Israel / Palestine News Analysis United States

Israel & Palestine: Why the Peace Talks Collapsedand Should Not Be Resumed
by Richard Falk | May 6, 2014

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, June 27, 2013. (State Department)
A week ago Israel suspended participation in the peace talks in response to news
that the Palestinian Authoritys Fatah had for a third time concluded a unity
agreement with the Hamas leadership of Gaza. Such a move toward intra-
Palestinian reconciliation should have been welcomed by Israel as a tentative
step in the right direction. Instead it was immediately denounced by Netanyahu
as the end of the diplomatic road, contending that Israel will never be part of
any political process that includes a terrorist organization pledged to its
destruction.
Without Hamas participation any diplomatic results of negotiations would likely
have been of questionable value, and besides, Hamas deserves inclusion. It has
behaved as a political actor since it took part in the 2006 Palestinian legislative
elections, and has repeatedly indicated its willingness to reach a long-term
normalizing agreement with Israel if and when Israel is ready to withdraw fully
to the 1967 borders and respect Palestinian sovereign rights. The contention
that Hamas is pledged to Israels destruction is pure hasbara, a cynical means to
manipulate the fear factor in Israeli domestic politics, as well as ensuring the
persistence of the conflict. This approach has become Israels way of choosing
..expansion over peace, and seemingly ignoring its own citizens mandate to
secure a stable peace agreement.
Israel had days earlier complained about an initiative taken by the PA to become
a party to 15 international treaties. Again, a step that would be viewed as
constructive if seeking an end to the conflict was anywhere to be found in
Israels playbook. Such an initiative should have been interpreted in a positive
direction as indicating the Palestinian intention to be a responsible member of
the international community. Israels contrary lame allegation that by acting
independently the PA departed from the agreed roadmap of negotiations
prematurely assuming the prerogatives of a state rather than waiting Godot-like
for such a status to be granted via the bilateral diplomatic route.
To remove any doubt about the priorities of the Netanyahu-led government,
Israel during the nine months set aside for reaching an agreement, authorized
no less than 13,851 new housing units in the settlements, added significant
amounts of available land for further settlement expansion, and demolished 312
Palestinian homes. These acts were not only unlawful, but actually accelerated
earlier settlement trends, and were obviously provocative from a Palestinian
perspective. As Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy, observed in a TV interview, if
Israeli authorizes even one additional housing unit during negotiations it is
sending a clear signal to the Palestinian people and their leaders that it has no
interest in reaching a sustainable peace agreement.
The revival of direct negotiations last August between the Government of Israel
and the Palestinian Authority was mainly a strong arm initiative of the U.S.
Government, energized by John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, who
has put relentless pressure on both sides to start talking despite the manifest
futility of such a process from its outset. Such resolve raises the still
unanswered question, why? Kerry melodramatically proclaimed that these
negotiations were the last chance to save the two-state solution as the means to
end the conflict, in effect, declaring this new round of U.S. sponsored
negotiations to be an all or nothing moment of decision for the Palestinian
Authority and Israel. Kerry has reinforced this appeal by warning that Israel
risks isolation and boycott if no agreement is reached, and in the last several
days, declared behind closed doors that Israel was taking a path that could lead
Israel to becoming an apartheid state by this apparent refusal to seek a
diplomatic solution.
It is probably beside the point that no one at the State Department informed
Kerry before he started to walk this tightrope that the two-state goal that he
so unconditionally endorsed was already dead and buried as a realistic option.
Further, that Israel had established an apartheid regime on the West Bank
decades ago, making his supposedly controversial statement better understood
to be old news. In other words, Kerry showed himself awkwardly out of touch
by issuing future warnings about matters that were already in a past tense. With
respect to apartheid he discredited himself further by apologizing for using the
a-word in response to objections by Israeli supporters in the United States,
however descriptive apartheid has become of the discriminatory nature of the
occupation. American leaders present themselves as craven in relation to Israeli
sensibilities when they retreat in this manner from reality without showing the
slightest sign of embarrassment.
