I.
Even by the standard of his recent predecessors, John Kerry, who became secretary of state in February 2013, took on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with extraordinary intensity. It was not an obvious choice, given the record of past diplomatic efforts, the bitter experience of President Barack Obama’s first term, the many factors that had made the conflict only more difficult to resolve, and the far larger scale and importance of other challenges facing the United States: the slaughter in Syria, where the number of dead was approaching one hundred thousand and steadily rising; sectarian violence and anti-American militancy spreading throughout the Middle East; and an effort to shift US priorities to counter the growing power of China.
Despite all of these, America’s ambitious new secretary found it particularly urgent to resolve the more than century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs in a territory smaller than his home state of Massachusetts. Between Kerry’s swearing-in and the launch of talks half a year later, Israeli-Palestinian violence claimed fewer than ten lives.
The attention Kerry paid to the issue was matched by the resources the United States provides to Israel, which receives more American military aid than the rest of the world combined—about $3.5 billion annually and set to increase to $3.8 billion in 2019, making up over one fifth of the Israeli defense budget. As for the Palestinian government, it too secures close to half a billion per year and is among the largest per capita recipients of US aid.1 Over these two small and highly dependent clients, the United States might be expected to possess considerable leverage. Yet its efforts to broker a peace agreement between them have been repeatedly frustrated, suggesting not just mismanagement of American taxpayer dollars but also the apparent impotence of the world’s most powerful nation.
Still, Kerry’s temptation to enter the morass was not difficult to understand. Most US officials believe without question that the foreclosure of a possibility of a two-state solution, whatever that might mean, would significantly harm American (as opposed to Israeli) interests. To many outsiders, the conflict seems to have a simple resolution—an ethnic partition of the territory into two nation-states separated by the pre-1967 lines—and the United States seems well placed to settle it. Confronted with accusations of US retreat from the Middle East and the seeming insolubility of problems elsewhere in the world, Kerry focused on what looked achievable.
He appeared, moreover, to think that securing an agreement was of great importance. The demography of Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel—where, collectively, the number of gentiles recently surpassed the number of Jews—led Kerry to assert that soon Israel would face the choice between “either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.” Not for the first time and not for the last, he declared that “the window for a two-state solution is shutting.”2
So Kerry pressed on, winning accolades not for any new strategy or tactic but rather for the sincerity of his faith in the possibility of brokering a deal. He was convinced an agreement could be reached if only he could drag the parties to the negotiating table and mediate it. He operated under the misapprehension that after decades of failed efforts, peace had remained elusive not because Israel and Palestine held irreconcilable positions but primarily because they did not trust each other.
Normally, the two parties, whatever their doubts, are willing to appease a determined, legacy-seeking American secretary of state. But Kerry found that months of shuttle diplomacy and earnest cajoling were not enough to surmount the obstacles that had prevented direct negotiations for years.
* * *
Since the beginning of Obama’s first term, there had been only three meetings between Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu, all of them in September 2010. There had also been secret talks and, in January 2012, unproductive “exploratory” meetings between lower-level officials, held in Amman. The Palestinians concluded that Netanyahu was not serious about a two-state settlement and so they had refused to enter official, publicly acknowledged talks unless Israel met two conditions: first, agreement to a freeze in settlement activity; second, an understanding that the final borders of the two states would be based on the pre-1967 lines, stipulations all Israeli prime ministers before Netanyahu had rejected.3 In the end, as American, Israeli, and Palestinian officials with direct knowledge of the talks have told me, Kerry arrived at a formula to launch new negotiations: he made inconsistent promises to each side.
To the Israelis, Kerry said he had gotten the Palestinians to acquiesce to hold talks in exchange for the release of prisoners, without the demands for a settlement freeze or acceptance of the pre-1967 lines. To the Palestinians, he suggested that he had nearly obtained agreement to both: First, he told them, Israel would commit during the talks to exhibit restraint within the settlement blocs and, according to several Abbas confidants, to stop issuing new tenders for construction outside them.4 Second, Kerry gave a letter to the Palestinians affirming that the goal of the United States was to create a Palestinian state with borders based on the pre-1967 lines and mutually agreed swaps. The implication was that the United States had secured private assurances from Netanyahu that he would meet or come close to meeting both conditions, but that this could not be acknowledged, since it would likely be rejected by the Israeli government or lead to its dissolution, and that the United States would work to ensure that both pledges were respected.
