President Obama’s deadline for Israelis and Palestinians to seal a peace deal has passed with the two sides as far as apart as ever. This is a chance to revisit the decades-long exercise of the “peace process.”
The first reason for the failure is the refusal to acknowledge that the status quo is the product of a series of wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors. None of those wars were between Israel and Palestine, since there was no Palestinian entity. Palestinians represented what is euphemistically called “collateral damage” in the conflict.
In 1948, there was no Palestine problem; there was an Israel problem, in that the Arab League wouldn’t tolerate a Jewish state in its midst. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the Arab League started calling for the creation of a Palestinian state, implicitly adopting the two-state formula it had rejected for decades.
War happens when one or more entities opts to forcibly change a status quo.
This is what happened in 1948: The Arab League regarded the status quo shaped by the United Nations around two states (one Jewish, one Arab) as intolerable, and tried to force change. It failed to achieve its goal, the destruction of Israel. But the new status quo that emerged didn’t meet Israel’s security requirements either, and so was fundamentally unstable.
The 1956 war also had nothing to do with Palestine. Then, Israel joined Britain and France in a bid to topple Gamal Abdul-Nasser’s regime in Cairo and prevent Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal. Had the scheme succeeded, Israel might’ve felt more secure on its southern fringes in the context of a new status quo.
Nor was the 1967 war about Palestine. Nasser, who started it, said the objective was “throwing the Jews into the sea.” At no point was creating a Palestinian state even considered. Nasser failed, and the new status quo favored Israel by widening its security perimeter — with territories taken from Egypt, Jordan and Syria, not from Palestine.
Nor was the 1973 war about Palestine. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s aim was to regain control of the Sinai and reopen the Suez Canal. The new status quo that emerged was acceptable to both sides: Israel obtained a peace treaty and formal recognition from Egypt, plus the demilitarization of the Sinai. Egypt could reopen the canal and divert resources to economic development.
Syria and Jordan, junior partners in the 1967 and 1973 wars, ended up losers. Yet Israel returned the territory it had seized from Jordan in exchange for a peace treaty, full recognition and security arrangements. In the 1990s, Israel came close to a similar deal with Syria, only to see the scheme collapse thanks to President Hafez al-Assad’s fears for the safety of his regime.
Israel’s other war, against Lebanon in 1982, also ended with the occupation of a chunk of territory. Again, once it had achieved its objectives, Israel was prepared to return the seized land.
The so-called peace process doesn’t bring together the actual parties to the wars but seeks a deal between one party that fought and another that wasn’t involved.
The demand for a return to pre-1967 borders is bizarre, to say the least. In 1967, there were no borders, just ceasefire lines drawn in 1948 — lines that symbolized an unstable status quo that led to two wars. Going back to them means returning to a situation that breeds war, not peace.
The “peace process” ignores a fact well established in human history: Every war ends with a winner and a loser; the winner dictates the new status quo and the loser grudgingly accepts.
Israel is perhaps the only winner to be prevented from even thinking about cashing its chips. Each time it won a war, the United Nations and other outsiders intervened to put the whole thing on a different trajectory.
The only way out of the impasse is for Israel to do what winners do: Shape the status quo that suits it.
Those promoting the two-state formula should ask a simple question: Which of the two states is easier to define? The obvious answer is Israel. So why not start with asking Israel to draw the borders it feels secure in? That would define the space in which the second state, for Palestinians, could be imagined and created.
In shaping the new status quo, Israel must show maximum magnanimity. Even then, Palestinians might find the outcome imposed by the winner intolerable, as have losers in countless past wars.
If both Israelis and Palestinians lower their expectations, they could develop a formula for coexistence. All the various “peace initiatives” have done is to raise Palestinian expectations beyond what any Israeli government could accept while raising Israeli fears to higher levels.
The alternative is to live with the current “limbo,” an interim status quo that appears surprisingly stable: The level of violence is at its lowest in four decades, while people in Gaza and the West Bank are doing economically better than their brethren in many Arab countries.