In no American president did Palestinians invest higher hopes than Barack Obama, and in none did they come to feel more profound disappointment. Obama entered the White House more deeply informed about and supportive of the Palestinian cause than any incoming president before him. He had attended and spoken at numerous events organized by the Arab American and Palestinian American communities, in which he had numerous contacts, and he had repeatedly criticized American policy, calling for a more even-handed approach toward Israel.1
In a 2003 toast to Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian American historian of the University of Chicago and later Columbia University, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and the many talks that had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” He had dined with and attended lectures by such figures as Edward Said, the most famous and eloquent Palestinian critic of the Oslo Accords, and he had offered words of encouragement to Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian American activist, writer, cofounder of the Electronic Intifada, and leading advocate of a one-state solution.2
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Palestinians looked to Obama as a potentially historic figure capable of ending their occupation. For the first time, they had the prospect of an American president who was not only sympathetic to their plight and motivated to resolve it but could connect to it viscerally. Obama could draw parallels with Britain’s colonization of Kenya, where his Muslim father was born, and the African American struggle for civil rights that had culminated in his presidency. Palestinians recalled that in 2007, during the previous administration, Condoleezza Rice had said that Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian life and movement were similar to the oppressive conditions that had angered her as a black child in racially segregated Alabama. Now the Palestinians had a black United States president who had cast himself as a champion of civil rights and replaced George W. Bush’s Oval Office bust of Winston Churchill with one of Martin Luther King, Jr.3
In his first days on the job, Obama did not disappoint. Within hours of taking office, he made one of his first phone calls to a foreign leader, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “We were not expecting such a quick call from President Obama,” a pleased Abbas adviser said, “but we knew how serious he is about the Palestinian problem.”4 Obama and his inner circle shared a strong conviction that a two-state agreement could be reached, and that a new approach was necessary for them to be the ones to reach it.
On his second day, Obama appointed a special envoy for Middle East Peace, Senator George Mitchell, author of a 2001 fact-finding report that called for a freeze in Israeli settlement construction. Four months later, ahead of a White House visit by Abbas, the administration publicly confronted Israel with a call for a complete freeze in settlement building in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and said that in discussing settlements it would not limit itself to the mealy-mouthed criticism of its recent predecessors, which had called them “unhelpful.” A senior official who accompanied Mitchell and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a drive from Israel to the West Bank later recalled the delegation’s discomfort as it entered the Occupied Territories: “my God, you crossed that border and it was apartheid.”5
Visitors to the White House said they had never heard Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or either Bush speaking about Israel and Palestine in the same way. Days after Abbas’s visit, Obama traveled to the Middle East, skipping what for another president would have been a requisite stop in Israel, and delivered an address in Cairo in which he said that “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable,” and spoke of the struggle of African Americans for full and equal rights.6
The shift was also felt by American Jewish leaders. At a White House meeting, Obama responded to the suggestion that Israelis “must know that the United States is right next to them,” by replying: “Look at the past eight years. During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that?”7
The president’s rhetorical question implied the obvious answer: precious little. But that was still considerably more than what the Palestinians would receive during the coming years from Obama. If there was a distinguishing feature of Obama’s record on Israel-Palestine, it was that, unlike his recent predecessors, he had not a single achievement to his name.
