been bolstered by a changing balance of power between the Palestinian Authority that was established at Oslo, and its "parent," the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has embraced a unilateral approach to statehood since its 1988 unilateral declaration of independence but has not operationalized it. On December 15-16, 2009, the PLO Central Council convened in Ramallah where it unilaterally assumed the PA's legislative authority, resolved to extend Abbas' term indefinitely, and even voted to replace the PA Legislative Council that had been established as part of the internationally-sanctioned Oslo peace accords.4
The PLO Central Council meeting and its far-reaching resolutions provide another illustration of unilateral intentions that are rooted in former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's 1988 PLO statehood declaration. However, despite Palestinian determination and a largely sympathetic international community, it's unlikely that the Palestinian "Kosovo strategy" will end the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Instead, it may signal the final unraveling of the Middle East peace process.
Palestinians Invoke Kosovo's Unilateral Statehood Model
Since February 2008, when the Albanian Muslim majority government in Kosovo unilaterally declared independence and secession from Christian Serbia, winning U.S. and European support, the Palestinian leadership has publicly invoked Kosovo as a model for a prospective Palestinian state. Yasser Abed Rabbo, senior advisor to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, told Agence France Presse immediately following the Kosovo declaration, "Our people have the right to proclaim independence even before Kosovo. And we ask for the backing of the United States and the European Union for our independence."5
In late 2008, the collapse of the Annapolis peace negotiations between Abbas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who, as Abbas acknowledged publicly, had made unprecedented concessions,6further motivated the Palestinians to embrace a unilateral approach to statehood as a default option. Abed Rabo confirmed at the time that, "we have another option. Kosovo is not better than Palestine."7
The Palestinians strengthened their bid for unilaterally-declared statehood in late 2009 and into 2010 while lobbying Europe, South America, and the UN for support, and simultaneously setting unprecedented preconditions for restarting negotiations with Israel.8 In November 2009, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat threatened to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, arguing that "the EU recognized the state" of Kosovo before other official channels supported its claim for independence. However, U.S. and European opposition to the move would force Erekat to deny his intentions. Instead, he insisted that the Palestinian Authority merely sought UN Security Council endorsement of a Palestinian state, which also mirrors Kosovo's quest for a UN Security Council resolution proposing independence.9
Two leading international jurists have suggested that the cases of Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are historically and legally different.10 However, from a Palestinian point of view, it seems that legal and historical context are less important than the sympathetic political perceptions that can be created in the international community by promoting what appear to be some external similarities.11 The Palestinians liken themselves to Kosovo's profile in the West as a besieged, indigenous population seeking freedom and independence from its brutal Serbian sovereign overlord, which in the Palestinian analogy is the State of Israel's "occupation" of the disputed West Bank.12
True, both Palestinians and Muslim Kosovars enjoy international support for their respective bids for independence.13 Both have established internationally-sanctioned, self-governing authorities, receive European security backing and UN financial support, and work with UN-appointed special envoys, while each has penned a constitution. However, Kosovo enjoys a NATO security presence, which Palestinian negotiators have failed to introduce into the West Bank despite several attempts to do so in past peace negotiations with Israel.14
Another point of similarity between Kosovars and the Palestinians involves territory. The Kosovo model did not require a territorial compromise on the part of the Albanian Muslim Kosavar government to take into account areas where concentrations of Serbian Christian population remained.15 Similarly, the Palestinian leadership has been reluctant to compromise with Israel over Israeli population centers and vital security requirements in the West Bank.
