Israel

Going against all past blog experiences, I though it might be worth posting about Israel and Palestine today.  Reading the tea leaves, the situation there is clearly getting more dire, and I'm not sure if there is a politically viable option for U.S. diplomats. 

The domestic politics within Israel favor the continuation of the status quo -- that is to say, no freeze on the housing settlements and a sustain crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem.  It doesn't take an NSF grant to know that politicians do not reverse course on policies that generate massive domestic support.  The Obama administration, after talking tough in the spring, seems unready or unwilling to apply greater levers of pressure against Netanyahu.  So, we have status quo ante. 

Meanwhile, the Palestinian frustration with this status quo has translated into greater support for Hamas, rumblings about a third intifada, and Abu Mazen threatening to quit. 

Neither side seems remotely ready or willing to negotiate. So, here's my question -- if you're Barack Obama, what do you do at this juncture?   Is this one of those moments when all sides might be better off staring into the abyss of abject noncooperation? 

I don't know, I really don't.  I do know that sometimes agreements cannot be reached unless adversaries get a better appreciation of the counterfactual of no agreement.  It might cause both the Israelis and the Palestinians to recognize that they are stuck with each other. 

On the other hand, this is also one of those moments when diplomatic fatigue can cause actors to throw up their hands in frustration and assume that things couldn't possible get any worse.  Except, of course, they could.  And there are ways in which a renewed uprising would be to the Middle East as the collapse of Lehman Brothers was to the global financial system. 

So, my question to readers:  is this a moment for the U.S. to double down in efforts to restart an Israel/Palestinian dialogue, or is this a moment for stepping back? 

In the past 24 hours, there's been some interesting stuff coming out on both North Korea and Israel. 

On the North Korea issue, Bob Gates' chat with an FT reporter is worth reading just to savor the man's obvious efforts to signal to the North Koreans that they can't control the agenda.  However, Mark Landler and David Sanger's New York Times story today suggests that China is thinking about putting the economic and financial hurt on North Korea. 

Meanwhile, the United States and Israel appear to be at loggerheads on the question of West Bank settlements.  This is particularly interesting: 

[T]he tenor of Mrs. Clinton’s comments Wednesday indicated to some analysts that the Obama administration was unlikely to budge from its position, even at the risk of putting Mr. Netanyahu’s government into jeopardy.

“She is stripping away whatever nuance, or whatever fig leaf, that would have allowed a deeply ideological government to make a settlement deal that is politically acceptable at home,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “They’ve concluded, ‘We’re going to force a change in behavior.’”

Within the Israeli government, however, there is a consensus that the ever-growing settler population must be accommodated.

No one is talking about sanctions just yet on Israel, but the historical precedent here is telling.  The last time the U.S. sanctioned Israel was in 1991 on the question of housing settlements.  The eventual result was the fall of the Yitzhak Shamir government. 

So China is contemplating sanctions against North Korea, and the United States a step away from doing the same thing vis-a-vis Israel.  This highlights a cruel irony when it comes to the use of economic pressure -- it works on your friends a lot better than it does against your foes. 

[I see where this is going.  Stop it!--ed.]  Of course, countries are understandably more reluctant to pressure their allies than their adversaries.  [I'm warning you!--ed.]  Why, it's almost like there's a paradox when it comes to economic sanctions.  [All right, that's it, this ridiculously self-promotional blog post is over!!--ed.]

UPDATE:  Ed Morse and Michael Makovsky have an excellent essay in The New Republic on the prospects of sanctioning Iran. 

Being a moderator on a conference panel is a thankless task. By implication, you're the least important person on the dais (otherwise you'd be on the panel rather than moerating it). If you're good and you're lucky, no one notices you. For every other scenario, however, you get noticed for bad reasons.

Reading this New York Times account by Katrin Bennhold, I feel some small measure of sympathy for Washington Post columnist David Ignatius:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, and vowed never to return to the annual gathering.

Mr. Erdogan apparently became incensed after he was prevented by the moderator from responding to remarks by Mr. Peres on the recent Israeli attack. The panel was running late and Mr. Peres was to have had the last word, participants said....