The presidents in the three decades before him had all fallen far short of ending occupation or achieving peace, but each had at least inched the parties toward greater partition and Palestinian self-rule. Jimmy Carter had obtained a framework peace agreement in which Israel committed to permit the establishment of a Palestinian self-governing authority, to negotiate with the Palestinians on a territorial withdrawal based on UN Security Council Resolution 242, and to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Ronald Reagan opened a dialogue with the PLO after it had recognized Israel, accepted Resolution 242, and renounced terrorism. George H. W. Bush laid the foundation of what is known as the peace process, dragging Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the first official negotiations with the Palestinians at the 1991 conference in Madrid, which was followed by bilateral talks in Washington that led directly to Oslo. Bill Clinton supported the establishment of the PA in 1994 and helped broker subsequent agreements that expanded Palestinian territorial jurisdiction and secured limited Israeli withdrawals. George W. Bush was the first to make it US policy to support Palestinian statehood, advanced the first UN Security Council resolution explicitly calling for two states, obtained the first endorsement of Palestinian statehood from an Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and supported Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and its dismantling of four West Bank settlements.8
And Obama? After giving up on his short-lived demand for a settlement freeze in September 2009, his envoys pressured the Palestinians to accept two wildly inconsistent preconditions for negotiations: first, that during the talks Israel could continue building new settlements, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention; second, that while Israel violated international law, the Palestinians had to refrain from peacefully employing it, including by exercising their right to join multilateral institutions, a step which, unlike Israel’s settlement construction, the United States said it would consider an act of “bad faith.”9
Then, in 2013, following the failure of these efforts, Obama authorized Secretary of State John Kerry to initiate yet another round of doomed negotiations, which served as cover for settlement building by Benjamin Netanyahu, on a scale unmatched during the preceding decade and with US complicity. Obama even ordered his UN ambassador to issue his sole veto of a UN Security Council resolution, one that called for a halt in settlement activity in words nearly identical to those already used by the administration. Meanwhile the president had provided more money and weapons than any of his predecessors to the Israeli government. His aides spent much of their final year not on advancing Obama’s goal of an end to occupation but rather on negotiating a substantial increase in US aid for the military that imposes it—to $38 billion over ten years—the most generous pledge of military assistance to any country in US history.10
Many in the administration hoped that this was merely a prelude to Obama’s final act, which was exactly what concerned the Israeli government. It dragged out the military aid talks, demanded a still larger subsidy, and displayed reluctance to accept the unprecedented package of assistance. It did so not only because some believed that Obama’s successor might provide an even more lucrative offer on more lenient terms, but also because it sensed a trap. By pointing to Israel’s receipt of the military package, Obama was more able to take steps not to Israel’s liking, including a last-gasp effort to secure a different sort of Palestine legacy.11
* * *
What legacy did Obama hope to leave? In his final months, there were only a few options that seemed politically feasible, which is to say they did not depend on the cooperation of the parties, the support of Congress, or the absence of vociferous opposition from pro-Israel groups. One was to follow in the footsteps of Sweden by offering a largely symbolic recognition of the State of Palestine, without specifying its borders or the location of its capital. (Even in the realm of symbolism, Sweden’s recognition hadn’t amounted to much: two years later, the country’s representative to the Palestinians did not refer to herself as an ambassador and her office was not called an embassy.)12 But recognition was deemed to be a bridge too far.
A second was to support a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. That, however, had been done several times already, decades earlier, to little effect, and doing it again was not expected to alter Israeli behavior or Palestinian living conditions, although it would have allowed Obama to say that he had done something, without actually having done much. A third was for the administration to deliver a speech that outlined the terms on which it thought the conflict should be settled, or to seek multilateral endorsement of such terms, perhaps through the Middle East Quartet. But the announcement of a proposal risked having no lasting effect, either on the parties or on US policy, and the prospects of yet another plan were unpromising.
This left only one option that wasn’t seen as unrealistic, unpalatable, or insignificant: to set down the guidelines or “parameters” of a peace agreement—on the four core issues of borders, security, refugees, and Jerusalem—in a US-supported UN Security Council resolution.13 Once passed, with US support, these parameters would become international law, binding, in theory, on all future presidents and peace brokers.
Top US officials saw a parameters resolution as Obama’s only chance at a lasting, positive legacy, one that history might even show to have been more important to peace than the achievements of his predecessors. Once Kerry’s efforts extinguished the administration’s last hopes of an agreement on their watch, a parameters resolution became their brass ring; after that, Israel-Palestine policy in Washington and capitals throughout Europe was largely at a standstill, hanging on the question of whether Obama would decide to grab it.
