The
Continuity of Obama’s Change
Mouin Rabbani
and Chris Toensing
January 27,
2009
(Mouin Rabbani,
a contributing editor of Middle East Report, is an Amman-based
political analyst. Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East
Report.)
President
Barack Obama’s campaign pledge that his administration would
begin working for peace in the Middle East from its first day
in office is one that he almost met. On January 21, a mere 24
hours after his inauguration, Obama placed phone calls from the
Oval Office to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian
Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Husni
Mubarak and Jordanian King ‘Abdallah II. The next day, together
with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, he visited the State Department to announce the appointment
of former Sen. George Mitchell as the new special envoy for the
Middle East.
Virtually
everyone who followed these proceedings emerged satisfied, not
least because Obama seemed to understand what he was saying and
spoke in coherent, complete sentences. For some, his willingness
to throw American diplomacy at the Israeli-Palestinian crisis
so early in his administration represented a breath of fresh
air after eight years of “neglect” under former President George
W. Bush. Others suggested Obama seems to have additionally learned
from the mistakes of the 1990s, when Washington failed to put
forth its own agenda for a permanent settlement until it was
too late in the game. Still others, in Arab chanceries, were
grateful simply that Obama acknowledged the suffering of Palestinians
trapped under Israeli aerial assault and economic blockade.
Many also
lauded the choice of Mitchell, whether on account of his prior
diplomatic success in Northern Ireland or his previous experience
in matters Israeli-Palestinian. But most of all, Obama was praised
for signaling a clean break with the catastrophic legacy of his
predecessor -- one all too evident in the ruins of, most recently,
Gaza. Such attitudes, however, represent a leap of faith unwarranted
by the history of US policy toward Israel-Palestine and, more
to the point, developments on the ground, still smoldering from
Israeli bombardments of unprecedented intensity.
Evolution
US media outlets
were quick to pronounce Obama’s “big phone calls to the Middle
East” “another marker of change” that the new president is, rather
unfairly, expected to bring to every domain of American life.
Yet the American political system is not one given to sudden
and significant shifts in foreign policy, least of all on account
of directives emanating from the Oval Office. Rather, foreign
policy, and perhaps nowhere more so than toward the Middle East,
is characterized by evolution, typically at a slow pace. Produced
by a variety of competing interests encompassing the bureaucracy,
business elites, the military, Congress and various lobbies,
policy tends to change only when consensus is achieved on a new
direction, with the role of the president generally limited to
formalizing rather than catalyzing the process. Bush’s notorious
aphorism, “I’m the decider,” represented ambition, not reality.
Thus the idea
of regime change in Iraq had its roots in the administration
of Bush père, and became US policy under President Bill
Clinton, long before being pursued by Bush fils. Similarly,
Obama’s much-touted withdrawal from Iraq, like his pledge to
talk to Iran, continues rather than changes policies introduced
during the final years of the second Bush administration. Though
one would not know it from the hyperventilation on the American
right, even the Bush administration mused once or twice about
shutting down the law-free zone at Guantánamo Bay. Where dramatic
shifts in US policy do occur, these are, as a rule, responses
to momentous events in the region rather than momentous decisions
in Washington.
The same pattern
holds true for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Witness the
readout of Obama’s phone calls delivered by White House Press
Secretary Robert Gibbs: The president told his fellow heads of
state and leaders of government that he is committed to “establishing
an effective anti-smuggling regime to prevent Hamas from rearming,
and facilitating in partnership with the Palestinian Authority
a major reconstruction effort for Palestinians in Gaza.” The
first clause of Obama’s promise nodded to the legitimacy of Israel’s
Operation Cast Lead, as Bush had emphatically done, by affirming
the war aim for which Israel settled before calling off the attacks
on January 18, as well as the agreement Israel reached with ex-Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice on her last day on the job. The second
clause also indicated continuity with the Bush administration’s
orientation, for the PA to which Obama referred is that part
of it located in the West Bank, ruled by the expired presidency
of Mahmoud Abbas and dominated by his Fatah party, to the exclusion
of the lame-duck government in the Gaza Strip controlled by Hamas,
which also has a majority in the PA legislature. This apparent
continuation of the policy of freezing out Hamas is dubious not
only because it seeks to annul the results of the 2006 Palestinian
elections, and give Washington the right to determine who represents
the Palestinians, but also on practical grounds. As Nathan Brown
observes in an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment of International
Peace, “If the assistance [for Gaza humanitarian needs and reconstruction]
is to go through regular PA channels, those answer to Hamas.