In a news conference immediately following the panel discussion, Mr. Erdogan said that he was particularly upset with Mr. Ignatius, who he said had failed to direct a balanced and impartial panel.

By all accounts, the discussion of the Gaza incursion was a lively one, with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, joining Mr. Peres and Mr. Erdogan. For the most part, participants said, Mr. Peres was alone in defending the Israeli role in Gaza, which is why he was given the final 25 minutes to speak. Earlier, Mr. Erdogan had spoken for 12 minutes about the sufferings of the Palestinians.

In an ideal world, as a moderator you always want each panelist to have two minutes apiece for closing remarks. In that same ideal world, politicians are capable of limiting their remarks to 120 seconds. In the real world, Ignatius was between a rock and a hard place.

Barack Obama's first formal television interview was released today -- with Al-Arabiya: 

The president sat for the interview, at the White House, moments after officially dispatching George J. Mitchell, his special envoy for Middle East peace, to the region last evening.

"All too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues -- and we don't always know all the factors that are involved," Obama told al-Arabiya. "So let's listen. He's going to be speaking to all the major parties involved. And he will then report back to me. From there we will formulate a specific response."

Marc Lynch does an excellent job of analyzing this move and its implications. 

This is one confirmation of David Rothkopf's observation that, "foreign policy in the Obama years will be run out of the White House."

I have no idea whether this will have any effect on the region.  Andrew Sullivan supplies one hopeful data point, but if you read the comment thread on the YouTube clip of the interview... well, it's less encouraging. 

Developing....

So I took Tom Ricks' advice and read through the transcript of Fareed Zakaria's Global Public Square interview with Barack Obama from this past summer. 

Obama acquits himself well during the whole interview, but this part about Israel and Palestine stood out for me: 

Israel has an interest not just in bunkering down. They've got to recognize that their long-term viability as a Jewish state is going to depend on their ability to create peace with their neighbors.

The Palestinian leadership has to acknowledge that the battles that they've been fighting, and the direction that they've been going in and the rhetoric they've been employing, has not delivered for their people. And it is very hard, given the history of that region and the sense of grievance on both sides, to step back and say, let's be practical and figure out what works.

But I think that's what the people of Israel and the people in the West Bank and Gaza are desperate for, is just some practical, commonsense approaches that would result in them feeling safe, secure and able to live their lives and educate their children.

I'm in complete agreement that this is what the parties in the region should do.  It's become increasingly clear, however, that none of the salient actors in the region possess anything like the willingness to acknowledge these facts of life. 

As Jonathan Chait, Todd Gitlin and Michael Cohen observe, Hamas really is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  And Israel has long been unwilling to moderate its behavior on housing settlements in the ocupied territories. 

My point here is that while Obama's rough outline of a solution makes perfect sense to me, I have no idea how we get from point A (the current moment) to point B (a moment when the relevant actors in Israel and Palestine agree with Obama). 

Consider this an open thread on the Israeli attacks on Hamas in Gaza.  One piece of this analysis by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times struck me as symbolizing the political difficulties of achieving any kind of negotiated settlement in the region: 

It was Ehud Barak, the defense minister, who directed the preparations, and politically it is Mr. Barak who stands to gain or lose most. As chairman of the Labor Party, he is running for prime minister in the February elections and polls show him to be a distant third to the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Kadima leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. But if Hamas is driven to a kind of cease-fire and towns in Israel’s south no longer live in fear of constant rocket fire, he will certainly be seen as the kind of leader this country needs. If, on the other hand, the operation takes a disastrous turn or leads to a regional conflagration, his political future seems bleak and he will have given Hamas the kind of prestige it has long sought.

So, let me get this staight:

1. The odds of Israel being a flexible negotiating partner would be highest if Barak was PM;
2. Barak's chances of being PM ride on the success of the offensive against Hamas;
3. If the attack fails -- which suggests that a there is no military solution to Gaza -- then the person most open to non-military solutions will be eliminated from serious contention in Israeli politics. 

Am I missing anything? UPDATE:  The Guardian's Rory McCarthy has a good roundup of Israeli opinions -- I tend to side with those who believe that there is no military solution to this problem.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  Shadi Hamid has a good post on what Hamas was thinking.