Politically, many in the Palestinian leadership assess that adopting a unilateral "Kosovo strategy" and seeking international legitimacy to impose the 1967 borders on Israel is their best option, which, in their view, would automatically solve the issues of Jewish settlements and the status of Jerusalem without having to negotiate with Israel, while leaving the refugee issue to be decided according to the "agreed-upon solution" specified in the Arab peace initiative.16
Israel as the Palestinians' "Serbian" War Criminal
Palestinian efforts to delegitimize Israel in the international community play a key role in their unilateral quest for independence. Mindful of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was indicted by the Hague-based International War Crimes Tribunal for the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, the Palestinian leadership has aggressively pursued a diplomatic intifada against Israel as a tool of "resistance" to criminalize and isolate the Jewish state in international circles, while simultaneously "leveraging up" the PA's case for statehood.17 For example, Palestinian leaders have for years charged Israel with being an "illegal occupier" of Palestinian lands, and of building an "apartheid wall" - Israel's security fence - in the West Bank. The Palestinian leadership has also promoted internationally its denial of any historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem.18
In January 2009, following the Gaza war with Hamas, Palestinian Justice Minster Ali Khashan petitioned the International Criminal Court to charge Israel with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.19Israel's Foreign Ministry noted that the PA was also a driving force behind the establishment of the Goldstone mission by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), and led the campaign in the HRC and the UN General Assembly to implement its conclusions.20 Pro-Palestinian groups have filed scores of war crimes petitions in London and in other European courts, using the Rome Statute and laws of universal jurisdiction to seek the arrest of senior Israeli leaders.21
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has also advanced the notion of a "popular intifada" and has overseen the organization of committees for non-violent popular resistance against Israel that are expressed in the weekly, high-profile, Palestinian-led protests at Bil'in, Maasara, Ni'ilin, and more recently in Sheikh Jarah in Jerusalem.22 In December 2009, Fayyad characterized PA diplomacy as launching an "international intifada against Israel."23
The Influence of Fayyad's Unilateral Statehood Plan
The Palestinian leadership's numerous references to Kosovo's unilateral statehood quest, in the context of public threats by Abbas and Erekat in November 2009 to unilaterally declare Palestinian statehood, must be seen against the backdrop of the August 2009 publication of Prime Minister Fayyad's unilateral two-year statehood plan.
Western policymakers and observers have embraced the Fayyad plan as a positive development - a unilateral, "bottom up," state-building plan whose main goal is to build the infrastructure for eventual Palestinian independence.24 Some Israeli officials and legal experts have also praised aspects of the plan. However, its firm two-year deadline, and its massive state-building projects slated for Area C of the West Bank - which is under full Israeli control and includes the strategically vital Jordan Valley and its protective 3,000-foot hilltops overlooking Israel's main airport and cities - renders the plan more of a pretext to unilaterally declare statehood.25 In fact, Fayyad has provided clear indications that after two years, the establishment of a de facto Palestinian state will occur with or without Israel's agreement.26
In January 2010, Fayyad said, "Our people are determined to expunge all the distorted definitions described as Areas A, B, and C," and that "Palestinian markets should burn products coming out of Jewish settlements."27 This would seem to suggest that Fayyad advocates sidelining the principle of a negotiated agreement that was enshrined and agreed upon in the Oslo accords, even to the point of resisting such previous agreements on the ground.
Favorable Geopolitical Conditions for the Palestinians
The Palestinian leadership did not adopt the unilateral "Kosovo strategy" ex nihilo. Leading members of the European Union encouraged the Palestinians to move in this direction. PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat credited former EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana with engineering the idea.28 In July 2009, Solana told a British forum that after a fixed deadline, the UN Security Council should unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines.29 Palestinian unilateralism also received a boost in early December 2009 when Sweden, in the final thirty days of its rotating EU presidency, proposed that EU foreign ministers back its draft proposal recognizing east Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, thus implying EU acceptance of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.30
The EU Foreign Policy Council partly softened its final statement days later. However, as former UN ambassador Dore Gold notes, the final EU statement still retained the proposal that envisioned Jerusalem as the future capital of two states. Additionally, the statement said that the EU "would not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders including with regard to Jerusalem," thereby enshrining the 1967 lines - a key Palestinian demand - as a previous political border.31 Palestinian unilateralism has also drawn encouragement from the United Nations itself. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has reportedly issued expressions of support for such moves, according to former PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan and Saeb Erekat in a November 14, 2009, interview with the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam.32
U.S. Policy
The Palestinians' roller-coaster relationship with the United States over the past two years has ended up giving the Palestinians' "Kosovo strategy" a push forward. In 2008 the Bush administration had rejected the Palestinian comparison between Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority, encouraging the PA to continue to pursue the Annapolis process.33 However, the Palestinian Authority rejected Washington's opposition, despite Palestinian participation at Annapolis. Abbas' spokesman, Yasser Abed Rabo, noted, "Our people have the right to proclaim independence as the people of Kosovo did. We were occupied long before the Kosovo problem emerged."34
Since then, Palestinian disappointment with the Obama administration's policy reversal on an Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition to negotiations has fueled the unilateral Palestinian statehood bid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's praise of Israel's settlement moratorium and her calls for an unconditional resumption of peace talks convinced Palestinians that the United States would not "deliver" Israel.35 Abbas was also worried about Secretary Clinton's statement noted in the Arabic press during her visit to Qatar that negotiations are about "give and take." He inferred that Clinton meant removing the principle of the 1967 borders from the table - which the Palestinians took as a hint that the Obama administration may have been reviving President Bush's 2004 presidential letter to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that provided U.S. presidential backing for Israeli settlement blocs and denied the right of return to Palestinian refugees. Abbas contrasted Clinton's latest statements with her much tougher statements on Israeli settlements in May 2009, when she said, "Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions."36
Former PA Minister Ziad Abu Ziad assessed that "the Palestinian leadership had thought that Obama had become more Palestinian than the Palestinians, that he would stop settlements, remove them, and establish a Palestinian state."37 Rather, U.S. pressure on Abbas to return to negotiations with Israel without preconditions has appeared to weaken Abbas both among the political echelons of Fatah and on the Palestinian street,38 and has severely compromised his ability to negotiate with Israel. Additionally, the terms of reference which Clinton had used in January 2010, to try to reconcile Israeli demands for secure and recognized boundaries with Palestinian demands for a state on the 1967 lines, seem to justify Abbas' concerns.
