Wednesday, February 26, 2014

What can Bibi be thinking?

Secretary of State John Kerry, continuing his extraordinary efforts to craft a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, efforts that have included shuttle diplomacy and arm twisting, appears to be on the verge of issuing the “Kerry Parameters”, a final status framework to guide future negotiations. Critics and pundits have said that this is just more of the same failed policy. This time may be different. For one thing, this will be the first American proposal designed to resolve the conflict since the “Clinton Parameters” in 2000. While no one except the insiders knows the exact content of the proposal, leaks and informed speculation leads me to believe that Kerry’s document will contain the following:

· Two states based on the 1967 borders with negotiated land swaps

· Jerusalem as a shared capital

· Israel to retain the major settlement blocks

· The Palestinian state to be demilitarized

· Israel to have a security force in the Jordan River valley for an extended period of time

· Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state

· No return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland

As with all the previous efforts to resolve the Israel/Palestine situation the devil is in the details. It appears that the Kerry Parameters will largely be based on the Clinton Parameters. In the land swaps, the Israelis will get land near the major population centers and the Palestinians will get an equivalent amount of desert. The Palestinian capital in Jerusalem will probably be a building somewhere near Jerusalem. The presence of the Israeli security force in the Jordan Valley will be vaguely worded in a way that it will likely become permanent. In short, Israel will get everything that it has declared that it needs in a two-state solution.

The political stars also seem to be aligned to make this time different. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, with no effective opposition, having assembled a stable governing coalition, is in a strong political position. On the other hand, the Palestinians, riven by divisions between Fatah and Hamas, represented by a corrupt, incompetent, illegitimate Palestinian Authority, having an economy solely dependent on Israeli inputs and foreign aid, as if preparing themselves to fade into a desert sandstorm, are in no position to negotiate from strength. The regional Arab states, long supportive of the Palestinian cause, are engulfed in chaos or, as is the case of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States, just want to see the problem go away so that they can focus their attention on Iran, their number one enemy. Iran, a longtime supporter of the Palestinian cause, may be willing to give up the fight in order to retain its nuclear program while getting sanctions relief.

Having received everything that he wanted, why then is Bibi still pushing back against the plan? The answer may lie in the old cliché, “be careful what you wish for, you might just get it”. In the twenty plus years of the Oslo Peace Process, Israel, while expanding its footprint on the West Bank, has been able to make the security argument that a Palestinian state is an existential threat in order to frustrate the two-state solution. Faced with the Law of Return, allowing any Jew moving to Israel to obtain citizenship, Israel, with no defined borders, has been able to use the West Bank settlements to accommodate this burgeoning Jewish population. Fixed borders which do not include all of the West Bank will not only exacerbate the problem, but also anger the religious Jews who, seeing Judea and Samaria as a gift from God, wish to establish “Eretz Israel” from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.

The fixed borders of this plan allow Israel to get rid of most, but not all, of its Arab population. With the so-called Palestinian state in place, the attention of internal, as well as international, activists will now be focused on the second class status of Israel’s 1.5mm Arab citizens. Feeling that the two-state solution would never happen, successive Israeli governments have done almost nothing to prepare for this eventuality. It seems that Netanyahu’s strategy depends on finding a way to torpedo the proposal and having the Palestinians be blamed for it.

No comments: