Allison W. Good

Twelve years ago, President Clinton hosted Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat at Camp David in an interventionist bid for a historic compromise. What he billed as a promising meeting, however, ended in a major breakdown. His elusive conquest for Middle East peace dominated his second term and ultimately backfired, but three and a half years into his presidency, it appears that Barack Obama has learned from Clinton’s mistakes.

Clinton failed to transcend the uncompromising political realities, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Middle East peace was the ultimate prize that the President hoped to take home before the end of his second term, but thirteen days of negotiations couldn’t make up for Barak and Arafat’s unwillingness to deal with final status issues. Clinton’s desire to reach an agreement blinded him to their irreconcilable differences, while forced mediation produced mistrust and paranoia. Even so, the President tried to bridge the gaps down to the very last weeks of his term.

There haven’t been formal Israeli-Palestinian talks since 2008, but Obama heralded his term with an ambitious speech in Cairo calling for two states, a halt to settlement construction, and an end to violence. He seized the idea that settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were “the crux of the problem,” which coincided with the election of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had a history of approving settlement construction at the expense of the Oslo Process. By this point, the Palestinian Authority had also lost much of its popularity in the Palestinian street as intra-Palestinian conflict caused a Gaza-West Bank split and President Mahmoud Abbas’ power weakened.

Despite the static situation on the ground, Obama emphatically pushed a settlement freeze for the next few months. The issue seemed to be a priority. At the end of September, though, he dropped the demand for a freeze, declaring it was “past time to talk about starting negotiations.” In November 2009, Netanyahu’s cabinet approved a 10-month partial freeze as a bid to restart talks, but the government continued to build pre-approved housing units. In March 2010, Israel sparked a diplomatic crisis when it approved the construction of 1,600 units during Vice President Biden’s visit.

The settlement freeze expired and was never renewed, but Obama forged ahead. In a deal reminiscent of the formal defense treaty Clinton offered Netanyahu in 1998 in return for complying with the Interim Agreement, Obama offered a slew of incentives in November 2010 – including the delivery of 20 additional F-35s and a commitment to Israel’s definition of security needs – in exchange for a 60-day moratorium on settlement construction.

The problem with Obama’s proposal wasn’t that Netanyahu refused, but the logic behind it. As former State Department advisor Aaron David Miller said about the package, “They’re not offering him [Netanyahu] pain, they’re offering him gain.” Even so, Netanyahu still had to deal with his constituency, which wouldn’t approve another building freeze. Obama had repeated Clinton’s mistake: believing in the unequivocal power of what Clinton official Martin Indyk described in Innocent Abroad as “good intentions backed by America’s immense influence.”

Obama essentially stayed out of the way after that. Since November 2010, he has only gone through the motions — speaking at this year’s AIPAC conference, calling Netanyahu and Abbas after attempts to restart talks, and releasing the occasional statemen: In other words, all process and no substance. Many say that Obama turned his back on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and focused on “easier” issues instead.

I’d like to offer a different interpretation. Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass recently said in Jerusalem that the “American era of dominating the Middle East peace process is ending. More responsibility will fall on the shoulders of Israelis and Palestinians themselves.” I think Obama finally understands that it’s really up to them — not the State Department or the White House — to find a solution. This is not negligence, but rather an honest confrontation of reality.

I think Obama also gets that neither side is currently serious about peace. Rocket attacks from Gaza, settlement construction, and settlers vandalizing West Bank mosques dominate the media. In June, Abbas called the peace process “clinically dead,” and it’s unlikely that Netanyahu’s unity government with centrist Kadima will convince the Prime Minister to accept pre-1967 lines with some land swaps as the starting point for negotiations. As diplomat Dennis Ross writes in The Missing Peace, “One critical lesson from the Oslo period is that no negotiation is likely to succeed if there is one environment at the negotiating table and another one on the street.” After stumbling through the first half of his term, perhaps Obama realized that the U.S. has no place in a stalemated process.