Despite Palestinian disenchantment with Washington, there are signs that the Obama administration position supports the Palestinian demand for a state along the 1967 lines and a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem,39 which are central objectives of the Palestinian "Kosovo strategy." According to one assessment, Obama may have even supplied the Palestinians with a letter of guarantee to that effect.40While the U.S. is publicly committed to the principle of a negotiated solution between the sides, it has grown impatient with the bilateral process. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly expressed deep frustration with both the PA and Israel, which supports the Palestinian sense that they are on the right track in pursuing a unilateral "Kosovo" option.
Internal Palestinian Considerations
The Palestinians' "Kosovo strategy" has also been bolstered by a shift in the balance of power from the internationally-sanctioned Palestinian Authority to its parent organization, the Palestine Liberation Organization. Abbas' refusal to stand for re-election and the PA's failure to hold new parliamentary elections has led to a governmental deadlock. Hamas' nominal control of the PLC since its 2006 electoral victory, as well as its rule in Gaza and its refusal to reconcile with Fatah or to cooperate in holding elections for the PA in January 2010, is another major source of the PA's paralysis. Abbas also fears a Hamas takeover of the West Bank.41
At the PLO Council's mid-December meeting, it unilaterally assumed the PA parliament's legislative authority and extended Abbas' leadership indefinitely, recognizing Abbas as Chairman of the PLO, as opposed to Chairman of the PA. By definition, the PLO move sidelined Hamas' majority control in the PA parliament.42 Despite the PLO Council's decision to delay the official replacement of the PA parliament, the meeting unilaterally restored the PLO's power in Palestinian parliamentary politics that had characterized the period under Arafat's rule.43
Should the PLO implement its recent resolution, collapse the PA, and rule the West Bank, it will create a vacuum of international legal legitimacy, as the PA was recognized by the Oslo agreements as an interim governing body. Therefore, this latest internal move will likely accelerate PLO decision-making regarding a unilateral declaration of statehood. The case has a precedent: in 1999, it was precisely this consideration that caused the Palestinian leadership to consider unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state as Oslo's five-year interim period was about to expire.
Re-energizing International Support for the PLO's 1988 Statehood Declaration
The PLO Council meeting also illustrated a strategic shift from the bilateral negotiations with Israel of the past 17 years. The PLO Council reenergized the Palestinian National Council's 1988 declaration of independence in Algiers, which had been endorsed by 104 countries and resulted in UN recognition of the PLO's proclamation.44 Beginning in 1989, this brought the UN to refer to the PLO as "Palestine," but without formal statehood status in view of firm U.S. and European opposition to the PLO declaration, since the PLO did not satisfy the basic criteria for statehood under international law.45
The PLO's unilateral statehood declaration was never shelved even during the Oslo years, despite the signed agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel affirming a negotiated solution based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which also governed all subsequent peace initiatives including the Quartet-sanctioned Roadmap and the Annapolis process.46 In fact, Arafat and other senior PLO and PA representatives had repeatedly asserted their right to declare statehood unilaterally during the Oslo period without prior coordination or agreement with Israel, and even threatened to make such a declaration on several occasions, including at the United Nations in 2000.47
That explains the far-reaching significance of the PLO Central Council's sudden reemergence as the Palestinian legislative authority. It established a new pretext to cancel previously signed agreements, both with respect to the exchange of letters with the PLO in September 1993 at the White House and to the 1995 interim agreement with the Palestinian Authority. A reinvigorated PLO strategy now seeks UN Security Council endorsement of the 1988 PLO declaration of statehood in an effort to impose the 1949 armistice lines (the 1967 borders) on Israel - which Abbas and other senior Palestinian leaders publicly sought in November 2009.48 On January 8, 2010, Abbas reiterated this threat if the United States failed to impose Palestinian preconditions on Israel as part of Washington's efforts to jump-start peace talks.49 Waleed al-Awad of the former communist Peoples Party noted that the goal of the PLO Central Council meeting was to "place an international siege on Israel."50
Prospects for Palestinian Success
