Now that Prime Minister Netanyahu is back in Israel and President Obama is back here, it is time to assess the effect their dueling speeches have had on the prospects for peace.
There is one factual conclusion on which the Israelis and the Palestinians completely agree: following President Obama's recent speech -- and repeated explanation of it -- on the Israel-Palestine conflict, we are further than ever from peace negotiations. President Obama has managed, in one fell swoop, to harden the positions of both sides and to create distrust of him by Israelis and Palestinians alike.
My criticism of the president is not directed at whether he is pro-Israel or anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian or anti-Palestinian. In fact, I believe that his actions have not been motivated by any antagonism toward the Jewish state. He simply does not understand the dynamics of Middle East negotiation. I am disappointed in him not because I support Israel (which I do), but because I support peace based on a two-state solution. I agree with President Obama about his "ends," while disagreeing about his "means."
Indeed there is little in the content of the president's statements with which I disagree. Rather, it is with his negotiating strategy, his constant need to explain himself, and his utter tone-deafness to the music, as distinguished from the lyrics.
The president has asked the Israelis to agree to negotiate new borders based on the 1967 lines, with land swaps. But he did so without asking the Palestinians to agree to drop their demand that millions of so-called "refugees" -- those who fled or left Israel during the 1947-49 Arab attacks against the Jewish state, and their descendents -- be allowed to "return" to Israel. New borders would be meaningless if this demographic bomb were to be dropped on Israel, turning it into yet another Arab state with a Palestinian majority. Everyone knows, as a matter of reality, that this is not going to happen, just as everyone knows that Israel will eventually give up most of the West Bank as it did the Gaza Strip. But it is critical to any successful negotiation that these two issues -- borders and "the right to return" -- be negotiated together. The Israelis will never agree to generous borders for the Palestinians unless they are assured that their identity as the nation-state of the Jewish people will not be demographically undercut by "the right of return." And the Palestinians will never give up their emotionally charged right of return unless that is an unambiguous prerequisite to achieving statehood with generous borders. The Obama strategy -- to demand generous borders from Israel first and leave the right of return to subsequent negotiations -- is a prescription for stalemate.
The president also helped cement the status quo by expressing his agreement with Israel's refusal to negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas -- unless that terrorist group first renounces violence, accepts Israel and supports prior agreements. The current position of the Israeli government is to invite the Palestinian authority to begin negotiations now, but to insist, as part of those negotiations and before any final agreement is reached, that Hamas either accept the president's current conditions or be excluded from the government. By appearing to go further than the Israeli government -- by seeming to justify an Israeli refusal even to begin negotiations with the Palestinian Authority until Hamas accepts those conditions or the Palestinian Authority rejects Hamas -- the president has made it harder for the Netanyahu government to resist the demands of Israeli extremists who oppose all negotiations.
Prime Minister Netanyahu originally planned to come to Washington with a generous peace proposal to entice the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But President Obama painted him into a corner and made him change his script by notifying him, as he was about to board his plane, that the president was going to call for Israel to return to its 1949-1967 lines, without also calling for the Palestinians to give up their right of return. By thus preempting the Prime Minister, he forced him to become more defensive of Israel's bargaining positions and less willing to offer specific, generous concessions. The result was a powerful speech in defense of Israel by Netanyahu, an overwhelmingly positive response from Congress, and a movement away from peace negotiations.
All in all, President Obama's well-intentioned efforts to jump-start the peace process have backfired, not so much because he favors one side over the other, but because of the ham-handedness of his negotiation strategy. A negotiator or mediator whose statements move the parties further away from the negotiating table than they were before he spoke deserves a failing grade in the science of negotiation.
There is now a widespread consensus that President Obama should not have delivered the speech he gave, especially the part about the 1967 lines and land swaps. What the President should have done was to insist that both parties immediately agree to sit down and negotiate without any preconditions. It's not too late. But it will take yet another "explanation" of what President Obama really meant in his ill-advised speech.
Professor Dershowitz's most recent novel is The Trials of Zion.
Alon Ben-Meir: Defying the Rules of Conflict Resolution
Daoud Kuttab: Strategy for Palestine Still Missing Implementation Plan
Carlo Strenger: Netanyahu Is Driving Israel Towards Dark Times
In ‘The Status of the Diplomatic Process with the Palestinians’ a briefing paper printed by Haaretz in December 2007 and prepared by Ehud Barak’s government for the incoming Olmert government, the real nature of the so-called ‘generous offer’ is spelled out:
1. Israel's illegal settlement blocs would be kept, with 80 percent of the settlers remaining in the West Bank on land annexed to Israel.
