Israel-Palestine: nothing works
For all the grief I gave Andrew Sullivan the other day, I have to admit: He’s the unquestioned master of his medium. In the days since Leon Wieseltier’s hit piece, Sully has curated a wide-ranging debate about himself and the thorny subject of Israel, and it’s made for pretty good reading. Still, some nuance would ...
For all the grief I gave Andrew Sullivan the other day, I have to admit: He's the unquestioned master of his medium. In the days since Leon Wieseltier's hit piece, Sully has curated a wide-ranging debate about himself and the thorny subject of Israel, and it's made for pretty good reading.
For all the grief I gave Andrew Sullivan the other day, I have to admit: He’s the unquestioned master of his medium. In the days since Leon Wieseltier’s hit piece, Sully has curated a wide-ranging debate about himself and the thorny subject of Israel, and it’s made for pretty good reading.
Still, some nuance would be helpful. Here, for instance, is a point I partly agree with:
I believe, after the last year, that it is in the interests of the United States to use serious leverage to get Israel to get serious about ending settlement construction permanently and beginning the dismantling and removal of these impediments to any serious progress in the region.
The settlements are a real problem. But I have grave doubts, especially after what has transpired in 2009, that allowing them to become the focus of negotiations is helpful. Instead of backing Benjamin Netanyahu into a corner and making Israelis fear for the future of their alliance with the United States, the issue got his hackles up and let his allies paint Obama as pro-Arab to an already suspicious Israeli public. And instead of buying goodwill from the Palestinians, it made them grow intransigent in the hopes of pocketing a more substantial settlement freeze. A lot has changed since the 1990s, notably the Israeli public’s lurch rightward and the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Our analysis of the situation needs to change, too. (One thing that hasn’t changed: AIPAC still gets what it wants in Congress.)
Maybe, as some have suggested, it would be better to forget about a lasting peace for now and go for a cease-fire in the hopes that moderates on both sides would gain strength over time. Another approach might be to focus on improving the lives of Palestinians and avoid the kind of high-stakes diplomacy that has tripped up all efforts to date. Maybe.
Here’s the thing about Israeli-Palestinian peace, though: Nothing works. We can try to draw lessons from past agreements, like the 1978 Egypt-Israel accords at Camp David, the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace deal, or the various interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinians that ultimately led nowhere in the 1990s. But none of them prove anything about a final-status deal over the West Bank and Gaza. For Israelis and Palestinians, things that sound stupid to most of us — like fighting over flower pots and patches of infertile desert — are a matter of life and death. All this makes the ins and outs of this conflict endlessly debateable, but also maddeningly difficult to solve.
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