Why I’m Doubtful About the ‘Peace Process’

The other day I got a scolding call from my friend Steve F, who's very pro-Israel and said that I only blame one side for the problem when the truth is he and I are not very far apart on the solution: the Clinton parameters of 2000. I agreed, but said, How can the Palestinians trust Israel, it is inherently expansionist, it keeps on building settlements even as it claims it wants to make a deal. Steve responded dismissively: "The settlements will go, all Israelis know it." Apart from the settlement blocs along the green line, that is. Steve knows lots of Israelis and portrays them as eminently reasonable. "They can't wait to get rid of the occupied territories." And he's still angry at Arafat over Camp David for rejecting a good offer. Need I add, Steve F's views are widely shared in the Jewish community.

I hung up the phone and, leaving for elitist Cape Cod, grabbed a couple books to read, including Aaron David Miller's The Much Too Promised Land, and Michael Fischbach's The Peace Process and Palestinian Refugee Claims. I've been re/reading them on vacation, along with the most important piece ever written on the peace process, Henry Siegman's piece of a year ago in the London Review of Books, which could never appear in the U.S.

The most revealing statement in my readings is Miller's description of his work with Seeds for Peace, a noble group that tries to build understanding between the children of warring peoples, Miller noted: Palestinians and Israelis, Pakistanis and Indians. The revelation here is simply this: Indians and Pakistanis have been at each other's throats for a long time, 60 years. Yet despite ethnic cleansing and savage murder and religious war and all the rest, both imperfect peoples have a state. The Pakistanis were given the right of self-determination by the U.N. in 1947. The U.N. made the same promise to the Palestinians in '47, and of course it goes without saying, the Palestinians have never had a state, and the fact that they are at war with the Israelis and can be savagely murderous has always been used against them to disqualify them from the right to self-determination. And so 60 years on, here are 4-6 million people with very limited freedom to express themselves or be represented politically, and meanwhile Israel the amazing western state gobbles their land and pays lip service to a peace process that goes nowhere.

As Siegman notes, there have been endless Palestinian losses over the last century; they have watched their share of Palestine get smaller and smaller, from more than 60 percent under the first partition plans to 44 percent under the U.N. plan to about 22 percent now and continuing to dissolve. The wonderful Palestinian state that has been dangled before them now for more than a decade–and which I support because I'm an American who wants to see an end to this massive distraction–is two widely-separated territories: "a kidney shaped state with Gaza on the side," as Saif Ammous cracks. Siegman notes that the greatest concession throughout the history of Israel is the PLO's acceptance of the pre-'67 borders, to which they were reduced by the great war/expulsion of '48. Is it really any wonder that having dropped down to 22 percent of the pie, they don't want to go further?

Miller says that in 2000 Israeli P.M. Ehud Barak was first prepared to make the revolutionary step of offering the Palestinians 80 percent of the West Bank and then at Camp David he notched that up to a whopping 90 percent, and by the time of the Clinton parameters I guess it approached about 93 percent. That's where it is now, stuck at 93, Maariv reports, with the U.S. contemplating the possibility of making a "bridging proposal" to split the difference, but afraid to do so lest it alienate what Maariv openly identifies as the Jewish lobby. Because let us be clear, the pressure is always on the Palestinians to show more flexibility about their ancestral lands.

So I feel justified in blaming one side more than the other. If it's a dispute over land, as we always hear, the more powerful side has always gotten more land, and it's hard not to see the neverending peace process as a cover for further Israeli expansion, hard to blame the Palestinians for backing away from an offer at Camp David that would have licensed Israeli gains, and where they were being pressured by an American government acting as "Israel's lawyer," as Miller put it.