Palestinian negotiators say Kerry gave them three other important assurances. First, he understood that, if he were to succeed, the Israeli government coalition would have to change at some point during the negotiations. Second, the talks would begin with a focus on borders and security before turning to other issues. And third, the United States would be present for the discussions, a commitment Palestinians wanted because they see such mediation, even by Israel’s closest ally, as preferable to negotiating with their occupier alone. As an added inducement, Kerry announced an ambitious plan to invest $4 billion in the West Bank.
None of these commitments was kept. Far from being restrained, new building in the settlement blocs surged. There was no halt in construction tenders issued outside the blocs, no initial focus on borders, no assurance that the discussions would be based on the pre-1967 lines, no $4 billion investment. At Israel’s insistence and over Palestinian objections, there was almost no US presence in the room during the first several months of negotiations. And there was no choice forced on Netanyahu between accepting US guidelines for continued negotiations or breaking up his government. Quite the opposite: for all but the final, desperate weeks of the talks, US positions were formulated specifically to avoid posing problems for Israel’s coalition government, many of whose members opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Kerry made one more empty promise and it proved fatal. In exchange for Israel’s agreement to release all 104 Palestinian prisoners who had been in jail since before Oslo, in 1993, Kerry secured a Palestinian commitment to halt any steps toward joining international conventions, treaty bodies, and organizations. For Israel, this promise had been a primary inducement to enter the talks.
Netanyahu insisted that the prisoners be released in four groups, spaced roughly two months apart. The Palestinians provided Kerry with a list that included fourteen Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Kerry assured them that Israel had accepted. Israel had not. Netanyahu never agreed to release these fourteen prisoners, which the Israeli cabinet decided would require a separate vote. But the Palestinian negotiators say they were led to believe the opposite.
Wishful thinking appeared to underlie the decision to mislead the parties. Had Kerry been on the brink of an agreement at the time of the planned fourth prisoner release, as he expected to be, he could reasonably have expected the pardons to be approved, and he said the United States would compensate Israel by freeing Jonathan Pollard, the American intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel. But Kerry’s plans didn’t come to be. After the deadline for the fourth group had passed and it became clear that the fourteen prisoners would not be released to their homes, despite several days during which the United States made repeated assurances to the contrary, Palestinians felt they were no longer under obligation to refrain from signing international agreements.5 They gave the United States several warnings of their intentions—enough time for the Israeli government to change its mind—and then joined fifteen conventions and treaty bodies as the State of Palestine. The talks collapsed.
* * *
At the start of the negotiations, Kerry’s stated objective was a comprehensive peace treaty within nine months, and he maintained this goal in the face of widespread skepticism. Yet his critics failed to understand that there was little penalty for wrongly forecasting success when the world had grown so accustomed to failure. Ahead of the Camp David summit in 2000, Bill Clinton said a peace agreement could be achieved in several days. At the outset of the 2007–2008 Annapolis talks, Bush and Condoleezza Rice expressed confidence that talks could be concluded within one year. Three years later, in 2010, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton renewed Bush’s one-year vow as they launched meetings that lasted all of three weeks.6
In each case, reaching an agreement was not the only reason for the two sides to engage in talks. Palestinian leaders have understood that their livelihoods and the foreign aid on which their government depends would be jeopardized if the peace process were somehow to come to a definitive end. Even ebbs in the process have financial consequences for Palestinians, who suffered a large dip in Western funding when negotiations were all but nonexistent for most of 2012. Each year they must show Western donors their “performance” in making progress toward statehood, despite the fact that more than seventeen years have passed since the date at which, according to the time-limited Oslo Accords, five years of interim governance by the PA were to end. Without the fiction of movement in peace talks, it becomes uncomfortably obvious to donors to the PA that the “state-building project” they are financing is not part of a “roadmap” or a pathway to independence but a treadmill.
