Foreign Affairs Magazine
Dec 20 2008
Change They Can Believe In
To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their Due
Walter Russell Mead
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009
Summary: If it hopes to bring peace to the Middle East, the Obama
administration must put Palestinian politics and goals first.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for
U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Reviving the Middle East peace process is the worst kind of necessary
evil for a U.S. administration: at once very necessary and very
evil. It is necessary because the festering dispute between the
Israelis and the Palestinians in a volatile, strategically vital
region has broad implications for U.S. interests and because the
security of Israel is one of the American public’s most enduring
international concerns. It is evil because it is costly and
difficult. The price of engagement is high, the chances for a solution
are mixed at best, and all of the available approaches carry
significant political risks. A string of poor policy choices by the
Bush administration made a bad situation significantly worse. It
inflamed passions. It weakened the position of moderate Israelis and
Palestinians alike. And it reduced the U.S. government’s credibility
as a broker.
Even without the damaging aftermath of eight misspent years, the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute will not be easily settled. Many people
have tried to end it; all have failed. Direct negotiations between
Arabs and Jews after World War I foundered. The British tried to
square the circle of competing Palestinian and Jewish aspirations from
the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration until the ignominious
collapse of their mandate in 1948. Since then, the United Nations, the
United States, and the international community have struggled with the
problem without managing to solve it. No issue in international
affairs has taxed the ingenuity of so many leaders or captured so much
attention from around the world. Winston Churchill failed to solve it;
the "wise men" who built NATO and the Marshall Plan handed it down,
still festering, to future generations. Henry Kissinger had to content
himself with incremental progress. The Soviet Union crumbled on Ronald
Reagan’s watch, but the Israeli-Palestinian dispute survived him. Bill
Clinton devoted much of his tenure to picking at this Gordian knot. He
failed. George W. Bush failed at everything he tried. This is a
dispute that deserves respect; old, inflamed, and complex, it does not
suffer quick fixes.
As Kissinger has famously observed, academic politics are so bitter
because the stakes are so small. In one sense, this is true of the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute as well: little land is involved. The
Palestine of the British mandate, today divided into Israel proper and
the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, was the size of
New Jersey. In 1919, its total population was estimated at
651,000. Today, the territory counts about 5.4 million Jews and about
5.2 million Arabs. Two diasporas in other parts of the world — some
7.7 million Jews and 5.2 million Palestinians — believe that they,
too, are entitled to live there.
But the conflict is about more than land; many people on both sides
feel profoundly that a compromise would be morally wrong. A
significant minority of Israelis not only retain a fervent attachment
to the land that makes up the Eretz Yisrael of the Bible but also
believe that to settle and possess it is to fulfill a divine
decree. For these Jews, it is a sin to surrender land that God has
given them. Although most Israelis do not share this belief with
dogmatic rigor, they would be reluctant to obstruct the path of those
seeking to redeem the Promised Land.
It may be difficult for outsiders to understand the Palestinians’
yearning for the villages and landscapes lost during the birth of
Israel in 1948. The sentiment is much more than nostalgia. The
Palestinians’ national identity took shape in the course of their
struggle with Zionism, and the mass displacement of Palestinians
resulting from Israel’s War of Independence, or the nakba
("catastrophe" in Arabic), was the fiery crucible out of which the
modern Palestinian consciousness emerged. The dispossessed
Palestinians, especially refugees living in camps, are seen as the
bearers of the most authentic form of Palestinian identity. The
unconditional right of Palestinians to return to the land and homes
lost in the nakba is the nation’s central demand. For many, although
by no means all, Palestinians, to give up the right of return would be
to betray their people. Even those who do not see this claim as an
indispensable goal of the national movement are uneasy about giving it
up.
A TALE OF TWO PEOPLES
The conflict is not just fiendishly hard to resolve; history and
culture make it difficult for both the Israelis and the Palestinians
to make the necessary choices. The two peoples had very different
experiences in the twentieth century, but both have been left with a
fractured national consciousness and institutions too weak to make or
enforce political decisions.
For the Israelis, determining the relationship between religion,
ethnicity, and citizenship is a perpetually difficult question. Is the
return of the Jews to their ancestral home a basically secular
objective with religious overtones, like the goals of other
independence movements among minorities in the Ottoman Empire,
including the Greeks and the Armenians? Or is it a fundamentally
religious project? Other countries face similar questions, but the
issue is particularly acute for Israel given its position as the
world’s only Jewish state.
Another complication is that although the Jews are an old people, the
Israelis are a young one. Jews have come to Israel from very different
societies and cultures and from all over the world, bringing very
different expectations, and they have established a political society
as varied and fragmented as their respective histories. Ashkenazim and
Sephardim, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, secular socialists and secular
liberals, post-Soviet Russians: this diversity — with the tensions it
brings heightened by the pressure of Israel’s existential anxieties —
is reflected in the country’s political landscape. A predictable
combination of weak governments and explosive politics hinders
decisive official action: more than most, Israel’s leaders must keep
looking over their shoulders to gauge public opinion.
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