Israel's Sudden Flurry of Diplomacy is a Switch
This Commentary first appeared in several McClatchy publications on June 28, 2008
In short order, Israel has reached a truce with the radical Islamist group Hamas, acknowledged secretive negotiations with Syria, and declared a willingness to discuss peace with Lebanon. All this comes on top of regular meetings between Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Diplomacy between Israel and its neighbors has been almost non-existent this decade. So why is all this happening now? And where is the United States, the traditional broker between Israel and the Arabs?
Three developments are driving this process. First, Olmert is facing serious political problems, including a corruption investigation over cash donations from a U.S. supporter. Olmert badly needs to change the headlines from the legal inquires swirling around him. He has now been in office more than two years and Israel’s unstable coalition governments rarely last longer than this. With his political career in jeopardy, Olmert’s best chance for extending his tenure is to ring up a diplomatic breakthrough.
Second, Israel’s military might has not proved decisive in recent confrontations. The Israeli Army largely quelled the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000. But Hamas, the most violent Palestinian group, only grew stronger politically. The same was true in Lebanon, where Israel waged war against Hezbollah during the summer of 2006, only to see Hezbollah emerge as a more potent political force. The Israeli public is weary of these inconclusive battles, and this has encouraged the Israeli leadership to seek compromises.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the United States is preoccupied with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington has been much less active elsewhere in the region, and has boycotted its adversaries. Israel and its Arab rivals have seen conditions deteriorate on several fronts, and have taken it upon themselves to act now, rather than wait for the United States to show greater interest.
Egypt brokered the truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, while Turkey has acted as the go-between for Israel and Syria. It’s too early to tell whether either initiative will produce any real breakthroughs. Odds are they won’t.
However, the developments do point to a significant shift in the Middle East. The United States sought to reshape the region after the September 11 attacks, but this has proved a mammoth undertaking with the outcome still uncertain. As the United States has bumped up against the limits of changes it can impose, regional actors have been more willing to step in.
Israel and Hamas have refused to deal directly with one another since Hamas’ founding two decades ago. But after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and seized full control of Gaza in the summer of 2007, some minimal contact became inescapable.
Israel controls Gaza’s borders, which means that everything going into the coastal territory, including food, fuel and medicine, has to be coordinated between the two sides. The Israeli restrictions made normal life impossible in Gaza, while Palestinian rocket fire out of Gaza made life unbearable for the nearby Israeli town of Sderot, the main target.
The solution was to work through Egypt. The Gaza truce could collapse at any time but it marks the first time Israel and Hamas have effectively negotiated an agreement. Regardless of what happens this time around, Egypt is likely to be called on to play a similar role in the future.
Israel and Syria had not held full-fledged negotiations since 2000, when the United States came close to brokering a deal. The Bush administration subsequently sought to isolate Syria and discouraged negotiations between the two sides. These positions were very much in line with the views held by Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006.
But Olmert has taken a very different approach. The Israeli air force bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor last September, an attack that risked unleashing widespread turmoil. Yet within months, the two countries began under-the-radar negotiations moderated by Turkey. Next month, Olmert and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad plan to attend a conference in France, raising the possibility of face-to-face talks between the leaders.
In Lebanon, the government has snubbed the Israeli overture, but Israel and Hezbollah have been engaged in indirect talks on a prisoner exchange.
The United States is still sponsoring the talks between Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Abbas. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has visited the region almost monthly since discussions were launched late last year. But the two sides have given no sign that they will reach an agreement, or even the outline of deal, before President Bush leaves office in January.
Bush’s successor will inherit a fluid Middle East where the rules are changing. Many of the parties that have been fighting this decade are now willing to talk, and they no longer see Washington as the exclusive mediator.
Greg Myre is an Adjunct Scholar at the Middle East Institute. He was based in Jerusalem and covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 1999 until June 2007 for The New York Times and The Associated Press.
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De-politicize the Bible and the Quran
For a long-term durable solution to the Arab Israeli conflict, a single democratic and secular state for Jews and Palestinians needs to evolve. Other solutions, like the two-sate solution, are like band-aid treatment to cancer. The dream of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine is unsustainable, unless the Palestinians vanish.
