Walter Russell Mead: The World Must Do More For Middle East Peace
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have a lot to answer for in their 100-year-plus conflict over some of the most miserable and hardscrabble but somehow beloved land on the face of the earth. But the sad and sorry truth is that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are really responsible for the mess that they are both in — and neither party can solve the problem on its own.
We outsiders love to blame those two squabbling peoples for their long and vicious war. These days most outsiders blame the Israelis — stronger, richer, mostly descended from immigrants who’ve only been (back) in the land for a century or less. Obviously as the stronger and richer party, say these folks, the Israelis should make the lion’s share of concessions. It is up to Israel to make the Palestinians happy, says a large fraction of world opinion, and its obstinate failure to do so is a crime not only against the suffering Palestinians, but against all the rest of us whose comfortable slumbers are so often and rudely disturbed by this incessant and distressing conflict. Meanwhile the incessant Israeli settlements and land seizures inflame both Palestinian and world public opinion and the brutality and cost of occupation hurts the Palestinians, frustrates their prospects for economic growth, and infuriates people all over the world.
Other outsiders say that the big problem is the Palestinians: they ‘never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ If they’d known what was good for them, they would have accepted either the British proposal or the UN proposal for partition back before Israel’s War of Independence. If they’d been smart enough to do that, there would be no Palestinian refugee problem today and they would have a lot more land. Failing that, they should have made peace in 1967 — they would have gotten every acre of the territories back without a single Israeli settlement. (Although there would have been some tough arguments over Jerusalem.) The chief cause of the endless prolongation of the conflict and of Palestinian suffering in this view is the repeated failure of the Palestinian leadership to accept compromise. The compromise they contemptuously reject today inexorably becomes the utopia they will dream of ten years down the road.
Again, there is some truth in both stories, but not enough. The largest and most expansive concessions that the Israelis can make (return to the pre-1967 borders, a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem with Islamic holy places under Palestinian control, compensation and financial aid to refugees) will not meet the true minimum Palestinian conditions for an acceptable peace. By the same token, no Palestinian leadership, however compromise-minded and moderate, can deliver what Israelis most crave in exchange: credible guarantees of security and the end of conflict and claims. That is the ugly reality at the heart of the conflict.
The U.N. and Us
The status quo in the Middle East isn’t Israel’s fault and it isn’t the Palestinians’ fault. If the world community seriously wants to understand, much less address this bitter, destructive and dangerous conflict it needs to spend some time looking in the mirror. It was decisions taken by the international community, not by the Israelis and not the Palestinians, that set the stage for this ongoing tragedy, and it is the international community and only the international community that can put this conflict on the long glide path toward final peace.
The conflict and the refugee crisis are both direct results of decisions made by the League of Nations (whose award of the mandate for Palestine to Britain incorporated the terms of the Balfour Declaration promising a homeland for the Jews) and the United Nations. The United Nations didn’t just propose a partition plan for Palestine in 1947 (accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs): when the British announced that they were giving up the mandate and going home, the United Nations made no provision for the security of the territory’s inhabitants during the transition period. In the absence of international peacekeepers or any other guarantees for their security, both the Jewish and the Arabic communities of British Palestine had to act in self defense as each community best understood its interest. The resulting war led directly to the creation of the refugee problem as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes — and the poisonous and bitter aftermath of the war led to the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel from all over the Arab world.
Each community nourished its grudges; to some degree they are both still doing it now.
But the international community could have prevented this if it had either enforced the partition plan it endorsed or at the very least taken up its legal and moral responsibility to provide basic security in Palestine while discussions continued. Neither the Jews nor the Arabs could do this in 1947-48. Today, 0nly the international community has the resources to move the dispute toward some kind of closure.
This is the ugly and uncomfortable truth that the world so often ignores as we get on our moral high ground and lecture to the squabbling Israelis and Palestinians about their stubborn failures to make peace: Israeli concessions alone cannot bring dignity and a decent future for a significant group of Palestinians...