Even if rebuilding and assistance is the task not of the PA but
of international actors, those can only operate with the permission
and cooperation of the Gaza PA.”
Obama devoted
a goodly portion of his January 22 remarks in Foggy Bottom to
explaining his approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, concluding
with the announcement that Mitchell would be dispatched to the
region “as soon as possible to help the parties ensure that the
ceasefire that has been achieved is made durable and sustainable.”
Mitchell, indeed, departed on January 26. Carter-era National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, appearing on MSNBC’s Rachel
Maddow Show, hailed the “sense of urgency” conveyed by Obama’s
commentary. Yet nothing therein would have been out of place
in the transcript of Bush’s final press conference, whether concerning
Israel, the Palestinians, Arab states, the US role or the diplomatic
agenda. Even at the rhetorical level, a bromide like, “we are
confronted by extraordinary, complex and interconnected global
challenges: the war on terror, sectarian division and the spread
of deadly technology. We did not ask for the burden that history
has asked us to bear, but Americans will bear it,” could just
as easily have emanated from Obama’s predecessor. The same is
true of the president’s statement: “Just as the terror of rocket
fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a
future without hope for the Palestinians.” The source of Israeli
fears is named, but the perpetuator of Palestinian despair is
not. In fact, though Obama went on to call for opening the Gazan
border crossings, he first hinted, as the Bush team had done,
that the Palestinians are partly to blame for their closure.
Israelis cannot abide the rocket fire, he said, and “neither
should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are
only set back by acts of terror.”
Back to
2001
As with Obama’s
speech, the media and the Washington peace process industry met
Mitchell’s investiture as special envoy with loud hosannas. “At
Last, an Honest Broker,” Israel Policy Forum director of policy
analysis M. J. Rosenberg headlined his regular Friday column.
The editorialists at USA Today concurred: “His appointment
signals a US return toward the role of honest broker.” Brzezinski
approved of the ex-senator as a person “trusted” by both Israel
and its Arab neighbors, a take-charge personality who is “not
just there to preside over needless, endless dialogues.” And
because Mitchell is of (part) Lebanese heritage, the New York
Times added, his appointment signals that Washington is “also
sensitive to the Palestinians’ many legitimate grievances.”
Much was made
in the op-eds praising Mitchell of his earlier foray into Middle
East shuttle diplomacy. In October 2000, President Clinton tapped
Mitchell to head a “committee of fact-finding” to look into the
conditions that had produced the Palestinian uprising that erupted
in late September of that year. The resulting Mitchell report,
issued on May 21, 2001, was cheered for its “balance” and “pragmatism”
both at the time and in the recent retrospectives, its crucial
merit being that it was “accepted by both sides.”
Jackson Diehl
penned a more sober remembrance in the January 23 Washington
Post, noting the “conservatism” of the Mitchell appointment
“at a point when long-time veterans of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy
are calling for a radical rethinking of US strategy.” Instead,
the columnist concluded Mitchell might “have the effect of returning
US policy to about where it was in October 2001.” As Diehl recalled,
the Mitchell report recommended a series of “confidence-building
measures” to move the parties, incrementally, back onto the path
of comprehensive negotiations. First, the PA, then controlled
by Yasser Arafat, was to exert “100 percent effort to prevent
terrorist operations,” a formulation that was then understood
to include attacks on soldiers or settlers in the Occupied Territories.
After this effort had succeeded, the report continued, Israel
should “consider” such confidence-building measures of its own
as lessening the burdens of occupation upon the Palestinians
and halting the construction of settlements on lands taken in
1967. This plodding, phased approach was destined to fail, and
not only because it was too “engaged” for the Bush administration,
as Diehl suggests.