For Israel, the process is no less instrumental. It has brought increased military aid; US vetoes of UN resolutions that Israel sees as unfavorable; and heightened stature on the global stage. Talks have won the appeasement of nagging leftists, human rights activists, and European officials; decreased support for boycotts and sanctions of Israel and settlement products; and a halt in steps toward international recognition of Palestinian statehood. Negotiations are thought—often wrongly—to have helped lessen Palestinian agitation against occupation by modestly reigniting hopes of achieving independence and thereby bolstering the PA’s claim to its people that it is less a cover for occupation than a tool for ending it. In shoring up international support for Israel, talks can serve as a bulwark against criticism of military operations in Gaza and elsewhere. At times negotiations have enabled Israel to construct settlements with impunity, in violation of international law. This was seen in the Kerry talks, during which settlement activity—justified as necessary to keep the Israeli governing coalition intact while the prime minister prepared to make a far-reaching offer of peace—rose to levels far higher than in the months before or after. Finally, negotiations reduce the pressure to roll back military occupation, since, it is argued, they will shortly end it in any event.
These, however, are not among the primary reasons the United States engages in the peace process. In contrast to cynics like Israel’s defense minister and former foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who says he does not believe negotiations will succeed but supports them as a form of conflict management, the motives of American officials are at once more earnest and more dispiriting.7
Though there are important divisions among US policy makers, including a few who want the country to disinvest from peacemaking and a group of neoconservatives who oppose US-brokered talks because they believe Arabs will never agree to recognize Israel, the majority of senior officials who have worked on the conflict—including, and especially, presidents and secretaries of state—have believed with each new round that they had a good chance of reaching a comprehensive agreement.
Lack of experience is not at fault, for many of the advisers involved have played key roles in multiple administrations. Their views are echoed in the halls of Washington think tanks whose experts have encouraged each new miscarriage. In a 2009 memoir, Martin Indyk, who was ambassador to Israel during the Camp David summit and later Kerry’s special envoy to the Middle East peace process, sought to diagnose the disease:
Hope and optimism are critical components of the innocence that is the hallmark of America’s engagement with the Middle East. Why would we bother to try to transform such a troubled region unless we somehow believed we could, and should? But the dark side of that innocence is a naiveté bred of ignorance and arrogance that generate a chronic inability to comprehend.8
II.
American officials involved in the peace process—as well as the think tanks, NGOs, advocates, journalists, and analysts who seek to influence them—can be divided into three groups. Their differing approaches to policy have dominated Middle East decision-making for over two decades and contributed to the failures of each administration.9
The first and smallest of these groups, which I shall call Skeptics, comprises conservatives and neoconservatives who believe that Arabs will not make peace with Israel, or, in the more nuanced version, that they will not agree to peace on terms acceptable to Israel’s center-right majority. Much of their suspicion derives from their assessment that past Israeli offers have fallen far short of Palestinian demands. On the latter point, they are surely correct.
Prominent people and institutions associated with the Skeptic camp include senior officials of the George W. Bush administration, such as Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith; the more hawkish parts of AIPAC; the American Enterprise Institute; and The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
Because many Skeptics oppose the peace process, they have had less influence on US-brokered negotiations. A few Skeptics still oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, even after the George W. Bush administration officially endorsed the goal of creating one, but their voices have been largely muted.
Skeptics tend to consider negotiations not simply a waste of time but dangerous; they cite as evidence the Second Intifada, which followed the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit. They believe that every significant agreement signed between Israel and its Arab neighbors—from the Oslo Accords with the PLO to the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan—was initiated without the United States. (Skeptics tend to downplay the importance of US efforts to encourage, finalize, or support these agreements.) Because of their antipathy to top-down negotiations, they have focused instead on bottom-up changes, most notably Salam Fayyad’s project of institution building. That program remains, according to nearly all Washington officials, one of the few policy successes concerning the conflict in recent years.10
The record shows that, in the years since Oslo, the Skeptics who held positions of influence during the George W. Bush administration were responsible for changes that most Washington policymakers consider to be more positive and consequential than those of their predecessors and successors in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Skeptics helped bring about the first official approval, both from an Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and a US president, Bush, not of Palestinian autonomy but of statehood. They pushed in 2003 for the Palestinian Authority to create the post of prime minister, in which they helped install a US favorite, Mahmoud Abbas, the most moderate leader in Palestinian history.
