Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, From Balfour to Trump by Khaled Elgindy

Author:Khaled Elgindy [Elgindy, Khaled]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Israel & Palestine, Diplomacy, Middle Eastern, Political Science, World, Middle East, History, Geopolitics
ISBN: 9780815731566
Google: m2EMDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 43863875
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2019-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

A ROADMAP TO NOWHERE

Bush’s June 2002 Rose Garden speech effectively modified the original trade-off of the 1990s by adding new conditions on the Palestinians while simultaneously downgrading what they could expect to receive in return. In addition to fighting terror, which of course was even more paramount than before, the Palestinians would also need to elect new leaders and enact democratic reforms to be eligible for statehood. In a sense, Bush’s Rose Garden speech marked a return to the Kissinger and Haig school of Arab-Israeli diplomacy, which viewed Palestinian politics as a kind of pathology that needed to be transformed or defeated before peace could be achieved. According to Deputy National Security Adviser Abrams, one of the principal architects of Bush’s Palestine policy, peace would require a complete “transformation of Palestinian attitudes and self-identity.” The same did not hold true for Israel, however. According to Abrams, Israelis had been engaged in “a decade-long untrammeled debate over the conditions of a final status agreement, but nothing of this sort has occurred on the Palestinian side. The PA and PLO have not prepared the Palestinian people for the national concessions that any final status agreement with Israel will require.” In other words, for Abrams and other administration hardliners, the real source of the conflict was not Israel’s ongoing military occupation, which still controlled most aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank and Gaza, or the still unresolved fate of Palestinian refugees, but the fact that Palestinian politics still placed a premium on resolving these issues. The reality, of course, was that Palestinians had been engaged in a highly contentious—often violent—internal debate over the two-state solution dating back to the 1970s, well before such ideas were taken up seriously by Israeli or American politicians. Certainly aspects of Palestinian politics were no doubt distasteful and problematic, but the same could be said of Israeli politics, where settler extremists and other champions of Eretz Yisrael, “Greater Israel,” wielded growing influence over the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians.

For Abrams and other administration hardliners, Bush’s vision was straightforward: “Get rid of Arafat, abandon terror, start building a democracy, and then—but only then—the United States will support creation of a state—and even then, a state ‘whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional’ until there was a wider peace agreement in the region.” In other words, says Abrams, “Statehood would be the Palestinians’ reward for ridding themselves of a corrupt leadership, ending terrorism, and becoming capable of self-government.” Abrams had been critical of the president’s unconditional embrace of Palestinian statehood earlier on since in his view, “the Palestinian side was not ready for statehood.”30

In the meantime, Bush’s Middle East policy continued to operate on two parallel and increasingly contradictory tracks. Despite the ascendancy of the Cheney camp, Powell continued to pursue his peacemaking agenda through the Middle East Quartet. The Quartet was in many ways an ideal forum for dealing with the seemingly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Its small but

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