WHY AMERICA CHASES AN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE / THE NEW YORK TIMES ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

November 20, 2010

Why America Chases an Israeli-Palestinian Peace

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, who left Israel last month after overseeing the training of Palestinian security forces for five years, liked to tell the story of his first assignment in the Middle East. Charged with locating Iraq’s elusive weapons of mass destruction after Saddam Hussein was deposed in 2003, General Dayton found no weapons but kept coming upon something else inside Iraqi military barracks — drawings of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem being squeezed by a serpent labeled Israel.


He was amazed to see that hundreds of miles from the Holy Land, the Arab-Israeli dispute felt so immediate and significant.


In trying to understand the unrelenting American effort to keep alive talks between Israel and the Palestinians — this last week produced the image of the Obama administration chasing the Israeli government with an enticement of more fighter jets — it is worth standing in General Dayton’s boots for a moment.


From there one can see why, in many ways, the United States feels a greater urgency and drive for the peace talks than do the Palestinians and Israelis themselves. Here, neither side believes the other is serious about real compromise and each actively cultivates a sense of historic victimhood. Washington, by contrast, deeply believes that ending this conflict is the key to unlocking its own regional strategic dilemmas.


“Every American ambassador in the region knows that official meetings with Arab leaders start with the obligatory half-hour lecture on the Palestinian question,” said a senior American diplomat who has spent his career in the Middle East and asked not to be identified to protect his work. “If we could dispense with that half-hour and get down to our other business, we might actually be able to get something done.”


For the past week, the Obama administration has been trying to lure Israel into a 90-day freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank so that the Palestinians will return to direct talks broken off when the last freeze ended in September.


To get the next freeze, an earlier offer to sell Israel 20 fighter jets has been sweetened to include a gift of 20 more (buy one, get one free). In addition, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has offered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specific assurances of diplomatic support over the next year, all to facilitate efforts to reach a final deal with the Palestinians that many suspect will fail, as such efforts have for the past 17 years.


It is worth noting that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been largely drained of deadly violence in the past few years. Moreover, the Palestinians are increasingly divided between the Fatah-led West Bank and the Hamas-led Gaza, and the Israeli government is dominated by pro-settler politicians largely opposed to a Palestinian state. In other words, the dispute is calmer than it has been in years, which, in the brutal logic of the Middle East, means that neither side is eager right now for the necessary compromises. So why push so hard?


The answer has a number of levels, but the most important is this: The United States believes that if it can end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its fraught relationship with the Muslim world will greatly improve, thereby allowing America to accomplish much that is currently eluding it in places like Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, not to mention easing its role as the prime guarantor of Israel’s own security.


Gen. James L. Jones, who stepped down recently as President Obama’s national security adviser, often told visitors that if he had to pick one foreign policy issue to tackle, it would be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because its resolution would help with all the others.


Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversaw American war efforts in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, told Congress this year that the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict created a hostile environment for the United States in the region.


The idea isn’t that the Americans would walk away from Israel, their staunch ally, or see its vital interests undercut in a peace settlement. The idea is that if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were resolved, anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world would diminish, American prospects in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would brighten, and Arab governments would find it easier to cooperate with Washington as it seeks to blunt Iranian ambitions.


Many Israelis dismiss this as a form of magical thinking.


“Let’s play a mind game,” suggested Mark Heller, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “Let’s assume that you’ve resolved the conflict or that Israel has disappeared or that Israel and the United States are now enemies. Will the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq suddenly start making love? Will the Sunnis, Shiites and Christians in Lebanon get together? Will it end the oppression of Christians in Egypt? Will it raise the status of women or put an end to the use of violence as a political weapon in the Muslim world? It’s a total illusion.”


There are many illusions at work in this region. The founding charter of Hamas states that after Palestine, the Jews seek to conquer all land between the Nile and the Euphrates. A significant portion of Muslims believe that Israel carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Extremist Jewish settlers believe that if they hold firm, the millions of Palestinians around them will leave their land.


In such an atmosphere, negotiations for peace inevitably require a leap of faith. But while these negotiations may carry a real risk of failure, taking that risk seems far preferable to giving in to the fear that the conflict has no end. American insistence on pushing for this deal at this moment is based on other specific factors as well.


While lower-level Israeli officials have embarrassed the Obama administration this year with ill-timed announcements about housing construction on contested land in East Jerusalem, Israel has also made clear that it knows that a strong Washington on its side is central to its security. A weakened or humiliated United States is not viewed here as in Israel’s interest. That is the main reason that a year ago Mr. Netanyahu froze most settlement building in the West Bank for 10 months — Mr. Obama had made such a point of asking for it.


On July 4, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, spoke at an American Independence Day celebration in Israel. He told of the time David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, first met John F. Kennedy in 1961, days before he was inaugurated as president.


Kennedy asked Ben-Gurion how he could help Israel. “The best thing you can do for Israel,” Mr. Peres said Ben-Gurion replied, “is be a great president of the United States.” A strong America is vital for Israel, he added.


Beyond this, there is another reason the Obama administration is putting such effort into ending this dispute. Mr. Netanyahu has convinced key members of the administration that he really does want a deal and that, ruling from the right, he has the political clout to carry it off. American officials are also convinced that the current Palestinian leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is more oriented toward negotiations and diplomacy than any other in Palestinian history. Both have repeatedly renounced violence.


One more factor: The administration knows that there is a point beyond which the creation of a Palestinian state will become unachievable — when so many Israeli settlers are spread over so much West Bank land that it will simply no longer be feasible to carve out a viable state. Some argue that with 300,000 settlers, that point has already been reached; all agree that it is not far away.


Finally, there is future violence. Ten years ago, when peace talks led by President Bill Clinton at Camp David fell apart, the second Palestinian uprising broke out, leading to exploding buses, suicide bombings and harsh Israeli countermeasures. Thousands — most of them Palestinians — were killed.


Israeli military and intelligence officials say that while the forces General Dayton helped train are the most professional Palestinian security men ever, their discipline and professionalism could break down without the prospect of an independent state.


“If there will not be real progress, I believe we can find that some time within three months, six months or one year from now, that the functioning of the Palestinian security system is in a very different place,” a top Israeli intelligence official told a group of foreign correspondents last week, speaking without attribution, as is the common practice of intelligence officials here. “In order to keep the legitimacy and functioning of the Palestinian security system, we need real progress in the peace process.”