Proponents of such a resolution argued that it would form the guidelines for any future negotiations; decrease the likelihood of more talks like Kerry’s that went nowhere, in part because they had no established terms of reference; reduce the incentives for the parties to hold out for better terms, since the resolution would not be subject to renegotiation; give each side the political cover of multilateral insistence on the concessions required of them; and present the parties with an international consensus that they could dislike but not reject indefinitely. Once Israelis and Palestinians succumbed to the weight of months or years of pressure to negotiate on the basis of a Security Council resolution—as eventually happened with Resolution 242, the basis of Israel’s only peace treaties with its Arab neighbors—the parameters, if sufficiently detailed, the argument went, would greatly improve the chance that talks would have a successful outcome, by having secured, in advance, the most painful compromises on each side.
This was precisely the move that the Israeli government feared most. In his March 2016 speech to AIPAC, Netanyahu assaulted the idea, warning against those who
seek to impose terms on Israel in the UN Security Council. And those terms would undoubtedly be stacked against us, they always are. So such an effort in the UN would only convince the Palestinians that they can stab their way to a state.… A Security Council resolution to pressure Israel would further harden Palestinian positions, and thereby it could actually kill the chances of peace for many, many years. And that is why I hope the United States will maintain its longstanding position to reject such a UN resolution.14
* * *
The idea that the United States should lay out the terms of an Israeli settlement with its neighbors has a long history, dating at least as far back as a 1977 Foreign Affairs article, “How to Save Israel in Spite of Herself,” by George Ball, the former undersecretary of state and ambassador to the UN. “The parties will never come anywhere near agreement by the traditional processes of diplomatic haggling,” Ball wrote, “unless the United States first defines the terms of that agreement, relates them to established international principles, and makes clear that America’s continued involvement in the area depends upon acceptance by both sides of the terms it prescribes.”15
Subsequent experience gave credence to the idea. Each of the US-mediated Israeli-Palestinian talks that failed was conducted without agreed guidelines, while each negotiation Israel concluded with its Arab neighbors was premised on internationally endorsed terms of reference. The land-for-peace formula of UN Security Council Resolution 242 was the foundation of Israel’s agreements with Egypt and Jordan and of the interim agreement on Palestinian self-governance brokered in Oslo, which itself provided the terms of reference for successful subsequent negotiations on Palestinian self-rule.
But Resolution 242 was designed to achieve peace between Israel and the Arab states it had fought against in 1967, not between Israel and a yet-to-be established Palestinian state. It made no specific mention of the Palestinians—referring to them only obliquely, in a call for “a just settlement of the refugee problem”—or their right to statehood and self-determination, which was a primary reason that the Palestinians had for so many years objected to accepting it without reservations. Once the PLO had done so, in 1988, its leaders felt that they had finally agreed to parameters established by the international community, only to find that the United States backed the Israeli view that the Palestinians’ acceptance of a state on less than one-fourth of their homeland was not a historic concession but a maximalist demand to be whittled down in future talks.
In round after round of negotiations since then, the Palestinians have reiterated that the guidelines of the discussion must be the UN resolutions they had been pressured to accept: from General Assembly Resolution 194, issued during the final phase of the 1948 war, which resolved that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date”; to the Security Council resolutions that condemned settlement activity as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention (446, 452, 465, 478), demanded the dismantlement of all settlements, including in Jerusalem (465), urged an immediate halt to Israel’s changes to the demographic composition of East Jerusalem and other Occupied Territories (446), affirmed the necessity of Israel’s withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war (242), and called for the creation of a Palestinian state (1397).
But as a mediator, the United States never insisted on these or other specific guidelines, and each final-status negotiation ended in failure and regret, with senior US officials belatedly seeking to draft parameters in order to salvage some lasting achievement from their wasted efforts.16
* * *
Obama had plenty of reasons to refuse to back a parameters resolution in his final months in office. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians had the ability to lobby their allies against such an approach, dragging the United States into exhausting negotiations and uncomfortable compromises. Reaching a consensus in the Security Council that would be acceptable to the United States was not assured, particularly given European and Russian reluctance to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.17 Once passed, a resolution was unlikely to be accepted anytime soon by either side or to produce negotiations over a comprehensive agreement, which was its ostensible purpose.