My shame surrounds the performance of the U.S. Jewish community for blindly supporting the expansionism of the Jewish state. Supplying the Zionists with arms felt heroic right after the Holocaust, I bet I would have volunteered myself out of suppressed Jewish Exodus-style masculinity; but make no mistake, those arms helped facilitate an ethnic cleansing in '48, and since then I remind my readers that U.S. president after president has wanted to say something about the settlements and pulled in his horns because no one will cover him. From Ford in '75 to Bush in '91 to Bush in '08. In Miller's book we read about James Baker challenging AIPAC to give up the ideas of the undivided Land of Israel in '89 and getting slammed in a letter to the president signed by 94 senators. Ford got a letter in '75 from 76 senators over his desire to "reassess" policy. And then we read about the George Mitchell report in 2001 that called for an end to settlements, and– well it just never ends, does it? American policymakers want an end to settlements. The settlements don't end. Why are we feckless? The Israel lobby. There is no other explanation for such a spectacular history of policy nullification. Today Israel continues to build settlements and Gordon Brown and Sarkozy get angry about it, but our president and presidential candidates are afraid to open their mouths.

Miller is afraid to reach any conclusions. But as I have stated several times now, his book is crammed with evidence of the lobby's power. That Scharansky and Sharon played key roles in writing Bush's important speech on the Palestinian state in spring 2002–an extremist and a war criminal, going over the text. I wrote about that scandal a few weeks ago. Here is another: That before Anthony Zinni could go over to Israel/Palestine in 2001, the organized Jewish community expressed concern that they didn't know who he was and so — "expressed concern that Zinni's middle East experience might make him less sensitive to Israel's concerns, so we arranged a lunch for him with Mort Zuckerman, chairman of the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, at which Zinni allayed a good many unfounded suspicions." Talk about access; who else gets to prime the pump? Siegman:

It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in empty rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys [including Zinni].

Or in Fischbach's book, I learn that UN 194, the 1948 resolution which guarantees the right of return to Palestinian refugees and is today Israel's nightmare, was lawyered extensively at the time by the U.S. delegation. "The Americans… played a crucial role in ruling out the possibility of compensating returning refugees for any land seized by the Israelis." And the resulting U.N. body that was to govern refugee returns, the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine "never strayed far from Western (particularly U.S.) conceptualization  of the refugee problem." Now consider that 194 has never been implemented, and the UNCCP has been frustrated for 60 years, and the earnest and good Fischbach speaks hopefully of this or that scheme to "fast-track" the process. Fast-track the process after 60 years??? Where is the impulse toward justice here? There has been no resolution at all of the refugee problem–in stark contrast to the problem of the Jewish refugees of Europe in '47, whose plight motivated the west to support the formation of Israel.

The pity here is American unfairness, and American Jewish unfairness, that What Palestinians want has never been considered in the U.S.–and so long as it has not been considered there has been violence. The Arabs have been disqualified again and again in the American discourse, because they are terrorists or animals (Erica Jong famously called Arabs animals in her book Fear of Flying), and the result has been what? That Israel has gotten away with its expansions again and again while making itself out to be the giant victim in the west because it has been attacked in savage ways by disaffected Palestinians. The amazing Siegman, whose own family members don't talk to him because of his bravery, characterizes Israel's policies as "dismemberment" and says the violence is understandable. Siegman:

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.

The other day, my friend Steve said that if American Jews didn't actively lobby for Israel here,  U.S. policy would be the same.  Americans love Israel. Or as Steven Spiegel said in countering Walt and Mearsheimer, Americans love Israel like they like ice cream. It's true that many Americans like Israel. But the main thing to be said is that they don't know much about Israel, and don't know much about what has befallen the Palestinians over 60 years of the great Israel miracle. If our press would only talk about Henry Siegman, or give a platform to Stephen Walt to explain what Aaron David Miller's book is about, these things might change.  But the press gives no quarter at all to these views, and the many Americans who have misgivings about this unequal policy are afraid to open their mouths.

As for Steve's claim that the Israelis are well-meaning now and that I am locked in the past, and we should look forward, I'm with you all the way Steve. But as an American, I say, Let us deal fairly with these parties. If the solution is not fair, the brutalities will just continue.

Related posts:

1. The Zelig of the Peace Process Should Go
2. Did Jewish Identity Stand in the Way of the Peace Process at Camp David?
3. ‘Peace Now’ suggests that election will stymie ‘peace process’
4. the best hair in the peace process industry
5. Hope in Obama is ‘evaporating’ in the Middle East as the peace process goes nowhere