New Prospects for Peace

Like most of my readers, I’m sure, I was extremely curious to hear the details of the much ballyhooed peace plan for the Middle East promised for years by the current administration and finally published for the world to see just last week. Yes, I understood that its release date was surely timed specifically to draw the attention of the American people away from the fact that the plan’s presidential sponsor was at the time on trial in the Senate. And, yes, I certainly also understood that the chances of both sides hearing the details and then moving on directly to beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks were, to say the very least, remote. Still, I have to admit that I was extremely interested in hearing the details of the plan and, even more so, in seeing how the various players and non-players out there would respond to those details.

Some of the responses, particularly in the press both at home and abroad, were the knee-jerk ones any savvy observer would have expected. And, as everybody surely also knew would be the case, the Palestinian leadership made a huge show out of rejecting its every detail so quickly that it appeared not even for it to have been discussed at all by their leadership, let alone at length and in detail, before that response was formulated. (Mahmoud Abbas’s “a thousand no’s to this deal” comment was certainly clear enough, as was his reference to the deal as “the slap of the century,” which is actually saying quite a lot.) But diplomacy is the art of the possible, not the visible…and I continued—and continue—to hope that behind all that negative bluster lies at least the possibility of some sort of negotiated settlement based on the idea put forward in last week’s proposal.

One interesting detail that struck me was how uniformly it appeared to be understood—including by ardent supporters of Israel—that the details of the plan strongly favor Israel and that the Palestinians, after seven long decades of playing a loser’s game featuring relentless inflexibility and negativity, need finally to understand that time is most definitely not on their side, that the world—including a significant portion of the Arab world—is tired of their unwavering intransigence, and that most reasonable outside observers still can’t quite understand why the Palestinians walked away from Oslo Accords or—even more to the point—why the Palestinians, who seem never to tire of expressing their wish to function in the world as an independent nation, don’t simply declare their independence and then get on with the business of nation building.

And yet a strong case could also be made that the deal, although strongly rooted in a realistic assessment of Israel’s security needs, also grants almost axiomatic credence to many notions—including some rooted far more in fantasy than history—that the Palestinians have been putting forward as basic planks of their national self-image for decades. For example, the 180 pages of the proposal (which I have actually read and which readers can see for themselves by clicking here) accept the Palestinian claim to an ongoing presence in the region and ignore the fact that the today’s Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of the people who came with an Arab army of occupation that invaded from the east in the seventh century and brought the Jewish homeland under the jurisdiction of a series of caliphates based serially in Medina, Damascus, and Baghdad. (For more on the question of who the occupiers in this story are and who, the indigenes, click here.)  For another, the proposal accepts as basic the right of the Palestinians to their own state as though this were a no-brainer that no one could rationally oppose despite the fact that the world—the real world, I mean, the one in which all parties to the conflict actually live—is filled almost to overflowing with groups possessed of strong senses of national identity whose chances of evolving into independent nations on the territory of other people’s countries are basically zero. (No need to trust me here either—just ask the first Basque you run into, or the first Chechen, Mohawk, Lapp, Breton, Ainu, Norman, Manx, Mayan, Biafran, Uighur, or Rohingya, and see what they have to say.) Furthermore, the proposal seems to accept as basic that the Palestinians have a right to at least a kind of autonomous presence in Jerusalem—despite the fact that the mosques atop the Temple Mount are already under the control of Jordan, an Arab-Muslim state. Nor, needless to say, does the report note—even in passing—that the two-state solution is already a feature of the Middle East, the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab state of Jordan existing side-by-side on the territory of the very British Mandate of Palestine that the United Nations, in the days when it could still be taken seriously as a force for good in the world, voted for partition on November 29, 1947. So to say that the document is hostile to the national aspirations of the Palestinians is not as correct as so many seem to think: in many ways, it accepts as valid and normative the basic principles that underlie those nationalistic aspiration even when they are rooted more in fantasy than in reality or history.

In the end, if the Palestinians can move past their tradition of unyielding obduracy, there are a lot of very good reasons for them to accept the plan put forward last week as the basis for the kind of intense negotiation that really could bring peace to the region.

There is, to start, enough money on the table to start the future state of Palestine off not only on sound financial footing, but possessed of enough funding to begin to create an Arab version of the start-up nation that has brought Israel such renown and prosperity. And we are not talking about trifling sums here—the report sees the potential for pumping $50 billion into the economy of a peaceful Palestinian entity in the Middle East in the course of the coming decade. If that kind of money were used wisely and well, the Palestinians could create a future for their own children that would be the envy of their Arab neighbors throughout the Middle East.

There’s also the practical side of American politics to consider here too. It is certainly well within the realm of possibility that President Trump will win a second term. But even if he loses to a Democratic rival, the chances of a new administration coming up with a plan that will offer the Palestinians more and that the Israeli leadership will still be able to support seem remote to me. Indeed, it is precisely because this plan speaks so directly to Israel’s security needs that the Palestinians should embrace it: this is their chance to negotiate their own autonomy without Israel being able to walk away from the table over its own security concerns without looking obstructionist and unreasonable.

Thirdly, this is a chance, once and for all, for the Palestinians to abandon—both with dignity and a principled acceptance of reality—the notion that somehow, when the dust all settles, the third- and fourth-generation descendants of people who decamped during the War of Independence will be able simply to move back into the homes their grandparents and great-grandparents fled in 1948. No Israeli government would ever agree to that. Nor would any Israeli who wants to live in a Jewish state—and least of all the descendants of Jews who were expelled from Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and so many other countries in the Arab world and who were never compensated for their losses. There was regrettable and unfortunate loss on both sides, but time has come to move past that sense of endless grievance and the agreement currently on the table speaks directly to that point.

Finally, the plan offers the Palestinians a way to wrest Gaza from the hands of Hamas by making it part of a future political entity to be governed by new leaders chosen by the people in free elections. Given what is on the table—and specifically given the way Hamas has failed to create in Gaza anything remotely like a peaceful society with a thriving economy—it’s hard to imagine the Palestinian people handing the mandate to govern to Hamas or any other terrorist organization. The Palestinians deserve to be led by leaders whose primary—maybe even whose sole concern—is the welfare of the governed. I can’t imagine that such people don’t exist. And this could well be the moment for such people finally to step forward and for things to change for the better. Of course, the current leaders of the P.A. certainly understand that they would be obliged—at least eventually—to cede power to a new generation of leaders and that means that agreeing to come to the table to begin working out a new deal for the Middle East would require a certain selflessness born of patriotism and hope in the future. Would Mahmoud Abbas and his people be capable of such a gesture? The odds are not good at all. But, as I have often noted in these pages, even the laws of probability allow for the occasional improbably event. We shall all soon see what the future brings. But, at least for the moment, we can hope that the Palestinians come to realize that they are standing at a crossroads and that a future characterized by prosperity and peace is well within their grasp.