The Palestinian gambit for pursuing a "Kosovo strategy" is anything but certain. The Palestinians are legally bound to negotiate a bilateral solution with Israel. Unilateral Palestinian threats to declare statehood have been rebuffed thus far by the European powers and the United States. However, the Palestinians believe that under fluid political conditions and growing U.S. impatience over getting the parties to return to the negotiating table, support for Palestinian unilateralism is possible and necessary for success. Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malki told the London-based Asharq Alawsatthat the main goal of Palestinian diplomacy is winning U.S. support, so that when the Arab countries jointly appeal to the UN Security Council, the Obama administration will not veto a resolution that will finally affirm the pre-1967 lines as the borders of a Palestinian state.51
There is also a wide gap between Palestinian aspirations for unilateral statehood and their poor performance on the ground. Palestinian governance has been marked by several failures. The PA has not delivered reforms to its constituency. Government corruption and unemployment are still major issues. The PA failed to hold the promised 2010 elections, which resulted in the PLO Central Council resolution to replace the PA Legislative Council. But that decision has also been tabled for the interim. Meanwhile, the split between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank may prove to be irreconcilable.
The Palestinian leadership's rush to act already as a de facto state has not succeeded, even in the basic administrative tasks of issuing passports and currency.52 In December 2009, Maan, a leading Palestinian news organization, raised doubts as to the effectiveness of the PLO's "Kosovo strategy" and questioned the wisdom of turning the international arena into a confrontation line between the Palestinians and Israelis. It emphasized that unilateral "success will benefit the Palestinians, while failure will inflict political catastrophe."53
Implications for Israel
The Palestinian "Kosovo strategy" contains several major implications for Israel. First, the Palestinian delegitimization of Israel in the interim poses a strategic threat. The Palestinian state-building process has succeeded in painting Israel as a pariah state, while the hidden foreign policy agenda of the PA and PLO leaderships is to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States. Although unlikely, if the Palestinians win international endorsement of sovereignty along the 1967 lines, Israel will become persona non grata anywhere east of the "green line," including in many central neighborhoods within its own capital city, Jerusalem, that have been developed since the 1967 war.
The unilateral Palestinian bid for sovereignty will also likely turn the Palestinians into the leading petitioner against the State of Israel at the International Criminal Court. An early indication of what can be expected if the PA's "Kosovo strategy" comes to fruition may be seen in the petition submitted to the court by the PA after the Gaza war. Although the PA is not a state and therefore should have no legal standing before the court, its petition was not rejected by the ICC.
Finally, the unilateral Palestinian quest for the 1947 lines may well continue even if the 1967 lines are endorsed by the United Nations. The PLO's 1988 declaration of independence was based on UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which recognizes the 1947 partition plan for Palestine, not the 1967 lines, as the basis for the borders of Israel and an Arab state.
This threat is not theoretical. In 1999, former Palestinian UN Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwa, today a senior Palestinian official and a major proponent of UN endorsement of a unilaterally-declared Palestinian state, submitted a letter on behalf of the PLO asserting that Resolution 181 and its corresponding 1947 partition plan are accepted by the PLO and cannot be annulled, as they provide the legal basis for the existence of both Jewish and Arab states in Mandatory Palestine.54 Since then, Resolution 181 has been invoked by other Palestinian leaders. In view of the PLO's intention to replace the PA as the legitimate legal authority to carry out the Palestinians' Kosovo model, the implications of unilateral Palestinian action are far-reaching.
Dan Diker is Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, where he is also a senior foreign policy analyst. He is also an Adjunct Fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington.
* * *
Notes
1. Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon, "Recognition of ‘67 Border Before Talks," Jerusalem Post, December 15, 2009. Abbas announced at the PLO Central Council meeting on December 15, 2009, that the Palestinians will not resume peace talks with Israel unless the international community recognized the "1967 borders" as the boundaries of a Palestinian state. Abbas' latest precondition, as well as the complete Palestinian rejection of all Israeli concessions and gestures since the failed Annapolis peace process - including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recognition of a demilitarized Palestinian state, a virtually complete settlement moratorium in the West Bank, and the granting of amnesty to hundreds of members of Palestinian terror groups - illustrates a Palestinian refusal to negotiate with Israel. See "The Palestinian Refusal to Negotiate Peace," Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, January 4, 2010, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Behind+the+Headlines/Palestinian_refusal_negotiate_peace-Jan_2009.