Rather than generating hope that an agreement is possible, a resolution would risk causing a significant deterioration in relations as leaders on both sides would face pressure to assure key constituencies that they had not succumbed to the international community’s diktat. Israel might build settlements in particularly sensitive areas, formally annex parts of the West Bank, or pass a law requiring a parliamentary supermajority to authorize any negotiations over Jerusalem; Palestinians could limit cooperation with Israel and pursue new claims against it in international institutions.18
Indeed, in the short run, a parameters resolution seemed to offer few advantages. The two sides would get no changes on the ground and no immediate prospect of ending the conflict. For Palestinians, the price of gaining American backing for international law would be that the United States would rewrite it in Israel’s favor, and even then without exerting the pressure necessary to force Israel to accept the terms. Such a resolution would thus weaken their position in international law—one of the only realms in which they once held some advantage. For Israel, a parameters resolution would mean a set of US-backed, internationally endorsed terms of reference where previously it had none.
Supporters of the resolution would be unable to argue that it had any near-term positive effect, while critics could point to its rejection by both sides, the solidification of a one-state reality in defiant response, and the increasing irrelevance of both the two-state solution and its international proponents. Obama’s successor, meanwhile, could subvert it through side letters and private commitments made to Israel, much as George W. Bush undermined a US-supported Security Council resolution on settlements in an April 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon.19
Above all, there was internal politics in the United States. This was the largest obstacle to a parameters resolution, which for the Obama administration had always been a question as much of domestic politics as of foreign policy. In July 2016, the Republican Party amended its platform to remove support for a two-state solution, to oppose “any measures intended to impose an agreement or to dictate borders or other terms,” and to call “for the immediate termination of all US funding of any entity that attempts to do so.” Following Netanyahu’s speech to AIPAC, 388 Democratic and Republican members of Congress sent a letter to Obama warning that support for a Security Council resolution on parameters would “dangerously hinder” the prospect of renewed negotiations. In September 2016, a bipartisan group of 88 senators urged Obama “to continue longstanding U.S. policy and make it clear that you will veto any one-sided UNSC resolution that may be offered in the coming months.”20 The Obama administration could justify challenging AIPAC and large numbers of Democrats in Congress for a goal as important to the United States as the agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program. But to confront widespread domestic opposition for something as marginal to US national security interests as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was another matter.
* * *
Where US officials came down on a parameters resolution depended to a significant degree on whether they believed the two-state solution was dying or already dead. Those who thought it was merely dying—most in the Obama administration—saw a parameters resolution as having many beneficial effects. It could, they thought, give new hope to hopeless Palestinians; inject a dose of realism into both societies about the compromises that will be required; ratchet up pressure on Israel to reverse steps undermining a two-state solution; and provide grounds for the Palestinian leadership to claim that its hand was forced by international law.
Those who thought the two-state solution was already dead, however, worried that a parameters resolution would simply give new life to the lie of a “temporary occupation” that will end in the next round of talks, meanwhile wasting the time of the United States and the international community with plans, pleas, and bribes to gain the parties’ acceptance as Israel expropriated more of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In fact, the debate in Western capitals about whether to put forward a parameters resolution was a distraction from the more substantive question of what the resolution should say. Among the parties themselves, opposition was not really about the wisdom of such an intervention in the abstract but about what each side feared it would lose. Both sides were certain to be disappointed with the final text, and the same could be said of the various US officials who sought a resolution more favorable to one party or the other. The debate between those officials was, in their own minds, one between relatively pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian positions. But it was closer to one between the stances of Republican and Democratic groups, all of them pro-Israel and Zionist.