After the end of the Second Intifada, in early 2005, Skeptics created a program that used US advisers to transition the Palestinian security forces under Abbas’s command from sometimes fighting Israel to cooperating closely with it, a goal shared by all American officials. Skeptics worked to reduce the number of checkpoints in the West Bank. They encouraged the popular though not altogether effective attempts by Fayyad to lessen corruption and reform Palestinian institutions. And Skeptics supported the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, perhaps the most significant change in the conflict since 1967. Skeptics of the Bush administration argue that their successes came precisely because they opposed fruitless peace talks—at least, until they were outmaneuvered by Condoleezza Rice, who made such talks a priority near the end of her tenure—and focused instead on smaller, incremental goals.
The Bush Skeptics also presided over no small number of failures. Grossly underestimating the strength of Hamas, they pushed for Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, convinced that Hamas—which had boycotted all previous national elections—would be discredited and defeated. The Skeptics then orchestrated a US-led policy to isolate the Islamist party and deprive it of its democratically elected power. In the view of Skeptics, the results of this isolation were mixed. On one hand, their policy succeeded: it prevented Hamas rule in the West Bank; demonstrated to Palestinians that the election of Islamists would exact a heavy collective price; and undermined the chance of a unified Palestinian government. On the other, the same policy also failed to achieve their aim of bringing down Hamas. Instead, it became stronger politically and militarily, while US collusion in thwarting Hamas’s victory undermined the legitimacy of the unelected Palestinian government that the Skeptics had sought to support.
* * *
The proponents of a second, more activist approach toward negotiations—I’ll call them Reproachers—reject the limited goals of the Skeptics, dismissing their doubts and believing that the conflict could be resolved if the United States were to put sufficient pressure on Israel (within the bounds of what they think American domestic politics can permit—which is to say, sufficient verbal pressure). Reproachers seek to be more balanced mediators, to forcefully criticize the expansion of Israeli settlements, and to dedicate greater effort toward conducting final-status talks.
A number of influential Reproachers are self-described realists and veterans of the peace process who are critical of themselves and other American officials for having acted, in the words of the former State Department official Aaron David Miller, as “Israel’s lawyer.” Prominent people and institutions associated with the Reproacher school include Obama during his first term, former Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Foreign Service officers at the US consulate in Jerusalem, Americans for Peace Now, J Street, and the editorial board of The New York Times.
Reproachers hold that most Israelis see little short-term incentive to change a status quo consisting of prolonged military occupation and increasing settlement activity in the West Bank. Large Israeli protests during recent years have been against the high cost of living and the military draft of ultra-Orthodox Jews, not against the occupation, which has become a normal, accepted, and easily ignored part of life for most people. In the absence of pressure, Reproachers argue, Israelis will continue to prefer this status quo to the principal alternatives. Few Israelis want to withdraw unilaterally, even from territory well short of what Palestinians demand, especially because doing so would not put an end to the conflict or to agitation against what remains of the occupation. Fewer still want to grant citizenship to all Palestinians living under their control, although that path is advocated by growing numbers on the Israeli right. And almost none seek an agreement on terms Palestinians say they can accept, fearing the possibility of granting sovereignty to a nation that may one day reelect Hamas.
Reproachers differ from other groups mainly in their sense of urgency about Israel’s need to reach an agreement and in how willing they are to scold their ally publicly. Concerned that the country’s more radical elements will drive it to ruin, Reproachers aim to act with “tough love” to help Israel achieve what they believe is in its own interest.
Reproachers such as Obama often claim that the half-century-old occupation is “unsustainable,” that time is running out, that Israel faces demographic annihilation, and that the current circumstances present the last chance for peace—claims repeated so frequently as to be largely ignored by Palestinians and Israelis alike.11 Seeing active US mediation as a necessary condition for peace, Reproachers reject the notion of Skeptics that, as with past treaties, an agreement will have to await the initiative of the parties themselves. Some Reproachers doubt the chance of peace under Netanyahu or other right-wing Israeli leaders (indeed, after the Kerry talks broke down, Obama administration Reproachers behaved more like Skeptics, calling for a “pause” in negotiations in the hope that the parties would eventually beg the United States to reengage) but this does not translate into skepticism about the peace process in general.