2. "Erekat: It's Time to Recognize a Palestinian State," Ma'an News, November 17, 2009. See also, "Palestinians Should Follow Kosovo Example: Negotiator," Agence France Press, February 20, 2008, http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iS_5y-7raxAQIhNgJDtMOIhadGrg.
3. "Palestinians Unveil Two-Year Development Plan for Statehood," Ha'aretz, November 15, 2009.
4. http://www.mofa-gov.ps/ar/index.php?p=main&id=22. The PLO Central Council also voted to delay implementing the replacement of the Oslo-sanctioned Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), extending the PLC's role in the interim until elections can be called "at the earliest possible date."
5. Yaakov Katz, "Taking a Cue from Kosovo," Jerusalem Post, September, 3, 2009.
6. Abbas acknowledged to the Washington Post 's Jackson Diehl after the failure of Annapolis that Olmert's offer of 97 percent of the West Bank and the recognition of the right of return (that included the return of 100,000 refugees - DD) was more generous to the Palestinians than the offers of either George Bush or Bill Clinton, and yet Abbas said: "The gaps were wide." See Jackson Diehl, "Abbas' Waiting Game,"Washington Post, May 29, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803614.html.
7. Ali Abunimah, "Kosovo and the Question of Palestine," Electronic Intifada, February 25, 2008.
8. "Erekat Unimpressed with New U.S. Attitude," January 9, 2009, Jerusalem Post,http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1262339435514 & pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull.
9. Tova Lazeroff and Herb Keinon, "Erekat Denies PA Unilateralism Plans," Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2009, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258489190816&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter. In the Kosovo case, UN Security Council Resolution 1244, passed in 1999, established Kosovo as a UN Protectorate. However, similar to the Palestinian case, Kosovo has not yet won a UNSC resolution for independence, since the Security Council has been unable to agree on a resolution backing supervised independence. See International Crisis Group Analysis, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3225&l=1.
10. Separate conversations with international law experts Professor Ruth Lapidot and Professor Irwin Cotler, former Justice Minister of Canada, in Jerusalem, December 21, 2009.
11. Kosovo - a province of Serbia - has been under international trusteeship since NATO's armed intervention in 1999. UN Security Council Resolution 1244 provided international sanction for UN trusteeship. For Serbs, Kosovo is an ancestral homeland and the site of many important Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries. They insist that the area remain under Serbian sovereignty. The current state of limbo, tension, and sporadic violence between Kosovo's Albanian majority, which is mostly Muslim, and the Serbian minority, which is mostly Orthodox Christian, has mobilized international support away from the notion of a multi-ethnic society there and ratcheted up support for Kosovo's break from Serbia.
12. Clearly, the legal analogy does not work. Kosovar independence, currently being considered by the International Court of Justice, requires the consent of Serbia, the sovereign power, notwithstanding exceptional cases of brutality that would obviate agreement of the sovereign. Ironically perhaps, legally, the Palestinians must also receive Israel's agreement in any final status arrangement over final borders, as enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 242, and as agreed upon at Oslo and in the 2002 Roadmap.
13. The Kosovo case was referred by the UN General Assembly to the International Court of Justice on October 8, 2008, for an advisory opinion as to the legality of Kosovo's unilateral declaration. The ICJ opinion is still pending. See http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/141/14797.pdf.
14. http://reut-institute.org/en/Publication.aspx?PublicationId=3679.
15. A map of Kosovo reveals that its ethnic composition leaves the minority Serb population contained in the provinces in Kosovo's north, leaving the majority of the land to the Muslim Kosovar majority without the risk of geographical interlocking or overlapping communities.
16. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative referred to the issue of refugees thus: "Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/mar/28/israel7.
17. Dan Diker, "Why Israel Must Now Move from Concession-Based Diplomacy to Rights-Based Diplomacy," Jerusalem Viewpoints #554, June-July 2007,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp ? DRIT=2&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=253&PID=0&IID=1607&TTL= Why_Israel_Must_Now_Move_from_Concessions-Based_Diplomacy_to_Rights-Based_Diplomacy. See also "Palestinian Refusal to Negotiate Peace."