On one side of the debate was AIPAC, an organization that distances itself from the Israeli government only when it is not led by Likud; on the other side were organizations like J Street, which had aligned itself with an Israeli center whose positions on borders and Jerusalem did not differ from Netanyahu’s. J Street had sought to overcome a boycott by the past several Israeli governments by trying to build ties to Likud ministers and offering to help Netanyahu’s government combat BDS.21
The inevitable outcome of this process was either no resolution (some officials called instead for a nonbinding and easily dismissed speech, endorsed, perhaps in a formal paper, by a number of allies) or one that was of far greater benefit to Israel than to the Palestinians. This was a particular irony, since AIPAC and Israel were strongly opposed to a parameters resolution in principle, while the Palestinians had been asking for US guidelines or internationally imposed terms of reference for well over a decade.22
* * *
Any resolution the United States could support would contain clauses that are difficult for each side to accept. The hardest issues for Israel are that the borders would be based on the pre-1967 lines and that the Palestinian capital would be in Jerusalem. The most onerous clauses for the Palestinians relate to recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, the absence of a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank, and a resolution of the refugee problem that would rule out any more than a symbolic return to Israel.
When we examine these painful concessions for each side, a striking disparity emerges: the two compromises for Israel are battles that the country already lost long ago, in numerous UN resolutions, presidential statements, official declarations of EU policy, and the Arab Peace Initiative, which has been welcomed by the Quartet and the Security Council.23 A Security Council call for a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 boundaries with East Jerusalem as its capital is consistent with the views of virtually all UN member states and is neither a significant gain for the PLO nor a substantial loss for Israel.
This is not true of the bitter pills for the Palestinians. A US-supported resolution would represent entirely new concessions to Israel. Settlements that the Security Council has determined must be dismantled would gain legitimacy as parts of a potential land swap. European and UN Security Council calls for a just and agreed solution to the refugee problem would be transformed into a strongly implied denial of a Palestinian right of return. And, for the first time in a Security Council resolution, the international community would offer some sort of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which the Quartet had previously refused to do.24
Palestinians and Israelis would be trading fundamentally unlike assets, one tangible, the other intangible. Palestinians would give up moral claims, acquiescing in the denial of their right to return and bestowing legitimacy on their dispossessors by recognizing the vast majority of their homeland as a Jewish state. Israelis, by contrast, would be committing to a physical withdrawal from land under their full control. The crucial difference between these two types of assets is that, once the parties had accepted the parameters, only the intangible ones would disappear. The land, by contrast, would remain in Israel’s possession until the parties reached a comprehensive settlement, an outcome that an agreed framework by no means guarantees.
For the United States, the purpose of any parameters would be to make negotiations more likely to succeed by securing the largest concessions from each side in advance. But even with agreed guidelines, the power disparity in the negotiating room would remain, which means that the worst possible interpretation of the parameters, the full exploitation of every loophole, is what would be presented to the weaker party as the alternative to continued occupation. The onus, then, was on the drafters to include as much detail as possible, immunizing the terms against the legal and semantic circumventions for which Netanyahu and his longtime envoy, Yitzhak Molho, are well known.
Yet the United States never considered drafting detailed Security Council parameters of this sort. Instead, the guidelines considered by the United States consisted of just a few short paragraphs, which sought to arrive at compromise positions:
• Between those who call for land swaps to be equal not just in size but quality, and those who call merely for “mutually agreed” swaps, thereby enabling Israel to annex valuable territory, including in Jerusalem, while offering smaller, inferior patches of desert land in return;
• Between those who put an upper limit on Israel’s West Bank annexation of no more than 3 percent, and those who do not, allowing Israel to annex settlements like Ariel that lie halfway across the West Bank;
• Between those who stress that the settlements remain illegal violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention until a peace agreement is reached, and those who describe the possibility of land swaps in a manner that permits Israel to claim that construction in settlement blocs has been sanctioned by the Security Council;
• Between those who call for two capitals in Jerusalem, and those who call merely for a shared capital, wording that empowers Israel to insist on a unified city with limited or no Palestinian sovereignty;
