The Peace Paradox

By Henry Kissinger
Los Angeles Times Syndicate International
Monday, December 4, 2000; Page A27

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20080-2000Dec3.html

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in calling for new elections for the Israeli
Parliament, also has indicated that he will use the interval to resume the
so-called peace process. Since the last Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
four months ago turned first into stalemate, then into intifada, it is
important to deal with two questions: What went wrong? How can another
debacle be avoided?

The realities that produced the peace process in the first place have not
changed. Neither side can defeat the other. The Palestinians cannot win
because Israel is too strong militarily, and Israel cannot win because the
Palestinians are too strong politically. Both sides are therefore condemned
to coexistence, the chief issue being whether this comes about as a military
stalemate or from some sort of agreement.

Failure to keep these fundamentals in mind was a principal cause of the
breakdown of negotiations. President Clinton and Prime Minister Barak had
convinced themselves that the peace process resulted from nothing less than
a Palestinian conversion to peace in the abstract rather than from the
pursuit of historical Palestinian objectives by less violent means. This is
why both ignored Yassar Arafat's repeated warning that the time was not yet
ripe for a summit. Whatever one's judgment of Arafat's motives, it is
important to understand the philosophical gulf between the way Israel and
America define peace and the way the Palestinians do.

Israel regards peace as a culmination of the struggle for a homeland and
defines it as a normality that ends claims and determines a permanent legal
status. Israeli and American leaders were applying the concepts of the
20th-century liberal democracy; but the Palestinians--or at least many of
them--live by convictions more comparable to those of Europe during the
17th-century religious conflicts. To them--and to many Arabs--Israel is an
intrusion in "holy" Arab territory. The territorial compromises proposed by
Israel and American mediators are viewed as amputations of their cultural
and theological patrimony.

When Barak opened the Camp David summit by offering Arafat something like 92
percent of the pre-1967 West Bank territory, he was going far beyond any
previous Israeli prime minister. But to the Palestinians, the 1967 borders
represent a concession in themselves, fully acceptable, if at all, only to
the most dovish among them--always cited by Israeli and Western
intellectuals as the genuine expression of Palestinian convictions, though
recent events have produced little evidence to that effect. The majority of
Palestinians treat territorial compromise the way France accepted Germany's
annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871--as an imposition to be reversed at
the first opportunity. And a significant minority--surely larger than the
doves--do not accept the state of Israel and favor all-out confrontation.
Thus what Barak considered a huge concession was, to Arafat, a minimum
offering that he would not be able to present to his constituency as a
significant achievement. If he risked accepting it at all, he was bound to
treat it as a stage in a process of the ultimate fulfillment of Palestinian
demands that he has been careful not to make explicit. In addressing
Palestinian audiences, Arafat never strays far from the vocabulary of Jihad
and the recovery of Jerusalem, however ambiguous his language to Westerners.
It is also why the Israeli demand at Camp David that the quid pro quo be a
formal renunciation of all future claims--the essence of reasonableness to
Americans and Israelis--proved impossible for Arafat. In the face of 3
million Palestinian refugees, he could give no such assurance without losing
the support of a significant segment of his constituency.

Arafat no doubt was reinforced in his stonewalling by the precipitate
Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, which he was more likely to interpret as
weakness than generosity, and by Clinton's eagerness for an agreement. In
any event, when Israeli territorial concessions were made conditional on
Palestinian "compromises" regarding the holy places, the looming stalemate
headed for a blowup.

Paradoxically, the focus on finality proved the principal obstacle to
agreement. The linkage of the holy places to the territorial disputes
expanded the negotiation from a Palestinian to a pan-Arab, even a
pan-Islamic, issue, simultaneously extending Arafat's influence and limiting
his flexibility. So long as the controversy concerned territory, moderate
Arab leaders could treat it as a Palestinian problem and even urge some
compromises. But once that religious issue was on the table, no Arab leader
could ignore the looming fundamentalist threat to his own rule. Therefore,
Clinton's appeals to Egyptian and Saudi leaders, urging them to intervene
with Arafat, were doomed to frustration.

Camp David failed because American and Israeli policymakers had deluded
themselves about the nature of the peace process. The emotional outpouring
that followed Yitzhak Rabin's handshake with Arafat on the White House lawn
in 1993 caused a growing segment of Israeli opinion to treat the peace
process as a mutual psychological adjustment--an attitude encouraged by an
American administration prone to treat international schisms as
misunderstandings.

All this obscured how deep-seated the conflict really was. Until then, both
sides had acted as if they could wear down the other: the Palestinians by
intifada and the mobilization of global political pressure on the model of
so-called wars of liberation; Israel by refusing any dialogue and enlisting
American support in that course.