Obama was right to extricate himself from the unpromising peace process. American interference has no place in a conflict whose sides refuse to negotiate in good faith.  If the President has indeed learned from the missteps of his predecessor, the U.S. may finally sit comfortably on the sidelines.

I tend to think betting in general is stupid, but yesterday I made a bet with intrepid blogger The Camel’s Nose that the unity government Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put together in May won’t last out the week. Let’s be honest: Bibi’s little experiment isn’t working out. The reasons columnists and analysts gave for this project – building a consensus for bombing Iran/dismantling settlements/passing universal conscription law – haven’t exactly panned out. In fact, they’ve all gloriously backfired.

TCN does a pretty good job arguing that the coalition will still be intact on July 8, but two can play this game. No need for Freudian meta-psychoanalysis here: the facts speak for themselves. Here is why the Mofaz-Bibi bromance (or “man-date,” if you keep up with memes) is about to become the shortest-lived government in Israel’s history – after Golda Meir’s botched 85-day, post-Yom Kippur War mess.

1. Bibi’s balancing act will be his downfall. Many lauded the prime minister’s political “masterstroke” back in May, but this characterization of Bibi as a cunning and resourceful tactician is plain wrong. Second-term Bibi faces the same challenge as first-term Bibi. Will he make a breakthrough at the expense of his right-wing base, or placate his loyal minions? Bibi is a creature of habit: In 1997, he reneged on the Hebron Agreement, and we know how it ended in 1999 when he failed to implement the Wye River Memorandum – an election that gave Israel Ehud Barak. Since this unity government took office, Bibi has reneged on two things he supposedly needed MK Shaul Mofaz and Kadima’s Knesset votes for: stopping settlement expansion and replacing the unconstitutional Tal Law, which exempts ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from mandatory service in the IDF. Instead, Bibi softened the blow of dismantling the Ulpana settlement by greenlighting the construction of 551 new housing units in the West Bank, and chucked the Keshev Committee, a Kadima-Likud initiative tasked with finding a replacement for the Tal Law. Bibi the Likudnik is back in action. Unfortunately, Yisrael Beiteinu and Habayit Hayehudi already withdrew from the committee, and Shas and UTJ aren’t too happy with the proposed quotas and penalties. Of course, Mofaz and Kadima are fuming as well. It’s only a matter of time before this government’s coalition partners strike out and vote to dissolve the Knesset.

2. Mofaz has seen the light. And that light is “leader of the opposition.” Mofaz, who I saw a couple of weeks ago, thought that a unity government would be Kadima’s big chance for post-Sharon resurgence. He thought there was room for compromise and a genuine willingness on Bibi’s part to resume negotiations with the Palestinians. But Bibi is, after all, King Bibi, and he isn’t changing. Mofaz is fed up, and making concessions on behalf of the Prime Minister isn’t going to win him any points with his own party. If he really wants to save his political career, he will withdraw from the coalition and become the leader of the opposition.

3. Cutting losses and taking names. This government may be a marriage of convenience, but let’s be real here – Kadima voters and parliamentarians don’t exactly like Bibi. Sure, Mofaz may be “popular” with the Israeli public, but if Bibi does “go to great lengths to find a deal with Mofaz,” as TCN has suggested, he will most likely lose the right-wing base that handed him the premiership in 2009. If it’s between having a somewhat smaller constiuency and having no constiuency at all, Bibi would do better to cut his losses and scrap his unity government. Public opinion may be important, but no one’s going to vote for Bibi in the next elections if he does make a deal with Mofaz.

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng remains very concerned about the state of law in China, he told Council on Foreign Relations fellow Jerome Cohen during a discussion at the CFR’s New York office Thursday, where he spoke publicly for the first time since he arrived in the U.S. on May 19.