Reproachers argue that the conflict has remained unresolved not because the maximum Israelis will concede is less than the minimum Palestinians will accept, as Skeptics claim. Rather, they say, it is because the United States has not been bold enough in seeking to bridge the differences. Reproachers tend to focus more on settlements and territory than on the thornier issues of sovereignty over Jerusalem’s Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount and the Palestinian refugee problem. They often state that the outlines of a final peace treaty are well known, and they tend to dismiss the possibility that failure thus far can be explained by the inadequacy of the arrangements they have suggested and seen rejected.
Nothing has done more to discredit Reproachers than holding power. No US administration had been more stacked with Reproachers than Barack Obama’s, and no American president had been more sympathetic to Palestinians. But during their eight years in power, Obama and his advisers achieved much less for them than did George W. Bush.
This is partly the result of circumstance. Both the Bush Skeptics and the Obama Reproachers began their first terms at roughly the same time as a newly elected Likud prime minister who had still not accepted the idea of Palestinian statehood. Ariel Sharon in 2001 and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 entered office just months after the collapse of what in each case had been the most far-reaching Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to date. Both prime ministers refused to continue talks where their predecessors—first Ehud Barak and then Ehud Olmert—had left off, despite Palestinian pleas for them to do so.
Barak and Olmert had made offers that were unsatisfactory to Palestinians yet far ahead of mainstream Israeli public opinion. Each prime minister had made his proposal at a time when he was losing power and a historic agreement offered his only chance at keeping his job. The two US administrations were sure that the new Likud prime minister could not match, much less surpass, the offers of several months earlier. But whereas the Bush Skeptics concluded that renewed negotiations were pointless, the Obama Reproachers believed that talks could succeed if they employed the right mix of seduction and pressure, and so sought to start negotiations between the Palestinians and Netanyahu. They did so despite a deafening chorus of analysts and former officials stating that Netanyahu could not be brought to make even the concessions of his predecessor, which Palestinians had so recently found insufficient.
So in the early days of Obama’s presidency, the Reproachers, led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, pushed for a settlement freeze, believing, incorrectly, that this would win respect, and subsequent steps toward normalization, from Arab states. But the Arab states offered Obama little more than indifference. After more than ten months of painful failure at appreciable domestic cost, the Reproachers succeeded in obtaining from Israel—in exchange for Abbas’s politically damaging commitment to postpone a vote at the United Nation endorsing the Goldstone Report on the 2008–2009 war in Gaza—not a freeze but a so-called moratorium on settlements that was filled with loopholes. These included a large number of exemptions: for construction begun just beforehand; for educational, religious, cultural, and sport facilities; for planning and public infrastructure; and for building in East Jerusalem, where settlement is most consequential. The 2010 moratorium—which Obama asked to extend for ninety days in exchange for twenty F-35 stealth fighter aircraft worth $3 billion and a US pledge to veto moves toward Palestinian statehood at the UN—was immediately preceded and succeeded by so much construction as to render it meaningless. In West Bank settlements, the number of construction starts dropped less than 7 percent from the previous year, while in East Jerusalem, the number of tenders issued for new housing nearly quadrupled.12
Bush, by contrast, was offered a full freeze in settlement construction during Sharon’s first months in office in 2001, as Indyk, who was then ambassador to Israel, writes in his memoir.13 The principal difference was that Sharon offered it in exchange for a halt in the Palestinian violence then raging, whereas when Obama entered office, the Second Intifada had long since ended.
US pressure on Israel during Obama’s first year consisted mostly of reprimands, which were more costly to his domestic political agenda than to Netanyahu. Though Reproachers were willing to take a different tone with Israel—and this received much attention in the often melodramatic coverage of US-Israel relations in the press—substantively it was clear that there was little appetite for more than rhetorical and symbolic confrontation. Frustrated with the failures of the Reproachers, Obama was reported by The Washington Post to have eventually asked them, “I see you want the moratorium [on settlements], but how does it get us where we want to be? Tell me the relationship between what we are doing and our objective.”14 It wasn’t long before he brought in a senior figure from a rival ideological camp, whose members I’ll call Embracers.