2. A wide "security zone," supervised by the Israeli army, would be maintained along the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, from the Dead Sea to the northern Jewish settlement of Meholah.
3. On East Jerusalem, Israel demanded massive territorial concessions in line with its illegal annexation of the part of the city occupied by Israel in 1967, with Israel wanting to maintain territorial contiguity for its illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, annex the Jewish and Armenian quarters, parts of the so-called ‘sacred basin’ and the so-called ‘Latrun Salient’, ensuring that E. Jerusalem would be a collection of Palestinian ghettos. In other words, the Palestinians were being asked to sign up to a deal that would give them a very compromised sovereignty over no more than about 14 percent of their historic homeland. (See: http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0309.htm)
Here's a direct link to it:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/downloads/baraks_offers/barak_eng.swf
Obama believes that his enemies will go for a 'win/win' situation. The Palestinians don't want to win unless the Israelis lose. That is why they walked away from Bill Clinton's peace table, and that is why they won't come to Obamas. And it is why the Republicans want to take us into recession again. They only want to win if Obama loses.
Can you offer any evidence that the Palestinians would press for more than what is their right according to International Law, particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Don't you think that the statement you have made above can only be truly be evidenced when, subsequent to those rights being acknowledged, the Palestinians demand more?
As a long time observer of this conflict, I have seen nothing to indicate that either the Palestinians claim anything more than is sanctioned by International Law or that Israel has ever offered to comply with it.
What is it that Israel might lose?
Possibly the privilege of being a State dedicated to the notion that one particular ethnicity/religion should rule but hey, isn't that the way of the World in the 21st Century?
Basically, Obama should keep his mouth shut and go golfing. More progress might be made in the Middle East--heck, more progress might be made in encouraging the US economy to grow.
Dershowitz, always wrong, is always siding against America, and it's duly elected leaders. His loyalties lie with Israel.
Israel needs to be cut off. We can't afford friends like them, who take our money while insulting our President. We have the opportunity to befriend EVERYBODY ELSE, why should we side with them anymore? What have they done for us, besides spying and stealing our nuclear secrets?
The solution is simple, it worked for South Africa - boycott Israeli Products.
BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS CAMPAIGN:
http://wwwÂÂÂ.bigcampÂaÂiÂgn.orgÂ/
BIG YAWN!
www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/world/middleeast/03syria.html
Let's see....
I guess current US citizens should prepare to leave all the US land acquired through wa-r with Spain, England. France, and Mexico....and Native Americans.
When you engage in wa-r and lose, you sometimes lose land. Period.
The Palestinian society would be far better off trying to improve itself on what land they have, rather than trying to wage constant wa-r.
It's all convenient of course, to 'forget'.
Please point out the Israeli precondition to negotiating that you refer to, other than the obvious requirement that enemies purporting to negotiate peace must recognize the right of each other's existence, otherwise there is nothing to negotiate.
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Good Grief, This must be the tenth blog on HuffPo trying to explain Obama’s INCOMPETENCE.
Obama is a lightweight on the international stage....the whole world giggles when he trys to explain his bungling time after time.
Not a quick study is he?
The SEAL ‘s got OBL, Obama watched on TV. I give the man credit for the decision, but he did not “get†OBL, the accolades for the kill go to the door kickers of Team 6.
There was wartime and they feared for their lives and their families. It's quite unusual to define war refugees as "disenfranchised" from their beloved home and lands.
Review this "historical fact" : the leaders of the surrounding Arab armies promised that the refugees would soon be able to return to their homes. Apparently a mistaken calculation on the Arab generals' part.
So now they can't come home? Egypt, Syria, Jordan waged war. Not the Israeli-Palestinians. They were told to run for their lives. So they did and the following history is that neither Egypt demanded Gaza back nor did Jordan demand return of the West Bank, a situation leaving war refugees interned in Lebanon as well.
Land swaps? You bet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1THQ94yF1Ng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn4r7ZjG9Nc
Their claim to land inside Israel is tenuous at best. An analogy closer to home would be the