The peace
process industry, in whose ranks Diehl includes former and soon-to-be
current State Department official Dennis Ross, insists that confidence-building
measures might have worked, as Diehl writes, “if only American
diplomacy were energetic enough.” It is certainly true that the
Bush administration, eager to leave Israel free rein in the Occupied
Territories, did not work to bring the Mitchell report’s recommendations
to fruition and instead threw its weight behind ex-Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon’s policy of “constructive destruction” toward the
PA. But the Mitchell report was the direct forebear of Bush’s
2003 “road map” to peace, which featured the same phased approach
beginning with the cessation of Palestinian violence, as adjudicated
by Israel and the United States. The “road map,” in turn, gave
way to the Annapolis process that commenced in November 2007.
All of these initiatives, needless to say, failed completely.
The Mitchell
report shared the structural flaw of all US interventions on
the Israeli-Palestinian front subsequent to the collapse of talks
at Camp David in July 2000. Whether through a stoppage of Palestinian
resistance, constitutional and security reform, or institution
building, it placed the onus for progress toward peace and Palestinian
statehood upon the occupied people, and deferred the duties of
the occupying power until later. And it spoke not at all of the
foremost of those obligations, the duty to end the occupation.
Those who
believe that the Obama administration brings good tidings for
Middle East peace therefore have essentially only two arguments
in their favor: that Obama is committed to improving US relations
with the Muslim world and understands this cannot be done without
resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the transformational
impact of Israel’s Gaza war suggests he cannot put the conflict
on the back burner -- as many suspect he would have liked to
do for at least the better part of his first term -- in order
to first deal with the global financial meltdown, wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan in which America is directly involved, and more
direct threats to US interests emerging from Iran and Pakistan.
Planned
Obsolescence
Yet there
is no going back to 2001. If there is a significant difference
between Obama’s approach, as telegraphed to date, and Bush’s,
it is that much of what Obama said has been made obsolete by
Israel’s Gaza campaign: Mahmoud Abbas, the 2002 Arab peace initiative
and the peace process are in the past tense; Arab normalization
with Israel is being reversed; and today Fatah needs Hamas in
order to survive more than the Palestinian Islamists need the
Ramallah PA to bring emergency supplies into the Gaza Strip.
While Mitchell may be able to move forward by leaving Ramallah
off his itinerary, he cannot succeed without at least the tacit
cooperation of Hamas.
Indeed, Israel’s
onslaught in the Gaza Strip solidified emerging trends in the
Middle East that are unlikely to be reversed in the near future,
least of all by business as usual. Among these trends is the
eclipse of Saudi-Egyptian leadership of Arab diplomacy. Undermined
by the refusal of either Israel or the US to engage with the
Arab peace initiative, and severely damaged by Cairo and Riyadh’s
support for Israel during the 2006 Lebanon war, that claim to
leadership has been fatally discredited by Saudi and Egyptian
sins of omission and commission during the Gaza conflict. Weaker
and smaller rivals and adversaries such as Syria and Qatar now
shamelessly flout the will of Cairo and Riyadh, with the consequence
that regional actors like Turkey and Iran are playing an increasingly
important role in setting the Arab agenda.
Interestingly,
the coup de grace to the Arab peace initiative may well
have been delivered by Obama at the State Department on January
22. In an environment where even the Saudis had recently suggested
the initiative could be suspended, and with Arab public opinion
clamoring for it to be shredded, Obama went no further than calling
it a plan “that contains constructive elements that could help
advance” peace efforts, before demanding that Arab states immediately,
unilaterally and completely fulfill their end of the bargain
-- normalization.
Within the
Palestinian arena, the Obama administration appears similarly
poised to plant the kiss of death upon the brow of Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas, emboldened in the aftermath of the Gaza war, and determined
to exact a high price from its rivals in Ramallah for their collusion
with Israel during the past 18 months, is insisting that Fatah
renounce the Annapolis process, terminate security cooperation
with Israel and release Islamist detainees from PA prisons as
conditions for national reconciliation. Increasingly, this agenda
is getting a sympathetic hearing among key Fatah power centers.