* * *
Embracers, the third and most influential group, combine the Skeptics’ unconditional backing of Israel with the Reproachers’ unwavering faith in the peace process. Prominent institutions associated with the Embracer school include the Anti-Defamation League, the more moderate parts of AIPAC, the US embassy in Tel Aviv, and the editorial board of The Washington Post. Like Skeptics, Embracers think a US focus on settlements is mistaken. Like Reproachers, they firmly believe that US involvement is necessary to achieving an agreement. Yet they argue that peace can be brokered only by embracing Israel tightly, reassuring it, and alleviating its fears. Israel, the Embracers reason, is the stronger party, with both more to give and more to lose; for Israel to have the confidence necessary to take generous steps, it needs unwavering American support.15
The most prominent Embracer is Dennis Ross, a George H. W. Bush and Clinton administration veteran who was asked to lead Obama’s Middle East policy when the Reproacher strategy hit a wall. Ross and other Embracers opposed the push for a settlement freeze and leaned on Obama to avoid calling for a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem in an important policy speech.16
Embracers are popular with US presidents because they tell them precisely what they want to hear: that you can achieve your goals by remaining closely allied with Israel; that Palestinians will ultimately be happy because your cradling of Israel will lead to the peace they desire; and that along the way you’ll win plaudits from Israel’s supporters in the United States, thus paying no domestic political price. So far this dream has not come true, but the words have been too sweet to resist.
Obama, who fell under the Embracers’ spell quite early in his first term, adopted an approach toward the peace process not unlike that of Goldilocks. He entered office thinking the Bush Skeptics were too warm toward Israel, telling a group of Jewish leaders in 2009 that the Bush administration’s intimacy with Israel had not produced results. But he soon concluded that his Reproachers were too cold. So he handed responsibility to the Embracers, who he believed would be just right.
Kerry’s appointment as secretary of state heralded a reemphasis on the Embracers’ strategy. When Israel put forward plans for extensive settlement expansion with each new prisoner release, Kerry did little more than call the announcements “illegitimate” and “unhelpful,” while angering Palestinians by describing the sharp rise as “expected” and urging them not to abandon the talks.17 He made it a priority to try to find a way to meet Netanyahu’s demands for an Israeli security presence in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley and for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, a position the United States had already failed to get even the Middle East Quartet to endorse. And he sought to avoid presenting Israel with any choice that might break up Netanyahu’s coalition. On difficult issues such as the division of sovereignty in Jerusalem, he used evasive rhetoric—referring, for example, to Palestinian “aspirations” for a capital there—to imply to Palestinians that they would enjoy sovereignty in the city while suggesting to the Israeli right that no division would take place.
Following repeated disappointments, the Palestinians came to believe that the negotiations presented a greater risk than they had anticipated. As the 2013–2014 talks foundered and the United States’ objective was steadily downgraded—from a comprehensive peace treaty, to a framework agreement between the parties, to an American framework proposal from which the parties could distance themselves, to a mere extension of talks without a framework—they feared that Kerry would put forward his vision of the outlines of an agreement, a vision that looked increasingly as if it would represent several steps backward from what they perceived as commitments already secured.
Palestinians recalled that in 2003, Bush’s Roadmap to Middle East Peace, which was endorsed by the Quartet and the UN Security Council, promised that all settlement activity would be frozen and that settler outposts would be immediately dismantled. The Roadmap also stated that a final resolution to the conflict would be based on (though not identical to) the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. This proposed a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; a just solution of the Palestinian refugee problem in accordance with the relevant 1948 UN General Assembly resolution (which the United States voted for); and a full withdrawal to Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries, with no mention of accommodation for settlement blocs or land swaps.18
Palestinian representatives do not insist that a comprehensive agreement entail no modifications of the Arab Peace Initiative or other possible bases for future talks. But unless their hand is forced by binding parameters enshrined in international law, they have little incentive to accept negotiations predicated on less favorable terms than had been offered in the past.19
* * *
Kerry was surprised at his inability to obtain Palestinian acceptance of parameters that fell short of previous US proposals.20 This despite the fact that there was no precedent for a Palestinian leader to make hugely controversial concessions in exchange for the mere opportunity to hold or extend talks, much less talks with an Israeli government whose intentions Palestinians had strong reasons to doubt. To concede, in the absence of a comprehensive peace treaty or even the reasonable probability of achieving one, that almost no refugees would have the choice of returning to Israel would be an act of political hara-kiri that any Palestinian leader would naturally avoid. Yet the United States asked Abbas to do just that, and expressed great disappointment when he refused to take the sword.
