By: Hilal Khashan
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Although the Palestinians immediately rejected the proposal, many Arab states embraced it. In fact, the ambassadors of the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain attended the press conference where the plan was announced – though the ambassadors of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two core Arab countries that have also endorsed the proposal, were conspicuously absent.
Nonetheless, the presence of representatives from three small Arab states was aimed at giving the plan a modicum of Arab legitimacy. Ultimately, however, Trump’s peace plan will not bring peace to the Middle East.
Changing Attitudes Toward Israel
Arabs did not enter the 1948 war against Israel enthusiastically. The Egyptian Cabinet was opposed to it; the Hashemites joined it to grab their part of Palestine as per the 1947 partition plan; and the Syrians had a rudimentary and poorly led army. Until 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser insisted that he had no intention of going to war with Israel, and that he would only consider a defensive war to repel an Israeli attack.
He demanded the implementation of United Nations resolutions for ending the conflict with Israel, especially U.N. Resolution 194, which called for repatriating or compensating Palestinian refugees. But in 1967, Nasser miscalculated when he closed the Tiran Strait to Israeli shipping. This gave Israel the pretext to go to war, complete the unfinished 1948 conflict and seize all of historical Palestine.
Over time, however, attitudes among some Arab states toward Israel have begun to change. Israel signed the Camp David Accords with Egypt in 1978 and the Wadi Araba Peace Treaty with Jordan in 1994. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative would have recognized Israel’s right to exist and extended official legitimacy to it, though Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon never agreed to the proposal.
Arab countries are eager to bury the hatchet with Israel and engage on economic, political and defense matters. They have a vested interest in aligning with Israel militarily against what they see as a looming Iranian threat and politically against an increasingly aggressive Turkish foreign policy in the Gulf, Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. In fact, they have been cooperating with Israel on economic and intelligence issues for years. But most of the Arab-Israeli cooperation has been taking place covertly.
This is why Arab states are eager to find a deal that would solve the Palestinian issue. Arab tradition places great emphasis on honor, so having an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians would allow the Arabs to deal with Israel openly without being accused of selling out.
But agreeing to a deal has proved exceedingly difficult. For Israel, negotiating peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan was fairly easy. Its territorial claims on Sinai were flexible; after occupying it three times in 1948, 1956 and 1967, it always proved willing to return it to Egyptian rule.
The 1974 Arab summit in Algiers relieved Jordan of its claim to the West Bank, which made making peace with Israel more manageable. However, the Golan Heights and the West Bank are a different matter. The Israelis believe they have a right to these areas – that they already paid a high price for the security they would afford. The West Bank also has religious significance for Israelis, so they will not give up their claims to it quietly.
The Palestinians feel betrayed by their fellow Arabs who made peace with Israel without defending their rights and transformed the Arab-Israeli conflict into a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the latest plan has been met with mixed responses from the region.
A Breakthrough Deal?
While U.S. officials have hailed Trump’s “deal of the century” as a breakthrough, the Palestinians have fiercely denounced it as the “slap of the century.” Peace treaties usually reflect the economic, political and military balance of power in the conflicts they are meant to resolve. But this concept often does not apply in matters of high principle such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel has won every conventional war against Arabs, and the Palestinians realize that they are the weaker party in the negotiating process. But the financial incentives in Trump’s plan have not convinced the Palestinians to accept the loss of East Jerusalem as their capital and all but 15 percent of Palestinian-claimed land.
The Israeli position on accommodating Palestinian national aspirations has not changed since the 1978 Camp David Accords, which promised to grant the Palestinians a self-governing authority within five years but only under a permanent Israel Defense Forces presence inside the West Bank.
This was followed by the 1993 Declaration of Principles to establish interim Palestinian self-rule that would lead to a permanent settlement of the conflict within five years on the basis of Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. The same resolutions governed the formulation of the Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995) agreements.
Trump’s plan gives the Palestinians four years to comply with certain prerequisites of statehood, including recognizing Israel as a Jewish state (despite the fact that 21 percent of its population are Arabs). The Palestinians believe that by the end of the four years, Israel will conclude that they have defaulted on the deal and continue to build settlements and change the reality on the ground.
Indeed, both the Israelis and the Palestinians view each other with suspicion and distrust. The Israelis believe that the ultimate objective of the Palestinians is to see the destruction of their state, whereas the Palestinians argue that Israel is stonewalling any attempts at peace. They would cite as an example the 2002 Quartet on the Middle East, which introduced a roadmap to peace that would help the Palestinians prepare for statehood. The roadmap ultimately went nowhere.
The latest proposed peace deal also seems destined to go nowhere. Though the Palestinians have rejected it, Arab countries like Morocco, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain and the UAE have embraced it. Arab rulers are undeterred by the plan’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital; they understand that Trump’s peace plan is an attempt to appeal to his evangelical base ahead of U.S. elections in November.
On Feb. 1, Arab foreign ministers gathered for an emergency meeting requested by the Palestinian Authority. This is just one more sign of the growing divide between the Palestinians and Arab countries that want to move beyond the Palestinian question.
No End in Sight
The stateless Palestinians are the weakest link in the Arab world. Yet, they possess the strongest bargaining chip vis-a-vis Israel, because as long as there is no agreement on their status, there will be no peace in the Middle East. Israelis demand that Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state but are willing to make few concessions.
The Palestinians argue that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and their expulsion from their homeland was an injustice. They believe that the Hashemites and Ibn Saud colluded with the British and the Zionist movement to facilitate the rise of the Jewish state at their expense.
The center of gravity for Arab politics has shifted over the past 40 years from Egypt, Iraq and Syria to the Gulf – namely, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, countries that do not view Israel as their enemy. They want to establish an alliance with Israel to neutralize the threat from Iran and Turkey. (Egypt and Morocco are not concerned about Iran because, as a Shiite country, Iran is incapable of religiously influencing their populations.
They are, however, concerned about Turkey, a Sunni country currently governed by the pan-Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP.)
The Palestinians know that they will continue to live under Israeli surveillance with or without a peace treaty. They have endured conflict for more than a century, and it has no end in sight.
Their rejection of Trump’s plan will preclude the establishment of an open alliance between Arab states and Israel. Without Palestinian endorsement, there’s little hope that Arab-Israeli cooperation can move forward.
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