Read entire article at American Interest (blog)
Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have a lot to answer for in their 100-year-plus conflict over some of the most miserable and hardscrabble but somehow beloved land on the face of the earth. But the sad and sorry truth is that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians are really responsible for the mess that they are both in — and neither party can solve the problem on its own.
We outsiders love to blame those two squabbling peoples for their long and vicious war. These days most outsiders blame the Israelis — stronger, richer, mostly descended from immigrants who’ve only been (back) in the land for a century or less. Obviously as the stronger and richer party, say these folks, the Israelis should make the lion’s share of concessions. It is up to Israel to make the Palestinians happy, says a large fraction of world opinion, and its obstinate failure to do so is a crime not only against the suffering Palestinians, but against all the rest of us whose comfortable slumbers are so often and rudely disturbed by this incessant and distressing conflict. Meanwhile the incessant Israeli settlements and land seizures inflame both Palestinian and world public opinion and the brutality and cost of occupation hurts the Palestinians, frustrates their prospects for economic growth, and infuriates people all over the world.
Other outsiders say that the big problem is the Palestinians: they ‘never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ If they’d known what was good for them, they would have accepted either the British proposal or the UN proposal for partition back before Israel’s War of Independence. If they’d been smart enough to do that, there would be no Palestinian refugee problem today and they would have a lot more land. Failing that, they should have made peace in 1967 — they would have gotten every acre of the territories back without a single Israeli settlement. (Although there would have been some tough arguments over Jerusalem.) The chief cause of the endless prolongation of the conflict and of Palestinian suffering in this view is the repeated failure of the Palestinian leadership to accept compromise. The compromise they contemptuously reject today inexorably becomes the utopia they will dream of ten years down the road.
Again, there is some truth in both stories, but not enough. The largest and most expansive concessions that the Israelis can make (return to the pre-1967 borders, a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem with Islamic holy places under Palestinian control, compensation and financial aid to refugees) will not meet the true minimum Palestinian conditions for an acceptable peace. By the same token, no Palestinian leadership, however compromise-minded and moderate, can deliver what Israelis most crave in exchange: credible guarantees of security and the end of conflict and claims. That is the ugly reality at the heart of the conflict.
The U.N. and Us
The status quo in the Middle East isn’t Israel’s fault and it isn’t the Palestinians’ fault. If the world community seriously wants to understand, much less address this bitter, destructive and dangerous conflict it needs to spend some time looking in the mirror. It was decisions taken by the international community, not by the Israelis and not the Palestinians, that set the stage for this ongoing tragedy, and it is the international community and only the international community that can put this conflict on the long glide path toward final peace.
The conflict and the refugee crisis are both direct results of decisions made by the League of Nations (whose award of the mandate for Palestine to Britain incorporated the terms of the Balfour Declaration promising a homeland for the Jews) and the United Nations. The United Nations didn’t just propose a partition plan for Palestine in 1947 (accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs): when the British announced that they were giving up the mandate and going home, the United Nations made no provision for the security of the territory’s inhabitants during the transition period. In the absence of international peacekeepers or any other guarantees for their security, both the Jewish and the Arabic communities of British Palestine had to act in self defense as each community best understood its interest. The resulting war led directly to the creation of the refugee problem as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes — and the poisonous and bitter aftermath of the war led to the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Israel from all over the Arab world.
Each community nourished its grudges; to some degree they are both still doing it now.
But the international community could have prevented this if it had either enforced the partition plan it endorsed or at the very least taken up its legal and moral responsibility to provide basic security in Palestine while discussions continued. Neither the Jews nor the Arabs could do this in 1947-48. Today, 0nly the international community has the resources to move the dispute toward some kind of closure.
This is the ugly and uncomfortable truth that the world so often ignores as we get on our moral high ground and lecture to the squabbling Israelis and Palestinians about their stubborn failures to make peace: Israeli concessions alone cannot bring dignity and a decent future for a significant group of Palestinians...