18. See examples of Palestinian leadership denials of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in Dore Gold, The Fight for Jerusalem (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2007), pp. 10-11.
19. John Quigly, "The Palestine Declaration to the International Criminal Court: The Statehood Issue,"Rutgers Law Record, vol. 35, (Spring 2009), http://www.lawrecord.com/files/35-rutgers-l-rec-1.pdf.
20. "Palestinian Refusal to Negotiate Peace." Daniel Reisner, former head of the Israel Defense Forces' International Law Department, pointed out in interviews on January 6, 2010, on Army Radio and Channel 10 that Fayyad's government successfully appealed to the International Criminal Court without having the status of a sovereign state. Surprisingly, Reisner noted, the court did not dismiss the appeal, which underscores the vigorous efforts of PA Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malki to upgrade the status of the PA to a sovereign state, which would in turn leverage up the number and effectiveness of Palestinian petitions to the ICC against the Israeli government and military officials.
21. In late 2009, Defense Minister Ehud Barak narrowly escaped arrest while on an official visit to London, while Israeli opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzippi Livni cancelled a planned visit to London, fearing arrest. http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/international/Israeli_Military_Delegation_Cancels _Britain_Trip_Fearing_Possible_War_Crime_Charges_25944716.
22. On March 22, 2009, Fayyad convened in his bureau the committees of the "popular intifada," as opposed to the military one. These committees were charged with organizing public activities against the security barrier and the settlements. Fayyad told them: "This example of resistance received respect, appreciation and support worldwide." Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, March 22 2009. See also Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari, "Is the Palestinian Authority Stable Enough for Peace Talks? Assessing the Resignation and Return of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad," Jerusalem Issue Brief, vol. 9, no. 3, June 16, 2009,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp ? DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=3007. For a typical anti-Israel protest website, see http://www.awalls.org/.
23. http://www.aawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&article=548758&issueno=11341.
24. U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, visiting Ramallah in November 2009, said, "I know some people concerned that this is unilateral, but it seems to me that it is unilateral in the healthy sense of self-development." See "Fayyad, PA Getting Ready for Statehood," Jerusalem Post, November 15, 2009. See also Dan Diker and Pinhas Inbari, "Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's Two-Year Path to Palestinian Statehood: Implications for the Palestinian Authority and Israel," Jerusalem Issue Brief, vol. 9, no. 11, October 2, 2009,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID =442&PID=0&IID=3096.
25. Alan Baker, "A Paradox of Peacemaking: How Fayyad's Unilateral Statehood Plan Undermines the Legal Foundations of Israeli-Palestinian Diplomacy," Jerusalem Viewpoints, no. 574, November-December, 2009,http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID =1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=3185.
26. Diker and Inbari, "Fayyad's Two-Year Path."
27. http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=252188.
28. "Erekat: PA May Declare State via UN," Ynet News, November 14, 2009, http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3804948,00.html.
29. Assaf Uni, Jack Khoury, and Yanir Yagna, "EU Chief Urges UN to Set Unilateral Timetable for Palestinian Statehood," Ha'aretz, July 13, 2009.
30. Barak Ravid, "EU Draft Document on Division of Jerusalem," Ha'aretz, December 2, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1131988.html.
31. Dore Gold, "Europe Seeks to Divide Jerusalem," Jerusalem Issue Brief, vol. 9, no. 14, December 10, 2009.
32. Baker, "A Paradox of Peace Making."
33. "Washington Rejects Palestinian Kosovo Comparison," AFP, February, 20, 2008.
34. Ibid.
35. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1124825.html.
36. Isabel Kershner, "Israeli Settlement Growth Must Stop, Clinton Says," New York Times, May 28, 2009.
37. Khaled Abu Toameh, "Palestinians and Obama, End of a Honeymoon," Hudson Institute New York, November 24, 2009.
38. Khaled Abu Toameh, "Why Is Abbas Stonewalling?" Jerusalem Post, December 24, 2009.
39. "Obama Tells Abbas Committed to PA State," Ynet News, October 23, 2009. Following Obama's phone call to Abbas, his spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeinah, said, "It was a very important conversation for the future of the peace process and the region." As the Palestinians' sole priority has been to win U.S. and international endorsement for the 1967 lines, the PA's uncharacteristically positive reaction to Obama after Washington's reversal of its former precondition of a total Israeli settlement freeze strongly suggests an Obama commitment on the central Palestinian demand.
