The Osterley Times: Annapolis: The Cost of Failure

There's a very good article by Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books which starts by asking what is in the Annapolis summit for Israel?

The "it" referred to guidelines the letter proposed for an agreement that would end Israel's occupation of the territories the IDF overran forty years ago in a conflict—as Israelis were reminded by the celebrated author David Grossman when he addressed a recent commemoration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination—that is now in its 100th year.

What is in it for Israel should be self-evident, but now that three new Israeli generations have been born having no memory of Israel without settlements, it no longer is; for too many, the occupation—and the spiral of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has come with it—is a given, the natural order of things.

An agreement that leads to the end of an occupation that with the best of intentions humiliates and brutalizes an entire nation should be more than enough of a reason to go for it. The subjugation and permanent dispossession of millions of people is surely not the vocation of Judaism, nor is it an acceptable condition for a Jewish national revival.

The whole notion of negotiating with Abbas was supposedly - and this is the Israeli argument - because he is a "moderate" and Israel are not prepared to negotiate with Hamas who the Palestinian people chose as their democratic representatives.

However, in order to persuade the Palestinians that more can be achieved by Abbas being "moderate" and Hamas being sidelined, then one would imagine that the Israelis would go out of their way to show Abbas's approach produces results.

In 2005, following Abbas's election as president of the Palestinian Authority, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank, worked out a detailed agreement with the Israeli government to remove many of the obstacles which plague Palestinian daily life.

The plan included the creation of a safe passage that would link the populations of the West Bank and Gaza—a connection that is vitally important to the social, cultural, and economic life of these geographically separated entities, to which Israel had already committed itself in the Oslo accords. The whole point of that agreement was to show Palestinians that Abbas's moderation and opposition to violence could obtain results that Israel had denied his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. It proved the opposite. According to Wolfensohn, Israel violated the agreement before the ink of its representatives' signatures had dried.

"In the months that followed, every aspect of the agreement was abrogated," Wolfensohn, an observant Jew and a lifelong friend and generous philanthropic supporter of Israel, recently told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. Indeed, instead of removing checkpoints, more were added. Reading the Ha'aretz interview, it is difficult to avoid the impression that this firsthand experience with Israel's dealings with the Palestinians profoundly disillusioned Wolfensohn, who came to see the equities of the conflict in a new light.

There is also the constant and oft repeated claim that Israel offers everything and is usually given nothing in return.

It is not true, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians refuse to compromise. (Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously complained that "Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.") That is an indecent charge, not only because so far Israel has given Palestinians nothing, but because Palestinians made the most far-reaching compromise of all when, in 1988, Arafat formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice line (i.e., the pre-1967 border). With that concession, Palestinians gave up their claim to more than half the territory that the United Nations 1947 Partition Resolution had assigned to Palestine's Arab inhabitants. Palestinians have never received credit for this wrenching and historic concession, made well before Israel formally recognized that Palestinians have a right to sovereignty in any part of Palestine. The notion that Palestinians can now be compelled to accept "border adjustments" at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that is left them is deeply offensive to Palestinians, and understandably so.

He then goes on to discuss Olmert's obstructionism, a point which is largely ignored in western press reports of the conditions being set before this conference at Annapolis takes place.

If Annapolis fails, it will be because of Israel's rejection of the single most central condition for success: full disclosure of its definition of viable Palestinian statehood. Olmert has already reneged on his earlier endorsement of Rice's insistence that the meeting must produce a joint statement outlining a permanent status agreement to avoid becoming a meaningless photo op, and it remains unlikely that any meaningful joint declaration can be reached.

According to Aluf Benn, Ha'aretz's diplomatic correspondent, Olmert is adept at marching "in the no-man's land between talk and action." For Olmert, Benn says, engaging in high-level talks and granting gestures to the Palestinians creates "the most convenient diplomatic situation," because such gestures are "in themselves sufficient to remove international pressure on Israel to withdraw from the territories and to end the occupation." At the same time, "as long as it's all talk and there are no agreements," internal pressures not to cede the territories are neutralized. Olmert seems to have succeeded in turning Annapolis into that kind of no-man's land.

Siegman appears to think that this is a unique opportunity for the Israelis to negotiate with "moderate" Palestinians, a point which I do not agree with. "Moderates" cannot simply be defined as people whom Israel deem worthy of talking to.

I think negotiations should be with the people that the Palestinians chose to represent them; however, I do agree that the dangers for Israel - should Olmert use this conference as no more than a photo-op to take pressure off of Israel - will be severe and life threatening to Israel herself.

More important, should Annapolis fail, prospects for resuming a viable peace process at some future date will be made increasingly unlikely by the changing demographic balance in Palestine. A clear Arab majority in historic Palestine, a situation that is imminent, will persuade Palestinians and their leaders that the quest for a two-state solution is a fool's pursuit. They may conclude that rather than settling for even less than 22 percent of Palestine—i.e., less than half the territory that the international community confirmed in the 1947 Partition Resolution of the UN is the legitimate patrimony of Palestine's Arab population—it would be better to renounce separate Palestinian statehood and instead demand equal rights in a state of Israel that includes all of Palestine. Why settle for crumbs now if as a result of their decisive majority they will soon become the dominant political and cultural force in all of Palestine?

Israel and her supporters always reject the charge of Apartheid when it is made towards this conflict, but Israel will very soon find herself controlling the lives of more Palestinians than it does Israelis. If, at that point, it remains obvious that we have an Israel intent on permanently denying its majority Arab population the rights and privileges it accords to its minority of Jewish citizens, then it is highly unlikely that the international community would be able to look away and accord Israel the astonishing leeway she has enjoyed up until this point.

As Siegman points out:

It would be an apartheid regime that, one hopes, a majority of Israelis would themselves not abide.

At that point the calls for a one state solution would reach a crescendo and Israel's preferred solution of the Palestinians remaining in Israeli controlled bantusans - where they get a vote so we all pretend that they are actually running the Palestinian Authority, when in reality they are running their own prison for the Israelis - would be revealed as the intellectual and moral vacuum which it is.

It is in Israel's interests to make the deal, but from all of Olmert's stances so far, he simply doesn't appear to get it.

Click title for Siegman's interesting article.

UPDATE:

Bush's style when it comes to the Israel-Palestine dispute:

"Hands off would be an understatement," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator. He now heads the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation and the Prospects for Peace Initiative at The Century Foundation.
Nathan Brown, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said, "What's remarkable is the extent to which he's been disengaged, with only episodic parachuting in with absolutely no follow-up."
To Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Bush strikes him "as someone who closes deals, not someone who painstakingly sets them up. Mideast peace needs to be painstakingly set up. ... Making a statement is one thing, but cajoling, prodding and nudging are just as important."

It really is almost impossible to think of an American President who has put less effort into this conflict than the current inhabitant of the White House, or one that has been more relentlessly pro-Israeli.