“It’s still very much being trampled on,” he said. “Our central government more than once has stated that I’m a free person, I’m a legal person, and it was very normal for me to leave Shandong. After I left Shandong, the local authorities, the deputy secretary in charge of law and order, got 30-odd hired thugs with axe handles and busted their way into the home of my elder brother and his son.”

Though Guangcheng’s brother has returned to Shandong, he is still “under tremendous pressure,” and Guangcheng’s nephew has been accused of murder.

“My nephew is still in a detention center,” he explained. “His lawyer cannot meet with him and we can’t get any information on him, and as I understand, keeping him isolated from his lawyer probably suggests that he may be tortured and they’re just trying to hide that fact.”

China’s moral standards in this case, he added, are at “rock bottom.”

Guangcheng also spoke to the disconnect between China’s central and local governments.

“I think of course they [the central government] know what’s going on at the local level, but I’m also sure they don’t know what’s completely going on because under the present circumstances they just hear a lot of reports, but they don’t have that many channels for directly communicating with the people,” he said.

Even so, corruption reaches down to all levels.

“The Bo Xilai incident reminds of another incident,” Guangcheng noted. “We had somebody at the level of a vice governor in Shandong province who, out of his own interest, in order to keep a cover-up on a mistress he had for 13 years, used a remote controlled bomb to blow her to pieces. Bo Xilai is not an isolated case.”

Regarding his stay at the U.S. embassy in Beijing and the diplomatic firestorm that ensued, he said he never changed his mind when he decided to pursue studying abroad in the U.S. after initially telling American officials that he wanted to stay in China.

“After the diplomatic agreement was reached between China and the U.S. and the central government guaranteed my personal safety, in other words after I left the U.S. embassy, I enjoyed those rights,” Guangcheng explained. “One of those rights is the freedom to travel in and out of China.”

The world should celebrate that, he added.

“I think we can see that the central government is letting me come to the U.S. to study,” Guangcheng said. “That is unprecedented. Regardless of what they did in the past, as long as they’re beginning to move in the right direction we should affirm it. We shouldn’t be just in this habit of challenging what they’re doing.”

So much has changed in Israeli politics in the first decade of the 21st century, right? Well, after tonight’s decision to scrap early elections and go for a Likud-Kadima unity government, you could have fooled me. The issues may be slightly different these days, but most of the dynamics are exactly the same.

Now that Labor is back in its comfortable position as the primary opposition, we’ve got a traditional Likud-Labor dichotomy that has characterized the vast majority of Israel’s political history. I don’t think Mofaz will remain in Kadima for much longer; if he wants a higher profile position like Foreign Minister, he’ll need to either merge his party with Likud or break away from Kadima himself. Also, unity governments are always ill-conceived ideas and never turn out well, so there’s that karma.

It’s true that Bibi has gotten smarter since his unfortunate downfall in 1999, but then again the Knesset has also shifted more to the right. Bibi’s maneuvering this time around was more of a well-oiled machine, but it was still calculated based on fear. Bibi was ousted by Barak in 1999 because he was so concerned about his coalition that he spent most of his time flip-flopping and less time actually getting things done. He gave lip service to the Oslo process many a time, but never kept his word. I’m not saying that Bibi 2012 is Bibi 1999, but rather that Mofaz 2012 is Bibi 1999. Mofaz is so worried about his party that he will do anything to save it and his individual political career. Long overshadowed by Livni, he didn’t win the Kadima primary for nothing. He may have voiced support for the social protest movement and previously declared bombing Iran to be a bad idea, but it’s clear that he has an entirely different endgame.