40. Amidst the growing tensions between the U.S. and Israel over Israeli construction in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar wrote, "The Obama administration has recently begun discussing how to appease Abbas. For example, by giving him letters spelling out U.S. support for a final status arrangement based on the 1967 borders and reaffirming Washington's position that Jerusalem is divided into eastern and western parts." See Akiva, Eldar, "Will Netanyahu's Behavior Push Obama into Abbas' Arms?" Ha'aretz, November 19, 2009.
41. Abbas reportedly revealed to a Kuwaiti newspaper that he had "verified information that Hamas was planning to take over the West Bank. Khaled Abu Toameh, "Can Hamas Be Stopped from Seizing the West Bank," Hudson Institute New York, January 5, 2010, http://www.hudsonny.org/2010/01/can-hamas-be-stopped-from-seizing-west-bank.php.
42. While many Hamas PLC lawmakers remain in Israeli custody, the Palestinian leadership wanted to remove Hamas from even formal majority control of the Palestinian Authority's Legislative Council.
43. Salim Zanoun, Chairman of the PLO's National Council, noted that the Palestinian Authority was the legal child of the PLO and the Central Council which the PNC established in 1994. The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs further explained the proposed but yet to be implemented PLO takeover of the PA Parliament, saying: "The PA's duty is only to provide services to the Palestinians." Hence, the PLO and not the PA is the only legal body empowered to declare a state, http://www.mofa-gov.ps/ar/index.php?p=main&id=22. Ironically, perhaps, the PLO Council did not uproot the PA and endorsed the continued functioning of the Palestinian Authority's legislative council, in order to enjoy the ongoing receipt of billions of dollars in international donor contributions. The PA received $3 billion in 2008, according to French estimates, while the December 2007 Paris donors' conference pledged over $7 billion in aid to the PA over the years 2008-2010. See Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh, "Can the Palestinian Authority's Fatah Forces Retake Gaza?" Jerusalem Viewpoints, no. 569, January-February 2009, http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=2842.
44. While not recognizing Palestine as a state, 104 countries recognized the 1988 Palestine Liberation Organization's Declaration of Independence. See John Quigly, "The Palestine Declaration to the International Criminal Court." See also Palestinian National Council, Declaration of Independence, November 15, 1988, UN Doc. A/43/827, S/20278, Annex III, November 18, 1988, reprinted in 27 I.L.M. 1668 (1988). The August 2009 publication of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's "Two-Year Plan to Palestinian Statehood" is seen by most Western and many Israeli observers as a unilateral state-building plan in its initial phases, but not necessarily one in which Fayyad or the PA will unilaterally declare a Palestinian state in 2011, thereby maintaining the framework of a negotiated solution.
45. Tal Becker, "International Recognition of a Unilaterally Declared Palestinian State, Legal and Policy Dilemmas," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, http://www.jcpa.org/art/becker1.htm.
46. Baker, "A Paradox of Peacemaking."
47. Becker, "International Recognition of a Unilaterally Declared Palestinian State."
48. "Erekat: It's Time to Recognize a Palestinian State," Ma'an News. See also "Abbas: Only Solution Is to Declare Palestinian State," Ha'aretz, November 25, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1128786.html.
49. Hilary Leila Krieger, "Jerusalem Rejects 2-Year Peace Deadline," Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2010.
50. Maan News (Arabic), December 12, 2009, http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=245977.
51. http://www.aawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&article=548758&issueno=11341.
52. For example, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Malki signed a state-to-state agreement with Francewhich is an upgrade of the PA's political status on the declarative level, but the Palestinians had to backtrack from practical decisions expressing unilateral statehood, such as issuing a Palestinian currency or issuing Palestinian passports. The Lebanese daily al-Akhbar reported that one of the main purposes of Abbas' visit to Beirut was to deal with the rejection of issuing passports to the Palestinian refugees inLebanon, as they believed passports would cost them the right of return. Abbas, according to the report, accepted the claim and rescinded the issuing of passports.
53. http://www.maannews.net/arb/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=245885.
54. See the letter submitted by PLO Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwa to the General Assembly, http://www.jcpa.org/art/jid-apx.htm#plo181.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Israel's Security Cabinet Expresses Doubts about Peace
by David Bedein
Begin May Be Man to Watch in New Group
Benjamin Begin, son of late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, could be the man to watch in Israel’s newly formed security cabinet.
Although he lacks a political portfolio, his importance surpasses other members of the cabinet, which also includes: Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a former Israel prime minister; Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman; Strategic Affairs Minister Bugi Yaalon; and Intelligence Affairs Minister Dan Meridor.