The agreement of Israel and the PA to sit together and negotiate formally
expired on April 29
th
, yet the indefatigable Kerry rather remarkably pushed the
parties to agree on an extension by a flurry of meetings in recent weeks
disclosing a mood hovering uneasily between exasperation and desperation. Even
if the talks were to resume, as still might happen, it should not be interpreted
as a hopeful development. There is utterly no reason to think that a diplomatic
process in the current political climate is capable of producing a just and
sustainable peace. To think differently embraces an illusion, and more
meaningfully, gives Israel additional time to consolidate its expansionist plans to
a point that makes it absurd to imagine the creation of a truly viable and
independent sovereign parallel Palestinian state.
So long as the political preconditions for fruitful inter-governmental diplomacy
do not exist, calls for direct negotiations should be abandoned. Both sides must
approach negotiations with a genuine incentive to strike a deal that is fair to the
other side, which implies a willingness to respect Palestinian rights under
international law. For reasons suggested, those preconditions do not exist on the
Israeli side. This makes it deeply misleading to put the blame for the breakdown
of the talks on both sides, or sometimes even to point the finger at the
Palestinians, as has been the practice in the mainstream Western media
whenever negotiations hit a stone wall.
It has been painfully obvious ever since Oslo (1993), that there is something
fundamentally deficient about the double role played by the United States
Government in relation to such negotiations. How can it be trusted when
American officials declare over and over again that the country will forever
remain the unconditional ally of Israel, and yet at the same time give even
minimal confidence to the Palestinians that it a neutral third party seeking to
promote a just peace? The short answer is that it cant and will not.
From the very outset of the recent diplomatic initiative this contradiction in
roles was resolved in Israels favor by the Obama appointment of Martin Indyk
as Special Envoy entrusted with the delicate symbolic role of overseeing the
negotiations. Indyk has a long public career of involvements supportive of Israel,
including past employment with the notorious AIPAC lobby that exerts its
disproportionate pro-Israeli influence over the entire American political scene.
Only the weakness of the Palestinian Authority can explain a willingness to
entrust its diplomatic fate to such a framework already strongly tilted in favor
of Israel due to Israels skills and strengths as an experienced political actor on
the global stage.
Against this background we have to ask what is gained and lost by such fruitless
negotiations. What is gained by Israel and the United States is some hope that
while negotiations proceed, the conflict will not escalate by taking an unwelcome
turn toward a Third Intifada that forcibly challenges Israels occupation policies
associated with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. There is also the
sense that so long as the U.S. Government is seen as backing a two-state
solution it satisfies regional expectations, and provide a rationale for supporting
even a futile diplomatic effort because it is the only game in town, and it seems
perverse to challenge its utility without presenting an alternative. The Arab
world itself endorsed and recently reaffirmed its 2002 regional peace initiative
calling for Israels withdrawal from occupied Palestine and formal acceptance of
Palestinian state within 1967 green line borders, with East Jerusalem as its
capital. Such a vision of peace derives from unanimous Security Council
Resolution 242 that was premised on Israels withdrawal from territories
occupied in the course of the 1967 War, but additionally on a just solution of
the refugee problem. And there is near universal appreciation expressed for
Kerrys dedication to resolving the conflict, and so it is a kind of public relations
success story despite the serious drawbacks mentioned.
In effect, there has existed a global consensus since 1967 on establishing peace
between Israel and Palestine, reinforced by the apparent absence of
alternatives, that is, the only possibilities are widely believed to be either two-
states or the persistence of the conflict. It should be appreciated that way
back in 1988 the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then speaking for all
Palestinians under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, gave up its maximalist goals,
and formally indicated its willingness to make peace with Israel based on these
1967 borders, with an implied readiness to compromise on the refugee issue.
Such an approach allowed Israel to possess secure borders based on 78% of
historic Palestine, and limited the Palestinian state to the other 22%, which is
less than half of what the UN had offered the Palestinians its partition proposal
of 1947, which at the time seemed unreasonable from a Palestinian perspective.
