President
Bush's announcement of a new Middle East summit is being dutifully
reported as a move to "revive" the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
designed to culminate in a two-state solution. But the meeting, if it
ever comes about, will be nothing of the sort. U.S. officials have
already made clear that the gathering's purpose will be "to review
progress toward building Palestinian institutions, look for ways to
support further reforms and support the effort going on right now
between the parties together."
Mushy? Of course it's mushy.
The Bush speech simply restated the key term of the administration's
long dead "roadmap" -- before there can be peace talks, the
Palestinians will be required to destroy Hamas. In other words, there
will be no peace talks, just a lot of wishful thinking. As White House
Press Secretary Tony Snow put it, "I think a lot of people are inclined
to try to treat this as a big peace conference. It's not."
The
Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the emperor's new clothes might
accurately describe current U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict -- except for one important detail. In the fairytale, the
emperor's courtiers are careful never to let on that they can see their
monarch's nakedness; in the case of U.S. Middle East policy, there is
what playwright Bertolt Brecht might have called an epic gap between
some of the actors and their lines. Plainly, very few of them believe
the things that the script requires them to say.
In this
absurdist take on the old fairytale, whenever anyone points out that
the emperor has no clothes, they are simply told "duh!" before the
players get back acting as if it's fashion week in the palace.
The
parlor game in all of this might be deciding which of Bush's courtiers
is the most craven and cynical. The competition is fierce, but here's a
handicapping of the race:
1. The Israelis
The Israeli
leadership recognized Hamas' takeover of Gaza's security as an
opportunity -- but not, as they still tell gullible journalists, to
pursue a peace agreement with Palestinian "moderates." Quite the
contrary, it's been viewed as a free pass to fend off any conceivable
U.S. pressure to conclude, or even work toward, a final-status
agreement with the Palestinians. All they now have to do is make wan
gestures of support for Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian
National Authority, while using the fact that he speaks for half or
less of all Palestinians to prove their case that, as ever, "there is
no Palestinian partner for peace."
According to the respected
Israeli political correspondent Aluf Benn, there is now a cast-iron
consensus across the Israeli political spectrum that withdrawal from
the West Bank is inconceivable for the foreseeable future. "In this
atmosphere," Benn writes, "it is clear that any talk about a ‘two-state
solution' and [Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's] declarations at the Sharm
el-Sheikh summit about ‘new opportunities' and ‘accelerating the
process toward a Palestinian state' are bogus. This diplomatic lip
service, disassociated from reality and real expectations, is meant to
assuage the Americans and the Europeans and deflect pressure on
Israel."
Such duplicity is fine with the Bush administration
and various European powers, Benn writes, precisely because they are
doing the same thing: "The international community is participating in
the show, and gradually is losing interest in the conflict." When it
comes to pursuing any kind of deal to end Israel's occupation of the
territories it captured in 1967, the Bush administration's policy can
be summed up in three words: Look reasonably busy.
Israel's
longstanding, but constantly shifting, argument has been simple enough:
It has no Palestinian partner. First that was thanks to PLO leader
Yasser Arafat's duplicity; then it was Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas' weakness; next, it was Hamas' victory in the January 2006
elections (that the Bush administration had sponsored), followed by the
decision of Abbas to join it in a "unity" government; now, with Hamas
left to starve and die in blockaded Gaza, and Abbas setting up his own
unelected government on the West Bank, we're back to Abbas' weakness as
an explanation.
The Bush administration has faithfully echoed
Israel's zigzagging evasion of talks with the Palestinians, a course
that began when Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister in February
2001. Even as, in op-ed after op-ed in U.S. papers , Hamas signals its
desire to engage, and even as Israel continues to negotiate a prisoner
exchange with Hamas, Israeli leaders insist that negotiations with the
organization are impossible. Hamas, after all, has waged a terror war
against Israel and adamantly refuses to recognize the Jewish state.
Few
now remember that Israel used the same argument to avoid talking to
Arafat's Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah,
too, had engaged in terrorism against Israelis (and still does
occasionally) and refused to revise its charter to recognize Israel
until 1998, five years after Arafat and Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin had
their historic handshake on the White House lawn. Non-recognition of
Israel is the default starting point for Palestinian nationalism, as
Hamas deputy head Abu Marzook recently made clear in the Los Angeles
Times, not because of some religious absolutism but because, for
Palestinians, Israel's creation in 1948 meant their violent
dispossession. Hamas believes it is being ordered to legitimize this
dispossession before negotiations can even begin, and it refuses to do
so.