• Between those who specify that a Palestinian capital will be in East Jerusalem within its pre-1967 municipal borders, and those who more vaguely propose that there be two capitals in Jerusalem—that is, in the expanded, Israeli-defined boundaries of the city, which extend to the edges of Ramallah and Bethlehem. That allows Israel to demand that the Palestinian capital be located in a place like Kafr Aqab, which is the northern-most neighborhood of the present-day municipality, but was never considered part of Jerusalem before June 1967; it lies on the West Bank side of the separation wall, and is closer to Ramallah than to the city center;
• Between those who state that some limited land swaps may be negotiated in Jerusalem, and those who call for all “Jewish neighborhoods” (that is, settlements) in East Jerusalem to be annexed by Israel, thereby legalizing all Jerusalem settlements, depriving Palestinians of the right to negotiate the status of some of their most valued land, and giving Israel license—and incentive—to increase construction of Jerusalem settlements in advance of a peace agreement;
• Between those who call for Palestinian sovereignty over the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount and Israeli sovereignty over the Wailing Wall/Buraq Wall, and those who call for a “special regime” in the Old City or say nothing about it, allowing Israel to insist on control or sovereignty over the al-Aqsa Mosque;25
• Between those who set a deadline for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank once an agreement has been reached, as the Clinton Parameters did, and those who reject a timeline or state merely that Palestinians and Israelis should agree on one, enabling Israel to demand that its withdrawal be contingent on its own determination of satisfactory Palestinian performance;26
• Between those who propose resolving the Palestinian refugee issue through both symbolic and practical concessions by Israel (for example, permitting return to all living refugee survivors of the 1948 war, of whom there are estimated to be as few as 30,000 today), and those who explicitly deny that any refugees will return or insist that they do so only on a “humanitarian” basis, at Israel’s sole discretion, indicating a rejection of any meaningful return;
• And, finally, between those who say that any “narrative” concessions—concerning the history of the conflict—should include Israeli acknowledgment of partial responsibility for the expulsion and flight of Palestinian refugees and full responsibility for denying them the ability to return, and those who say that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state without any reciprocal concession.
* * *
It was clear that on many of these issues, any US-supported resolution would favor Israeli positions over Palestinian ones. There were some Palestinians who were nevertheless prepared to take US-endorsed, legally binding parameters, with all their flaws and detrimental effects, as an improvement on existing international law that the US mediator has ignored. The choice for the PLO has never been between inadequate US parameters and existing UN resolutions. It has been, rather, between refusing to negotiate while Israel’s occupation grows more deeply entrenched, and negotiating with no parameters at all. The latter meant talks being held on Israel’s terms. That was why some Palestinians saw a parameters resolution as a risky but perhaps worthwhile gamble, weakening their position on paper in the hope of strengthening it in practice. And it was why the prospect of US guidelines seemed to them very much like the Obama administration itself: disappointing, unjust, and ineffectual, and yet perhaps still the best they were going to get.
—September 2016
CODA
In the end, the Palestinians didn’t get even that. Obama finished his presidency much as he had started it: bold in words, timid in deeds. In the intensive debate about how to secure an Israel-Palestine legacy, he chose the most cautious path: abstaining from a UN Security Council resolution on settlements that, by the administration’s own admission, contained nothing new. It was, in fact, not even a reiteration but rather a watered-down version of a far stronger Security Council resolution that had been supported by the Carter administration.
Several days later, during his final month in office, Obama allowed his secretary of state to put forward parameters in a lengthy speech. Israel rejected both the speech and the UN resolution, with no apparent consequences. In his final remarks, Kerry once again warned Israel that if it did not separate from the Occupied Territories it would have to choose between being Jewish or democratic. But Kerry seemed unable or unwilling to appreciate that his threats carried no weight: he had been making the same admonition for several years, without forcing any such choice on Israel.
Until its final day in power, the Obama administration continued to believe that Israel would move toward a two-state solution if only the United States explained that the alternative was apartheid. The logic was irrefutable, they believed, so it was inevitable that Israel would eventually grasp its truth. Eight years of failed policy were founded on the stubborn delusion that with sufficiently impassioned rhetoric Israel could be persuaded to make concessions that it did not consider to be in its interest. Obama achieved less than any of his recent predecessors because, when it came to Israel, force was a language he could not—or would not—understand.
—January 2017