Muslim and Jew can live together in peace. History is the proof. Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in Arab countries peaceably for centuries. In his Coningsby, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1868 and 1874-1880), the first and thus far the only person of Jewish parentage to reach the premiership, described the “halcyon centuries” in Muslim Spain where the “children of Ishmael rewarded the children of Israel with equal rights and privileges with themselves.” Sultan Bayezid-II (1481-1512) encouraged thousands of Jews to settle in the Muslim Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from Spain.
Around the time of Israel’s creation, more than 850,000 Jews migrated from Arab countries, 600,000 going to Israel. The charge that the Jews migrated because of Arab maltreatment is an unfair political expediency. The migration happened in the course of Israel’s creation. During this period, 531 Palestinian villages were depopulated and 805,000 refugees lost their homes, according to Palestinian sources (650,000 to 700,000 refugees, according to Jewish sources).
Islam venerates Judaism. The Quran made Abraham as the first Muslim. Islam is the Religion of Abraham. Quran’s Chapter 14 is named after Abraham and, to Joseph Chapter 12 is named. Today, Jewish derived Arabic proper names are common.
Feeling powerless, the Arab masses invoked hostile Quranic Verses, recounted stories of the Prophet’s troubles with the Jewish tribes in Medina, drew lessons from substituting Friday for the Sabbath and the prayer’s direction from Jerusalem to Mecca. For thirteen centuries, however, these were non-issues.
Politicizing the Bible’s Genesis 15:18: “The Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, unto thy seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” politicized the Quran. Politicizing the Bible pushed frustrated moderate Arabs into orthodoxy and the orthodox into Jihadism. The Arab Israeli conflict has degenerated to a religious war that could last for a thousand years. In provoking the enmity of their age-old Muslim friends, Zionism has radicalized Arab Muslims into Islamist extremism. In doing so, it disserved the long-term interests of the Jewish people.
Had Zionism adhered to the stipulation in the 1917 Balfour declaration: “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” this conflict would not have developed.
The Bible and the Quran must be de-politicized.
The two-state solution is capricious:
First, demographically, a purely Jewish state is impossible to attain. The Zionist dream of creating an exclusive state for the Jewish people in Palestine is unsustainable in the long-term. Presently, about 1.3 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, or just under 25 percent of Israel’s 5.5 million Jews. Due to their high population’s growth rate the Palestinian-Israelis will eventually become the majority. The number of Palestinians in Israel in 1948 was about 150,000. The Palestinian-Israelis are in addition to the 4.2 million Palestinians who live under Israel’s occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Outside Palestine, 2.6 millions are registered in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, plus 1.5 million scattered worldwide.
Secondly, Jerusalem, borders, security, water, settlements, and the refugees’ right-of-return are intractable. When Clinton, Barak, and Arafat attempted in July 2000 to tackle these issues at Camp David, the negotiations collapsed, leading to the second intifada.
Thirdly, even if a miracle patches up a two-state agreement, the extremists on both sides would undermine it.
Fourthly, the Arab masses will shun a Zionist state. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) have failed to develop beyond small diplomatic missions.
Western secular democratic ideals should inspire a single secular democratic state:
First, the intractable obstacles would disappear.
Secondly, a single state will commingle Palestinians and Jews into an inseparable mix. Arabs would no longer have an excuse to boycott their Jewish “cousins.” Economic, cultural, educational, and social interaction would follow.
Thirdly, a single state would allow Arabs and Jews access to all Palestine.
The Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are instruments of integration between Palestinians and Jews, not segregation, a mixture as difficult to unscramble today as removing the Palestinian Israelis from Israel.
Durable peace requires the genuine welcome of the Arab masses of the Jewish people. The Jews who had lived among Arabs could be helpful. They share customs, habits, values, food, music, dance, and, for the older generation, the Arabic language.
Whether it would be a good bargain to exchange a partial and declining Jewish exclusivity in an unstable two-state solution for a durable single state embracing Jews and Muslims is a question Israel’s Jewish people alone can answer.
In provoking the enmity of their age-old Muslim friends, Zionism has disserved the strategic interests of the Jewish people. In Christian Europe, centuries of culminated in the Holocaust.
The secular democratic one-state solution has been gathering pace. A conference at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was held on November 17-18, 2007 to address the various aspects of this concept.
Elie Elhadj; author: The Islamic Shield
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