There’s also the issue of Bibi versus the rest of Likud. In the 1990s he couldn’t make certain concessions as required by the Hebron Agreement and the Wye Memorandum not only because his coalition was too fragile, but also because his own party doubted him. The tension between Bibi and Likud MK Moshe Feiglin during the Likud leadership race in January was undeniably divisive, and Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor recently told Al Jazeera that “Iran never vowed to ‘wipe Israel off the map,’ as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed.” Yesterday, Anglo Likud Central Committee member Gidon Ariel announced that he would run against Bibi for the position of Likud Convention President this Sunday evening. Ariel comes from Maale Adumim, and it’s guaranteed that he and his fellow settler Likudniks are not too happy about Bibi welcoming Mofaz and Kadima with open arms. All of this is likely to continue to cause major tension under the Likud-Kadima unity government. Whether it causes the government to implode a la 1999, on the other hand, is a different issue.

These are just some preliminary thoughts. For more, follow me on Twitter at @awg9988, since I will most likely be tweeting up a storm about all of this.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the The New Republic, has an excellent piece up about what he calls the “lost art” of simultaneously defending and criticizing Israel. Here’s the crux of his argument:

SO ISRAEL MUST be defended and Israel must be criticized. Almost nobody any longer practices the lost art of doing both at the same time, with similar emphasis, out of equally intense convictions, in a single breath. Instead there is the party of security and the party of justice, as if the country, any country, can endure without both. The debate is a stale contest in cursing between gangs, a tiresome exchange of to-be-sure sentences, uttered by people with anxieties about credibility, or worse, with no such anxieties at all.

This is a piece that I’ve been waiting to see for a long time, and I think it describes where I am perfectly. My experience studying abroad in Israel lured me away from the right-center of Israeli politics, and more towards the center-left, but not into “Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state” territory. As I was discussing last night with my good friend who is a peace and conflict studies masters candidate at American University, either you’re allied with AIPAC or with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Those of us who fall somewhere in between, who are more prone to intellectualism and objectivity than to eager — and usually reckless — passions, are misunderstood. We do not care to constantly rehash and re-dissect the specifics of Resolution 242, but to rather look at the bigger picture and deal with the here and now.

I often think that I must confuse a lot of my Jewish friends and family. I think that the concept of defensible borders is obsolete, but I also believe that it’s not realistic for millions of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel. The current government is destroying Israel one cabinet decision at a time, but the left isn’t exactly well-organized, and I don’t think leftist parties will make much headway in the next elections. This morning I didn’t buy a bag of Bamba at the supermarket, even though a portion of the proceeds go to building a community center in Sderot, because that money runs through the Jewish National Fund, which is notorious for its blatant anti-Palestinian views and policies. I don’t see the conflict through the eyes of AIPAC, SJP, B’tselem, Stand With Us, or even J Street. Instead, I take a Wieseltier-esque approach of practical intellectualism — of objectivity, balance (whatever that means), and genuine curiosity.

So will I celebrate Israel’s Independence Day this year? Of course. Do I believe that Israel should be an independent Jewish state? Absolutely. But I also think that Israel’s policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are colonialist, and that the IDF is not as moral an army as public and private hasbara makes it out to be. According to most, this makes me anti-Israel, a sort of political apikoros. And to others, I’m still supporting an apartheid regime that will stop at nothing to cleanse Israel of Palestinians once and for all.

What bothers me more than the fact that what I’m describing is a lost art is the fact that I am made to feel so uncomfortable about where I stand. I have completely refrained from being vocally pro-Israel, pro-two state solution, or pro-Palestinian because I do not want to be known as one or the other. I’m not quite sure where this leaves me, but I will keep practicing this lost art. It’s the only way to be credible.

On Tuesday evening, Dennis Ross gave a lecture about the “challenges ahead” for America and the Middle East at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. I definitely appreciated his approach of not trying to predict the future, but I did find fault with his assessment of Iran and his analysis of the current status of Israel-Palestine and the “peace process” (or whatever we’re calling it now).

First, he went into detail about the Arab Awakening, emphasizing that whoever ultimately comes to power in places like Egypt and Tunisia has to govern their citizens and not rule them as subjects. As for the American role in these events, he said, “The story [and] its authors are in the region, they’re not outside the region. We may have a huge stake in what’s going on here, but we’re not in a position to be shaping it.” I’ve deduced, therefore, that he is against an American intervention in Syria, and is probably also against arming the Free Syrian Army. Unlike a lot of talk I’ve been hearing, though, Ross seems to be confident that the Syrian regime’s days are numbered.

