PRESSURE ON ISRAEL: LESLIE GELB….SEE NOTE PLEASE
AMERICA PRESSURES ISRAEL PLENTY FOREIGN POLICY JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/unconventional_wisdom?page=0,6
GELB LAYS IT OUT WELL BUT WHY IS IT THAT IN SPITE OF RECOGNIZING THE UNFAIR DEMANDS AND THE RATCHETING HATRED EVERY TIME ISRAEL AGREES TO APPEASEMENT….THE LIGHT AT THE END OF ISRAEL’S DARK TUNNEL IS ALWAYS A TWO STATE DISSOLUTION?
Scholars, pundits, propagandists, and journalists have created two dangerous
pieces of conventional wisdom about the Middle East: that Israelis, not
Palestinians, have been the main stumbling block to peace, and that the
United States has failed to use its influence to pressure Israel for serious
compromises. Both propositions are largely untrue. If uncorrected, these
myths could make both Palestinians and Israelis feel irretrievably wronged
and unwilling ever to negotiate in good faith.
Israel has a long and compelling history of making major concessions to
Arabs. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem in 1977, and less
than two years later, Israel agreed to return the entire Sinai Peninsula,
booty of a war it did not start and an act of territorial generosity
unprecedented in modern history. Israelis negotiated with Palestinian leader
Yasir Arafat, whom they rightly considered a terrorist. At the end of U.S.
President Bill Clinton’s administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
offered the Palestinians several key concessions, including more than 90
percent of the West Bank. After the Annapolis initiative put forward by
George W. Bush’s administration, one of Barak’s successors, Ehud Olmert,
upped the offerings considerably: more of the West Bank, a sliver of Arab
East Jerusalem for a Palestinian capital, and a land swap to give the new
Palestinian state a land link to Gaza. Olmert even privately accepted “the
right of return” to Israel for a certain number of Palestinian refugees. To
both generous proposals, the Palestinians said either no or nothing.
In return, the Israelis received little, and the Palestinians insisted on
more of everything. Their rationale was that they needed further concessions
to compensate for Israeli demands limiting the size and capability of
Palestinian security forces. These restrictions, they said, would undermine
the very feasibility of a sovereign Palestinian state. The Israelis argued
that they needed these added protections because Israel could not count on
Arabs to accept Israel’s existence. They cited the Palestinians’ rejection
of a Jewish history in Israel and even any Jewish connection to the Temple
Mount in the heart of Jerusalem. For good measure, the Palestinians still
refuse to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” Nor do the Palestinians
acknowledge that when Israel departed Gaza in 2005, it uprooted 9,000
Israeli settlers. In return, Israel got rockets and a terrorist enclave run
by Hamas.
At each step in this tortuous negotiating process, the United States has
pushed and pulled Israel toward concessions, but received little or no
credit from the Arab side. Sometimes this pressure has been public, as in
President Barack Obama’s recent scolding of Israel over its West Bank
settlements, but more often it has been private. Yet Arabs have not wanted
to credit Washington’s role as a peacemaker because they think the United
States is capable of exerting even more pressure on Israel. Nonetheless, the
American role has been real and substantial.
Israel has only made this world of misperceptions worse. It has explained
its concessions badly, if at all. Consider, for example, how Israeli
governments refuse to tout their history of concessions on the West Bank for
fear these would be taken as starting points in ongoing negotiations.
Apparently, Israelis would rather look guilty than weak.
Israelis certainly deserve criticism for continuing their West Bank
settlements. But they deserve credit for their concrete efforts to make
peace. And so does the United States. Yet the myths prevail, and dangerously
so.
Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, a
former senior U.S. government official, and a former columnist for the New
York Times.
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