ME Diplomacy

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad published a plan in August 2009 to unilaterally declare statehood after a two-year state-building process. However, any unilateral action that undermines the existing Oslo interim framework could jeopardize the peace process and remove the basis for the existence of the Palestinian Authority.

While the outlines of a two-state solution are generally known, the maximum that any government of Israel will be ready to offer the Palestinians and still survive politically is much less than the minimum that any Palestinian leader can accept. So while the two-state solution is a very nice slogan, it cannot be achieved in the foreseeable future. We can either stay in the same situation and try to manage the conflict, or we can try to think of some other solution.

For the British government, formal negotiations with the IRA could only occur in a context in which republican violence had been brought to an end. With the IRA in a position of declining military and political fortunes, it sought to extricate itself via the peace process.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera (April 26, 2008), Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal clarified that for Hamas, a tahdiya is “a tactic in conflict management.” He added that it “is not unusual for the resistance...to escalate sometimes and to retreat a bit sometimes as the tide does....The tahdiya creates a formulation that will force Israel...to remove the siege...and if it happens it will be a remarkable achievement.”

In an unimplementable “shelf agreement,” Israel will be seen to have committed itself to certain far-reaching steps that it has not implemented. On the one hand, this will be seen as the starting point for any future negotiations, and on the other hand, it will invite increasing pressure on Israel, with the added element of ongoing terror.

In reality, there is no fundamental difference between the ultimate goals of Hamas and the PLO: Neither accepts the Jewish state’s right to exist and both are committed to its eventual destruction. By categorically refusing to recognize Israel’s Jewishness, the Palestinian leadership has effectively rejected the two-state solution, based, in the words of the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947, on the creation of “independent Arab and Jewish States” in Palestine.

The Roadmap insists in Phase I that “all official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.” The current effort of Secretary of State Rice to facilitate Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a November 2007 joint declaration in Washington over the parameters of a future Palestinian state essentially circumvents the Bush administration’s own 2003 Roadmap sequence.

Once Israel dropped its past reliance on a diplomacy based on its own rights and adopted a new concession-based diplomacy instead, its spokesmen essentially acquiesced to the Palestinian historical narrative.

In taking the position of “international peace envoy” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Blair will need to change the basic political parameters in order to avoid another catastrophic failure. Most importantly, this will require abandoning the widely held images of Palestinian victimization and demonization of Israel.