Next, he talked about Iran. His “psychic map” for that topic is that crippling sanctions, plus increasing regional and international isolation, provide a context for negotiation. The balance of power, he says, has shifted against Iran, which is no longer able to coerce its neighbors. Beginning in July, the European Union will boycott Iranian oil, and Saudi Arabia has promised to step up and make sure there’s enough oil on the market. Ross seems to think that crippling sanctions hold great promise because, in the past, Iran has changed its behavior when it thought the price was too high. It is ultimately up to the Supreme Leader whether or not Iran goes forward with its nuclear program and how it uses nuclear power, but I don’t think we can necessarily claim precedent on this one. The longer a conflict lasts, the harder it is to solve, and sanctions usually take a long time to work. Israel will bear with negotiations for only so long.

I was pleased that Ross began his comments on Israel-Palestine with observation that the psychological gaps are more profound than the substantive gaps, and that there is popular support among Israelis and Palestinians for a two-state solution that embraces terms similar to the Clinton Parameters. He accurately continued that each side is convinced that the other will not do what is necessary, and that we’re going to see “more of the same.” Sure, the rest of the region isn’t exactly focused on this issue right now, but it’s not going away. Ross concluded that we must continue to pedal the peace process bicycle, or else things are likely to get worse. Even if the circumstances aren’t ripe, both sides must ask themselves how they can alter the context so that change happens over time.

Ross suggested that Israel find ways to validate Palestinians who believe in nonviolence by showing them through reciprocity that Israeli control in the West Bank is receding. He proposes that Israel stop its incursions into Area A, support a larger Palestinian police force in Area B, and permit more Palestinian economic activity in Area C. Maybe then the context will change.

My fundamental disagreement with this point is that changing the facts on the ground will not affect psychology at this point. Statistics show that longer lasting intractable conflicts are much harder to resolve, and you don’t need to look back very far to see how psychologically intractable this conflict is. Just last week, after all, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Abu Mazen traded barbs over Jerusalem. It doesn’t matter what kinds of baby steps Israel takes; there will always be an insurmountable gap on Jerusalem. As for those opinion polls, it’s all hypothetical and, like he said, neither side believes a two-state solution with Clinton Parameters is really going to happen. The leadership on both sides seems to be satisfied with maintaining the status quo, which makes the prospects for what Ross calls “coordinated unilateralism” untenable. If nothing is working, he says, each side can take parallel steps that would be in their own interest and benefit each side. No concessions, just rational actors making rational choices. Unfortunately, it’s quite clear that Netanyahu and Abu Mazen are irrational actors, at least when it comes to the conflict. Ross did leave us with the caveat that he’s not optimistic, but I wonder if pedaling this bicycle actually does more harm than good.

This morning I had the pleasure of attending a panel discussion featuring Haaretz Washington correspondent Natasha Mozgovaya, JTA Washington bureau chief Ron Kampeas, Al-Hayat Washington correspondent Joyce Karam, and expert Mideast policy wonk David Makovsky. Both Makovsky and Mozgovaya confirmed what I thought all along, that what’s happening right now is just political posturing and an exercise in flamboyant deterrence. Here’s what Makovsky had to say:

I think their [Netanyahu and Barak] fear was that the IAEA report would get lost, and they’re looking for ways to keep this issue in the international news so that it gets maximum attention. They were afraid it would go down the news hole, so they tested the Jericho missile. The last time they tested it was four years ago, and the name Jericho wasn’t even mentioned, but this time there was a press release, and the test was done during the day out in the open. When Israel wants to hide things they know how to do it, and they wanted this report to build pressure on Iran and the US.

I’m convinced.