Mr. Begin has a history of opposing, giving concessions to the Palestinians. He resigned from the previous Netanyahu government in January 1997 after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relinquished Israeli control over Hebron.
He left Likud following the conclusion of the Wye River Memorandums in October 1998, which called for the redeployment of Israeli forces. This effectively ended Mr. Netanyahu’s last government. Mr. Begin also opposed what he saw as former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s corruption and disloyalty from early on.
During a Knesset discussion last Wednesday on Jerusalem Day, Mr. Begin quoted extensively from remarks made by Abbas Zaki, a Palestinian Authority leader, on May 7.
In those comments, Mr. Zaki said: “The Jews view Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as their historic dream. After they evacuate those lands, they will get out of Jerusalem. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. Then they will move forward.”
Mr. Begin used these comments to remind the Israeli public of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) plan of destroying Israel through diplomatic, as well as military means, over the course of several phases.
The other members of the security cabinet share Mr. Begin’s skepticism about the Palestinians.
Mr. Barak has long since lost faith in negotiations with the Palestinians. Mr. Lieberman opposes any form of withdrawal and has often said that the negotiations with the Palestinians have no chance of moving forward.
Mr. Yaalon, who served as the Israeli army chief of staff from 2001-2005, is probably the most severe in his position toward the Palestinians. He has written a recent book, not yet translated into English, where he openly states he does not believe in any peace plan. He writes that peace likely might only be possible three or four generations from now.
The strategic affairs minister believes that the process has to begin from the bottom, step by step, but only on the economic and municipal level, nothing on the national level.
In his book, Mr. Yaalon writes the Palestinian Authority must pass an unlimited number of tests before any progress can be made. They include altering Palestinian school curriculums calling for Israel’s destruction and its existence as a Jewish state.
Mr. Meridor, who was actively involved in the failed negotiations with the Palestinians at Camp David under the aegis of former President Bill Clinton in the summer of 2000, has often expressed how surprised he was with the seriousness of the Palestinian demand for the “right of return” to Arab villages that were lost in 1948, which have since been replaced by Israeli towns, collective farms and woodlands.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Begin May Be Man to Watch in New Group
Benjamin Begin, son of late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, could be the man to watch in Israel’s newly formed security cabinet.
Although he lacks a political portfolio, his importance surpasses other members of the cabinet, which also includes: Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a former Israel prime minister; Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman; Strategic Affairs Minister Bugi Yaalon; and Intelligence Affairs Minister Dan Meridor.
Mr. Begin has a history of opposing, giving concessions to the Palestinians. He resigned from the previous Netanyahu government in January 1997 after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relinquished Israeli control over Hebron.
He left Likud following the conclusion of the Wye River Memorandums in October 1998, which called for the redeployment of Israeli forces. This effectively ended Mr. Netanyahu’s last government. Mr. Begin also opposed what he saw as former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s corruption and disloyalty from early on.
During a Knesset discussion last Wednesday on Jerusalem Day, Mr. Begin quoted extensively from remarks made by Abbas Zaki, a Palestinian Authority leader, on May 7.
In those comments, Mr. Zaki said: “The Jews view Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as their historic dream. After they evacuate those lands, they will get out of Jerusalem. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. Then they will move forward.”
Mr. Begin used these comments to remind the Israeli public of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) plan of destroying Israel through diplomatic, as well as military means, over the course of several phases.
The other members of the security cabinet share Mr. Begin’s skepticism about the Palestinians.
Mr. Barak has long since lost faith in negotiations with the Palestinians. Mr. Lieberman opposes any form of withdrawal and has often said that the negotiations with the Palestinians have no chance of moving forward.
Mr. Yaalon, who served as the Israeli army chief of staff from 2001-2005, is probably the most severe in his position toward the Palestinians. He has written a recent book, not yet translated into English, where he openly states he does not believe in any peace plan. He writes that peace likely might only be possible three or four generations from now.
The strategic affairs minister believes that the process has to begin from the bottom, step by step, but only on the economic and municipal level, nothing on the national level.
In his book, Mr. Yaalon writes the Palestinian Authority must pass an unlimited number of tests before any progress can be made. They include altering Palestinian school curriculums calling for Israel’s destruction and its existence as a Jewish state.
Mr. Meridor, who was actively involved in the failed negotiations with the Palestinians at Camp David under the aegis of former President Bill Clinton in the summer of 2000, has often expressed how surprised he was with the seriousness of the Palestinian demand for the “right of return” to Arab villages that were lost in 1948, which have since been replaced by Israeli towns, collective farms and woodlands.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
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