The Oslo agreement was, however, less a conversion than a recognition by
both sides of objective necessities. The Palestinians, having backed Saddam
Hussein in the Gulf War, had isolated themselves from most of the Arab
states, which were looking to Washington as the most influential outside
power. The Oslo agreement provided recognition, maneuvering room and an end
to some of the most onerous aspects of Israeli occupation.

Israel under Yitzhak Shamir, on the other hand, had clashed repeatedly with
the Bush administration over American pressures for progress toward peace
even before the Palestinians had come to the table with Israel. The new
government of Rabin wanted to put its relations with Washington on a stable
basis and saw in the Oslo process a means to achieve a greater control over
its destiny. And it was driven by a mystical, almost eschatological, desire
for peace by an ever greater part of the Israeli population, which had moved
from the pioneer spirit of the early generations to an accommodating
business ethic.

In the process, it was forgotten that the important operational aspect of
Oslo was a tacit bargain, which deferred the most difficult issues--final
borders, Jerusalem, demilitarization--to some final negotiation down the
road. It was hoped that, in the interval, a process of reciprocal moves
would build confidence between the parties. The opposite happened. Israel
was supposed to give up incrementally control over additional territory
prior to the final negotiation. In return, the Palestinians were to make
additional moves toward a more peaceful atmosphere between the two peoples.
But the quid pro quo for Israeli territorial concessions proved hard to
define. As a result, in Israel, the process began to appear like a series of
unilateral concessions just to keep the process going, while the Clinton
administration grew increasingly impatient with what it considered the
foot-dragging of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Barak took office in the aftermath--and partly as a result of an
American-Israeli diplomatic controversy. He was determined to avoid a clash
with the one ally on whose support Israel depended, and he wanted to make
sure that Israel would not be blamed for any failure of negotiations.
Moreover, he was in a hurry lest Arafat declare a Palestinian state
unilaterally, weakening Israel's bargaining position even further.
But the emergence of a Palestinian state is no longer an Israeli bargaining
card. Statehood had been inherent in Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's
offer of Palestinian autonomy at the first Camp David summit in 1978. It was
implicit in the Oslo accords. Even today, Arafat is treated as a head of
state when he travels. Within a measurable time, a Palestinian state will be
recognized by most nations, including Europe, even were America to hold back
for a while. Israeli ambivalence on this subject gives Arafat a permanent
means of pressure. Once the state has been declared, the challenge will be
coexistence with Israel--which, intifada or not, remains the option neither
party will be able to avoid indefinitely.

Barak, a former commando, sought to resolve all these issues in one fell
swoop, encouraged by an American president with great confidence in his
persuasive ability and little experience with the tragic in history. Between
them, they convinced themselves that the ultimate problem was psychological
and that Arab distrust could be overcome by unprecedented Israeli
territorial concessions. The effort was bold but bound to self-destruct,
either before or after an agreement--as I repeatedly emphasized at that
time. It now becomes crucial to draw the right lessons from the experience.

These are:

First, negotiations must not start where the last ones left off. The parties
are not ready for a final settlement--at least not on terms both sides can
accept. At this stage, rather than a peace agreement, the formula of the
second Sinai accord of 1975--that the agreement stands until superseded by
another agreement--would serve the purpose.

Second, the challenge of coexistence remains. Any new negotiation should
seek to achieve a definition of coexistence between two societies sharing a
territory only 50 miles wide. It should attempt to reduce friction between
the two societies by separating them to the greatest extent possible.
Third, the territorial issue should be settled separately from other issues.
But the resolution can no longer be--indeed, in my view, should never have
been--the 1967 borders, in which Israel's major cities are linked by a
corridor only nine miles wide. This does not provide an adequate buffer
against the sort of guerrilla war that has characterized the conflict.
Fourth, in defining these borders, major consideration should be given to
Palestinians' concerns for their ability to lead a life of dignity within an
economically viable entity. Palestinian territory should be made more
contiguous and Israeli checkpoints significantly reduced. It is also time
for Israel to review its settlement policy, especially with respect to those
settlements that are most exposed and a constant invitation to new outbursts
of violence. They should be consolidated now, with or without an agreement.
Fifth, the next U.S. administration should seek to redefine the purpose and
direction of a new "coexistence approach" before launching its own
diplomacy. It should not bow to international pressures to plunge in
immediately and "do something." In recent years, the United States has been
too involved in the minutiae of the negotiations and not sufficiently
attentive to overall purposes. It has used up credibility by involving
itself in detail and personalities or in seeking to shape outcomes by
influencing Israel's domestic politics.

Sixth, thoughtfulness will be more important than speed.
The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger
Associates, an international consulting firm that has clients with business
interests in many countries abroad.

(c)2000, Los Angeles Times Syndicate International
© 2000 The Washington Post Company

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