Yet it is one that Abbas not only rejects but also cannot accommodate
without effectively renouncing everything he represents. Given
his propensity for sheer political folly, the last thing he needs
is a joint platform with Mitchell from which to attack Hamas
and denounce Palestinian resistance, volunteer his government
as the conduit for assistance to the Gaza Strip, pledge fealty
to a peace process in partnership with Israel under US auspices
and publicly call for secret negotiations to work out a political
agreement.
Fatah as well
as the PLO are in a state of meltdown, and every day Abbas remains
at the helm serves to only prolong the agony and increase the
likelihood the patient will not recover. What both organizations
desperately need is an agreement with Hamas, rather than a new
round of talks about talks with Washington that are predicated
on the illusion of reconfiguring the Palestinian political system
to Abbas’ advantage.
In the meantime,
Hamas is preoccupied with its relations with Israel. As the January
27 incidents show, the existing ceasefire is highly volatile
for the simple reason that it consists of two unilateral initiatives
rather than an agreement, with no similar measures regarding
key issues like the blockade, smuggling routes and a prisoner
exchange. No less importantly, the war has increased rather than
lessened Hamas’ determination to lift the blockade. Israel’s
position, that reconstruction assistance will only flow into
Gaza after Hamas agrees to an indefinite suspension of hostilities
and the tunnels under Rafah are put out of commission, is rejected
by the Islamists as an Israeli attempt to extract in Cairo what
it failed to achieve in Gaza and a recipe for permanent occupation.
If Israel continues to reject an agreement that essentially reflects
the conditions of the Egyptian-mediated 2008 ceasefire, and particularly
if Egypt and the Europeans continue to withhold assistance until
Israel expresses satisfaction with Hamas’ positions, a second
round of fighting remains a distinct possibility. How Mitchell
intends to produce a durable ceasefire, with the limited toolbox
in his possession, remains something of a mystery. Insisting
he will neither visit Gaza nor engage with Hamas -- at a time
when Israel is all but ignoring Abbas and focusing on Egyptian-mediated
talks with the Islamists -- he has once again produced a situation
where US diplomacy is hamstrung by being more pro-Israel than
Israel itself.
The Real
Test
Yet the larger
question is whether, even under the best of circumstances, Obama
can achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace. In other words, assuming
for the sake of argument that Washington leapfrogs the processes
and “road maps” to implement rather than negotiate a two-state
settlement; gives the Palestinians the space required to resolve
their differences rather than deepening them in the hope its
favored clients emerge triumphant; ceases making demands of the
Arab world that give peace and negotiations a bad name; and is
able to stare down Israel and domestic pressures and stay the
course, can it succeed?
On the available
evidence, it is almost certainly too late to implement a viable
two-state settlement. Israeli settlement expansion appears to
have proceeded too far, for far too long, to be able to be reversed
by an Israeli government that can remain legitimate, even if
genuine US pressure is bought to bear. The real test for Washington
will therefore be not how often Mitchell shuttles to and around
the region, but how rapidly it acts to freeze Israeli settlement
expansion in all its forms and reverse Israeli impunity in the
Occupied Territories. If the issue of settlements, the elephant
in the room left unmentioned by the speakers at the State Department
on January 22, has still not been seriously addressed by the
time Mitchell returns from his first trip (and in 2001, recall,
he only said Israel should “consider” a freeze if the Palestinians
effectively disarm), it will be time to write the two-state paradigm’s
definitive obituary.
The problem
is that the death notice will not be accompanied by a birth announcement
for a binational state. With the vast majority of Israelis committed
to retaining a Jewish state, and the vast majority of Palestinians
in response demanding that their ethnicity be privileged in their
own entity, a South African-type transformation on the Mediterranean
is at best many years away. The more likely scenario, for the
coming years, is a descent into increasingly existential, and
regionalized, conflict. 
|