Reproachers repeatedly call on the United States to issue its vision of a final peace deal. They think that parameters for a comprehensive agreement, once proposed, would either serve as the basis for renewed negotiations or force the Israeli coalition to break apart (and be replaced, they hope, with a more amenable one). But there is little reason to believe the parties would accept such nonbinding guidelines in the absence of heavy pressure—the sort of pressure that no stream of American policymakers has been willing to apply. No one has yet drafted a set of substantive parameters on all final-status issues that, in the absence of significant coercion, including codification in a legally binding UN Security Council Resolution, could be publicly defended by both Abbas and the Israeli left, to say nothing of the country’s right and center. (A Palestinian capital in historic Jerusalem, for example, is a sine qua non of any agreement that a Palestinian leader could sign, yet even the head of the Israeli Labor Party has publicly supported Likud’s insistence on a “united” Jerusalem.)21 And unless Abbas were to accept US parameters unequivocally, without issuing a set of nullifying reservations, the Israeli government would be under no pressure to do so.
At a White House meeting in March 2014, the Obama administration read Abbas a draft framework for continued negotiations, telling him that he could add reservations to it, as could the Israelis. But the proposal had not been seen or accepted by Israel. In fact, the Israelis had held extensive negotiations with the United States over a separate document, less favorable to Palestinians than the one shown to Abbas. The Palestinians complained about this: as with previous Palestinian acceptance of land swaps, the United States and Israel could take Abbas’s concessions as a starting point to be further eroded in future talks. American officials were suspicious of this resistance, accusing the Palestinians of wanting to have it both ways: when an offer had not been approved by Israel, the Palestinians said it was “not serious”; when it had been approved, they called it “pre-cooked.” At the same time, some conceded that Abbas had every reason to doubt that the United States would have forced Israel to accept the framework, rather than returning to him for further compromises.22
Reportedly the draft was more favorable to the Palestinians than the December 2000 proposal presented by President Clinton on one issue, territory. Whereas Clinton stated that Israel could annex up to 6 percent of the West Bank and give the Palestinians as little as 1 percent in compensation, Obama indicated that territorial swaps should be equivalent. But those with first-hand knowledge of the paper say the rest of the terms were less favorable or in some cases more vague, a disadvantage for the weaker negotiating party. They provided no end date for the withdrawal of Israeli security forces from Palestinian territory. There was no mention of even the symbolic formulations on refugees that Clinton had proposed: “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to historic Palestine” or “to their homeland.” The plan did suggest a capital in Jerusalem, but it did not state that Palestinians would be sovereign over specific areas that Clinton had named, including the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and the al-Aqsa Mosque.23
The Obama administration expressed great frustration at Abbas’s refusal to accept the framework. Obama said that Abbas was “too weak” to make peace, a seemingly defensible yet incomplete assessment of what went wrong with the Kerry talks. Obama failed to mention that Abbas’s inability to accept the framework was exacerbated by the fact that Abbas does not represent huge parts of Palestinian society, including the many supporters of Hamas. American officials privately lament the lack of vision or courage among Palestinian leaders. But instead of seeking to help establish a leadership with bolstered legitimacy, the United States prioritizes the exclusion from Palestinian decision-making of all but the most dovish voices surrounding Abbas. Not just Islamists are shut out but other large, neglected constituencies, including refugees and the diaspora. This makes it more likely that the doves will be too weak to gather consensus around possible compromises, too afraid in the absence of such consensus to sign a deal, and too isolated to sell one successfully. It should not have been surprising, then, that given the choice between making politically explosive concessions and rejecting the US framework, the PLO moved in April 2014 to end the talks, join international conventions and treaties as the State of Palestine, and sign an agreement with Hamas to form a new government of technocrats acceptable to the PLO.24
III.
Despite the tactical differences among Skeptics, Reproachers, and Embracers, there is more uniting the three approaches than distinguishing them. If they were to draw up the outlines of a peace treaty, they might fight over the size of land swaps, the number of settlers Israel would evacuate, the location of the border dividing Jerusalem, how long Israeli security forces would remain in a Palestinian state, and the language used to rule out the return of nearly all Palestinian refugees. But to a nonexpert observer it would be difficult to discern the importance of such distinctions.