In appraisals of the conflict this historic Palestinian concession, perhaps
imprudently made by the PLO, has never been acknowledged, much less
reciprocated, by either Israel or the United States. In my view, this absence of
response exhibited all along a fundamental lack of political will on the Israeli
side to reach a solution through inter-governmental negotiations, although some
would interpret the Camp David initiative in 2000 as the last time that Israeli
leadership seemed somewhat inclined to resolve the conflict diplomatically.
The Palestinian Authority depends on Israel to transfer tax revenues upon which
its governing capacity rests, and it can usually be brought into line if it acts in
defiance of Tel Aviv and Washington. Also, collaboration on security
arrangements with Israel creates both co-dependency and give a measure of
stability to the otherwise frozen situation. Occasionally, seemingly with quixotic
intent, the PA and Abbas challenge this image by suggesting their option to quit
the political stage and return the responsibilities of administering the West
Bank to Israel.
The two-state consensus has been increasingly challenged over the years by
influential Palestinians, including Edward Said, who toward the end of his life
argued that in view of intervening developments subsequent to 1988, only a one-
state solution could reconcile the two peoples in an acceptable manner based on
mutual respect for rights, democracy, and equality. The advocacy of a single
secular democratic state draws on two sets of arguments
a pragmatic contention that the settlement process and the changed
demographic of East Jerusalem are essentially irreversible, and thus there is no
feasible means at this time to create a viable Palestinian state, and this becomes
more apparent with each passing day; and a principled contention that it makes
no political or ethical sense in the twenty-first century to encourage the
formation of ethnic states, especially as in this case, 20% of the Israeli
population is Palestinian, and subject to an array of discriminatory legislative
measures. In some respects, the essence of the Palestinian predicament is to
acknowledge that it is too late for the two-state solution and seemingly too
early for a one-state solution.
Assuming that the diplomatic route is blocked, is the situation hopeless for the
Palestinians? I believe that Palestinian hopes for a just peace should never have
rested on the outcome of formal diplomacy for the reasons given above. Put
succinctly, given the Israel failure to heed the call for withdrawal in U.N.
Security Council Resolution 242, its non-response to the 1988 PLO acceptance of
Israel within the 1967 borders, and its consistent commitment to settlement
expansion, no sane person should have put much faith in an Israeli readiness to
make a peace respectful of Palestinian rights under international law.
Currently, the best prospect for realizing Palestinian self-determination is by
way of pressures exerted through the mobilization of a movement from below,
combining popular resistance with global solidarity. Such a process, what I have
called legitimacy war, exemplified by Gandhis nonviolent victory over the
British Empire and more recently by the success of the global anti-apartheid
movement against racist South Africa, represents the latest strategic turn in
the Palestinian national movement, and seems even compatible with the recent
outlook of Hamas as expressed by its leaders and confirmed by its behavior.
It is time to appreciate that the current approach of the Palestinian national
movement rests on two broad undertakings: the adoption of nonviolent
resistance tactics and an increasingly strengthened global solidarity movement,
centered on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) initiative, which is
gaining momentum throughout the world, especially in Europe. These
developments are reinforced by UN calls to Member States to remind corporate
and financial actors under their national control that it is problematic under
international law to continue engaging in business dealings with Israeli
settlements.
In effect, there are horizons of hope for Palestinians with respect to seeking a
just and sustainable peace between these two ethnic communities that is gaining
most of its impact and influence from the actions of people rather than the
maneuvers of governments. Of course, if the political climate changes in
response to legitimacy war pressures, governments could have a crucial future
role to play, taking advantage of a new balance of forces that could enable
diplomacy to move towards solutions. Constructive diplomacy would contrast with
what has recently transpired, which seemed to combine deflection from Israeli
expansionism followed by participation in a childish blame game. It is important
that world public opinion reject as meaningless the diplomatic charade of peace
talks while the fate of a people continues to be daily sacrificed on the altar of
geopolitics.
Tags: 'Peace Process', BDS, Israel, John Kerry, Palestine, Palestinian Authority
About the Author
Richard Falk


Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who
taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa
Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of
California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board
of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the
situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.
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