The fact that Fatah did eventually recognize Israel -- and
got so little in return -- has cost the organization dearly on the
Palestinian street. Nine months into the Western financial blockade
that followed Hamas' election victory, a survey conducted by the
Western-funded Palestinian Center for Social and Political Research
found 54% of Palestinians dissatisfied with Hamas' performance in power
and only 40% ready to vote for it again. Nonetheless, when asked
whether Hamas should recognize Israel in order to get the siege lifted,
67% said no.
The Israelis will continue to play along with the
American fantasy that a peace can be concluded with a self-appointed
Palestinian autocracy, while war is waged on the elected Palestinian
government. However, they know perfectly well that Abbas is in no
position to deliver -- and that's fortunate to their way of thinking.
After all, from the time that Sharon became prime minister, a peace
agreement with the Palestinian leadership has not been what Israel had
in mind. His election campaign promises involved putting an end to the
Oslo peace process. He left no doubt that he believed the sort of
comprehensive peace envisaged at Oslo was impossible. In an interview
shortly after his election, he called instead for "a long-term, gradual
solution that will enable us to examine the development of the
relations between us and the Palestinians over time." Curiously enough,
this is exactly the position Hamas leaders have taken on the issue.
They opt for long-term "truces," aimed at calming relations between the
two peoples, rather than final agreements. That outlook earns Hamas the
label "rejectionist"; Bush called Sharon "a man of peace."
Buoyed
by the post 9/11 environment in Washington, Sharon led the Americans on
a giddy dance. First, he got them to agree that peace talks were
impossible because Arafat was autocratic and deceitful. So the U.S.
demanded that, prior to any progress in the "peace process," President
Arafat would have to cede control over Palestinian finances and
security forces to the democratically elected legislature as well as
the cabinet and prime minister it picked.
Then Arafat died and
the U.S.-favored Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas became President. Sharon
promptly declared Abbas too weak for peace, a prophecy he helped
fulfill by showing the Palestinian electorate that Abbas would achieve
nothing through patient, plaintive conversations with Washington.
Still,
those dopey Americans didn't seem to get the joke; so, perversely, they
pushed for Palestinian elections, which Hamas duly won. Blindsided, the
Bush administration promptly rushed out the patently naive explanation
that Hamas had won because of Fatah's corruption (even as it continued
to coddle some of the most corrupt elements in Fatah). As former
European Union (EU) special Middle East adviser Alastair Crooke makes
clear, the election result was indeed primarily a repudiation of Fatah
and its policies. International experience has shown that voters will
tolerate a measure of corruption on the part of political leaders as
long as they deliver on some of their promises. (Brazil's current
government is a perfect example of this.) But Palestinian voters
recognized that Fatah had led them up a blind alley -- almost 20 years
of negotiations had not ended Israel's de facto control of Gaza and had
seen the steady expansion, in the form of settlements, of its
occupation of the West Bank.
Palestinian democracy had
returned the "wrong" party to power. The U.S. response was best summed
up in Brecht's quip about an official East German statement claiming
"the people" had forfeited the confidence of the government: "Wouldn't
it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place?"
The
Bush administration quickly adopted a policy of collective punishment.
The Palestinians were to be choked until they relented and reversed
their electoral decision. An undoubtedly amused Israeli leadership now
watched as Washington reversed everything it had said about Palestinian
governance, demanding that all authority over security, finances, and
anything else that came to mind must be placed, as in Arafat's time, in
the hands of the president. More important, it also began fomenting
coup plans in which U.S.-backed Palestinian security forces answering
to Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan would seize control of Gaza. We now
know how well that worked out.
As the Bush administration's
vaudeville act spins on, Israel will play along, while damning the
hapless Abbas with faint gestures of encouragement. Israel has agreed
to begin trickling funds -- belonging to the Palestinian
Administration, but withheld since Hamas' election victory -- into
Abbas' coffers (but not all at once, mind you, lest he get the idea
that he has any freedom of action). It has also agreed to release some
250 of the more than 9,000 Palestinian prisoners it holds (and only
lower-ranking members of Abbas' faction at that). These two "gestures"
are an indication of just how little Israel seems ready to do to
"bolster" Abbas.
