The encounter between President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu can by no stretch of imagination and wishful thinking produce a peace agreement. Yet, it would be wrong to dwell excessively on the weaknesses of the current leaders, for that presupposes that with different leaders at the helm, an agreement between the parties could be reached through bilateral negotiations. Alas, this is not the case. Personalities are of course important in history. But the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been, throughout, the hostage of unbeatable impersonal forces of history.
Our failure to reach a settlement in the past was not the result of bad faith, or inadequate negotiating skills. Rather, it was a defining failure that stemmed from the inherent incapacity of the parties to reconcile themselves to each other's fundamental requirements for a settlement. This is not a border dispute--a real estate deal--as was the case with Israeli-Egyptian peace. Ours is a fundamental clash of national ethos, a dispute over millenarian certificates of ownership, a conflict over holy sites and religious shrines, a clash of divergent national narratives. Left to our own devices, we have proven ourselves tragically incapable of breaking the genetic code of our dispute.
The end of bilateralism stems also from the deficiencies of highly dysfunctional political systems both in Palestine and in Israel. Abbas is still gasping for political oxygen under the pressure of Hamas, whereas any foreign minister visiting Israel would have to listen to as many peace plans as there are ministers.
Abbas is thus right to opt for a new peace paradigm, but his plan for a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state might be the wrong choice. He expects that a unilateral yet internationally recognized declaration of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders would put unbearable pressure on an Israel that is already haunted by the specter of universal de-legitimization.
One cannot deny of course the devastating effects of the new Palestinian strategy on Israel's international standing. The current wave of international recognition of the Palestinian state is indeed a major blow to Israel's international relations. Particularly hurting is the case of key Latin American countries where Israel enjoyed in the past an almost mythological status.
The Palestinian president assumes that from the moment his state is recognized by the UN Security Council, Israel would become the illegal occupier of a sovereign state, a full member of the UN, and would therefore be subject to international sanctions that would destroy its economy, undermine even further its image and condemn it to the status of a pariah in the family of nations.
But, notwithstanding the undeniable damage the Palestinian strategy is inflicting on Israel's increasingly fragile international standing, Abbas might be embarking here on what could turn out to be a self-defeating diplomatic exercise. If Abbas fails to muster the support of the United States and Europe, Netanyahu might feel free to cancel existing agreements and engage in unilateral steps of his own. Nor would American and European support necessarily produce the results Abbas expects. If pushed against the wall, Israel might try to extricate itself from an internationally unbearable condition by unilaterally disengaging from the bulk of the West Bank to the wall/fence.
A hostile Palestinian state would then automatically emerge on the other side of the wall, but one that might not necessarily be ruled by the PLO. A violent Israeli disengagement, and the consequent end of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in security matters, might then unleash the necessary instability for Hamas to emerge as a serious contender for power in the West Bank. This in its turn might draw Jordan into the business of the West Bank the same way Egypt is being drawn against its will into the affairs of Gaza.
Another weakness of a Palestinian unilateral move is that it might reduce the conflict with Israel into a banal border dispute between two sovereign states. Those in the international community who recognize the Palestinian state would see that inevitably as the end of the peace process, and neither Europe nor the US would include in the package any kind of acknowledgement of the right of return. Indeed, by unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, Abbas would be putting into practice Israel's vision of ''two states for two peoples''.
Either way, we stand at the end of the peace process as we have known it to date. This Gordian knot cannot be untied; it needs to be cut through robust third party mediation.
But an American peace plan aimed at bridging the gaps between the parties has a chance only if built around a solid international alliance for an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Even then, it would require especially laborious and complex diplomatic engineering.
Yet, however enamored they might be with the ''international community'', the Palestinians might not be that happy with a plan that comes from an American-led international alliance. The combination of a plan that almost certainly would have to satisfy Israel's security concerns and lean toward acknowledging its Jewishness in a way that might entirely neutralize the Palestinian ethos of return, might not be especially palatable to the Palestinians.
Trapped in their own contradictions and in diametrically discrepant national dreams, Israelis and Palestinians cannot expect a solution that is perfect. Their task is to go for the least imperfect solution before they decline into doomsday scenarios such as a hostile Israeli unilateral disengagement or a decline into a one-state reality of permanent civil war.-
Published 10/1/2011 © bitterlemons.org