On questions of broader significance, their opinions largely overlap. Members of all three groups consider themselves pro-Israel and are concerned with preserving Israel as a Jewish state. All favor a two-state solution, the annexation by Israel of large settlement blocs in the West Bank, and a Palestinian capital in some part of East Jerusalem. When they speak of dividing Jerusalem, they mean dividing only occupied East Jerusalem, while forcing Palestinians wishing to go from Ramallah to the al-Aqsa Mosque to travel in tunnels running beneath East Jerusalem settlements annexed by Israel. All wish to deny Palestinian refugees anything more than a symbolic return to Israel, and all underestimate the moral significance to Palestinians of Israeli recognition of at least partial responsibility for the refugee problem. All imagine amounts of financial compensation to refugees that are orders of magnitude lower than refugees expect. (A 2003 survey showed that among those refugees willing to choose compensation instead of a return to Israel, 65 percent believed a fair amount would be $100,000–$500,000 per family. Prior to the Camp David negotiations in 2000, US officials estimated that a combined total of up to $20 billion might be available to Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees from Arab countries, meaning that Palestinians could expect to receive no more than $1,000–$3,000 per refugee.) All neglect how unacceptable their proposals are to refugees, whose support will be indispensable for a lasting agreement, since they make up a majority of Palestinians worldwide and roughly 45 percent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza.25
All three groups back the Israeli demand to place severe restrictions on the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state, with limits on armament, border control, airspace, and ability to form alliances, as well as the placement within the state of international security forces, Israeli early-warning stations, routes for Israeli emergency deployments, and, for some considerable period, Israeli troops. Some of these restrictions are acceptable to PLO leaders, but they remain highly unpopular with the Palestinian public.
Most important, all three groups underrate how ineffectual and often detrimental US actions and policies have been, whether the incremental steps favored by the Skeptics or the final-status talks promoted by Embracers and Reproachers. The groups justify their positions on the grounds that they advance the parties toward a two-state peace. Yet the effect, in practice if not in intention, has been to create false hopes.
For two decades, the notion that peace may come in the near future has excused taking little more than minimal and inadequate steps to lessen the hardships imposed by occupation today. Had Israel and the United States demanded that a peace treaty precede a withdrawal from Gaza or southern Lebanon, the IDF might still be in both places. In point of fact, the United States’ earnest and patient search for peace serves to entrench a one-state reality: Israeli Arabs deepen their ties to Palestinians in the West Bank; settlements spread; outposts are legalized; and annexationist Israelis grow in power. New roads and parks cut through Arab East Jerusalem and make any reasonable division of the city untenable. Palestinian residents of an intended future capital are surrounded by settlements, threatened with the loss of their residency, or compelled to move to the other side of the separation wall. All the while, a series of fruitless negotiations helps to discredit the two-state model and confirm the depth of the chasm between the two sides.
Despite the good intentions American officials express, the United States is less a cure than a cause of stasis. It deprives other third parties—whether European or Arab—of a meaningful part in the process. It negotiates and drafts proposals without adequately consulting or considering the concerns of communities whose support would be crucial for a lasting peace: religious Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Jews as well as Islamists, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and refugees. And the United States tells the Palestinians that peace talks, as well as Western support, are conditional on a halt in Palestinian steps to place more pressure on Israel.
Those steps—which, though popular with the public, are opposed or regarded warily by many Palestinian leaders—include popular protests, boycotts, sanctions, lawsuits, pursuit of recognition of a Palestinian state in various international institutions, and limits on security cooperation with Israel. They also include reforms within the PLO to admit Hamas and other excluded Palestinian factions. The United States opposes such reforms, which are necessary for true Palestinian reconciliation, but fails to see that PLO negotiators will have little legitimacy without them.
No political incentives exist for the United States to change its policies, exert its considerable leverage over the parties, and overturn the status quo. The potential benefits of creating a small, poor, and strategically inconsequential Palestinian state are tiny when compared with the costs of heavily pressuring a close ally that wields significant regional and US domestic power. American policy thus remains designed to thwart actions that would raise the costs of the status quo, and so in effect sustains it.
—September 2014