By contrast, Hamas is using its capture over
a year ago of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit to negotiate the release of
more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners -- and they have taken care to
make sure that their lists include prisoners from all factions. You can
guess which approach will prove more popular among Palestinians.
Whether
it's an enfeebled Abbas or an unyielding Hamas, Israel will simply
continue to argue that there is no real Palestinian partner in sight.
The show of creating one will go on, but it is designed to fail.
2. Mahmoud Abbas
Mahmoud
Abbas has looked like a very unhappy camper for a very long time. As
well he should. As former Clinton negotiator Rob Malley and former
Palestinian adviser Hussein Agha noted four years ago, Abbas (aka Abu
Mazen) had an ambiguous role in the script written by Ariel Sharon and
green-lighted by the Bush administration:
"Let Abu Mazen
succeed in order to marginalize Arafat, end the armed intifada, and
achieve for Israel a measure of security. But let him succeed only so
far and no further. Let him bring about a more peaceful situation
without benefiting from its potential political returns. For Abu
Mazen's success could bring him strength, and his strength would
revitalize the threat of a unified Palestinian movement that his rise
was meant to thwart."
Having gambled his political life on the
willingness of the United States to press Israel to conclude a
two-state deal, Abbas has long been glumly aware of just how bare the
negotiation cupboard really is. For years now, he has had to stand by
silently being damned, in the eyes of his own people, by the minimalist
praise and parsimonious gestures occasionally tossed his way.
Whatever
the rhetoric, it's not going to get much better. After all, the Bush
administration abandoned the role of seriously mediating between Israel
and the Palestinians almost as soon as it took office. Since then, its
efforts can best be summed up by the all-nighters Secretary of State
Condi Rice pulled in Jerusalem, as if engaged in real diplomacy. She
would then crow about how she had gotten a border crossing into Gaza
opened (that would invariably close within days of her departure). As
if that wasn't sufficient humiliation for Abbas, he had to endure
periodic scoldings from Rice over his failure to provoke a Palestinian
civil war with Hamas.
Abbas' problem is that neither Bush --
even if he wanted to, which he doesn't -- nor any successor president,
is likely to risk the domestic political aggravation attached to
pressing Israel into a peace agreement. Bush's Middle East policy
director Elliot Abrams recently reassured pro-Israel groups in the U.S.
that all of Secretary of State Rice's shuttling around the region was
simply "process," designed to placate the Arabs and win their support
for putting more pressure on Iran. The President, Abrams said, had no
intention of actually pressing Israel back to the negotiating table.
The
Palestinian electorate knew the game was up long before the Fatah
leadership faced up to that fact. As Alastair Crooke noted:
"Hardly
any Palestinians now believe that Palestinian 'good behaviour' -- as
promised to Israel by Fatah -- will induce the U.S. to ignore its
domestic Israel lobby and exert pressure on Israel to withdraw from the
lands occupied in 1967... Palestinians have seen their putative state
in the West Bank salami-sliced away by settlements, army posts,
military zones, fences and Israeli-only roads that cut the territory
into enclaves in which 2.5 million Palestinians are confined, their
movements heavily curtailed... The U.S. and the [European Union] argued
that Palestinian violence was the problem; but the Palestinians noted
that in periods of quiet more rather than less of their land fell to
the Israeli salami-slicer -- yet still the international community
remained silent."
So Abbas is a very lonely man. And the
corruption all around him is but a symptom of the way his movement has
lost its political identity and become instead just a vehicle for
personal power and enrichment. The fear of losing the power of
patronage, poorly wrapped in rhetoric about national goals, was what
prompted Fatah's leaders to press Abbas, from the moment the election
results were in, to overturn them. The regime Abbas is now creating
will prove little more than a carbon copy of the decrepit, autocratic
Arab regimes in the region most willing to follow U.S. dictates. As
Beirut Daily Star editor-at-large Rami Khouri observed earlier this
year, such regimes tend to speak for their immediate entourages, their
security chiefs, and little more. The Americans and Israelis know that
Abbas (like those regimes) has few cards to play and is likely to have
no choice but to take whatever he's given.
Abbas' domestic
problems are not limited to the influence of Hamas. Analyst Khaled
Amyreh points out that his faction within Fatah is very small and its
willingness to accept American tutelage is rejected by those who had
been closer to Arafat. Perhaps recognizing the danger of his isolation
(even within his own party), Abbas appears now to have sacrificed
Dahlan, his national security chief (as well as Bush and Condi's
anointed favorite). It's hard not to suspect that Abbas may yet
consider the possibility of some kind of rapprochement with Hamas.
3. The Arab regimes
The
Arab autocrats whose presence is now required whenever Bush puts on one
of his no-clothes shows recognize themselves in Abbas' predicament.
They, too, have precious little to show their people in return for
allying with Washington. Their citizenry, too, has watched them stand
by helplessly as Washington has sanctioned and encouraged the
systematic trampling of the Palestinians, the pulverizing of Lebanon,
and the chaotic destruction of Iraq (which now produces a
9/11-equivalent death toll at least every few weeks). Those citizens,
too, see that only the Islamists seem willing to stand up to the U.S.
and Israel. The autocrats, too, beg and plead with Washington to
enforce a two-state solution based on Israel's 1967 borders and face
the same smug dismissal of their concerns or the same meaningless
ritual endorsements.
How many times do they have to be
reminded by administration officials that President Bush was the first
American leader to publicly call for a Palestinian state? Of course, he
was also the first to formally endorse Israel's right to the massive
settlements built in the occupied West Bank in violation of
international law.
So cavalier were Bush's tailors in the
early days of his Mesopotamian expedition that they actually envisaged
getting rid of longtime U.S. trusties in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
elsewhere. They imagined a "democratic tsunami" that would sweep the
region, replacing previous allies with a cadre of Ahmed Chalabis, Fouad
Ajamis, Kenan Makiyas, Amir Taheris, and other neocon-approved Middle
Easterners.
The Hamas victory last year made clear that the
beneficiary of any Arab democracy would initially be the Islamists, so
Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and the Kings Abdullah of Jordan and Saudi Arabia
as well as their entourages will have to do for now. Their function in
the Bush schema, however, is simply to serve as a "native" cheering
section as he tilts at Iran, while bolstering Abbas in his role as
Palestinian gendarme.
4. The Europeans
Unlike the Arab
allies smiling painfully as they quietly agitate for President Bush to
put on some clothes, the Europeans, bizarrely enough, have stripped
down to the buff and joined Bush on the catwalk. Europe, too, is
enforcing a financial siege against the elected Palestinian government
in the vain hope that this will force a symbolic surrender from Hamas.
(The Arab regimes, at least, have the excuse that the U.S. is using its
dominant position in the international banking system to prevent them
from sending money to Gaza; the Europeans are not doing so as a matter
of policy.)
And it's not just critics who think they should
know better; they admit that they do know better: U.S. national
security analyst Mark Perry reveals that, after he and Alastair Crooke
briefed European leaders on the arguments for engaging with Hamas
despite U.S. pressure for a boycott, one ambassador responded: "We know
you are right, really we do. But we will not break with the Americans.
We just cannot do it."
If a willingness to strangle the
Palestinians in Gaza is the test of loyalty to the U.S., it also takes
the Europeans out of any meaningful role in the region -- as Tony Blair
will discover as soon as he embarks on his fool's errand of "mentoring"
Palestinian institution-building under occupation and siege -- on terms
that exclude the democratically elected government from his mentoring,
no less. Sadly, the end of an independent European role will have
tragic consequences for the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as
for the rest of us. After all, as the Europeans have surely noted,
under President Bush and his top officials the U.S. has made itself
part of the problem, not part of any prospective solution in the Middle
East.
That really is one great tragedy of the Bush
administration, which essentially outsourced its policy on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Ariel Sharon. Sharon's ideas are now so
deeply embedded in the mainstream of both parties on Capitol Hill that
Congress is even more anti-Palestinian than the administration. As the
presidential candidates of both parties fall over one another to take
ever harder-line stances on the Palestinians, Iran, and any other
subject of concern to Israel, it's an odds-on bet that the naked
imperial fashion show will continue, no matter who replaces Bush on the
imperial throne.
President Bush's announcement of a new Middle East summit is being dutifully reported as a move to "revive" the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, designed to culminate in a two-state solution. But the meeting, if it ever comes about, will be nothing of the sort. U.S. officials have already made clear that the gathering's purpose will be "to review progress toward building Palestinian institutions, look for ways to support further reforms and support the effort going on right now between the parties together." 
