Earlier today the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO, passed a resolution criticizing Israeli government policies with regard to religious historical sites in occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Al Aqsa/Haram al-Sharif complex in Jerusalem’s Old City. The Israeli government and many others criticized the resolution for failing to mention the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, the site upon which the Haram al-Sharif now sits.

Some headlines notwithstanding, the resolution itself does not actually “deny” or “nullify” the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, it simply does not acknowledge it. But this is problematic enough. The Temple Mount, which held the two Jewish temples, is the holiest site in the Jewish faith, and a hugely important site in the history of the Jewish people. While the resolution does “[affirm] the importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions,” failing to affirm this specifically with regard to the Temple Mount would seem to be a clear betrayal of UNESCO’s stated mission of “[b]uilding intercultural understanding… through protection of heritage and support for cultural diversity.”

In addition to being an irresponsible move, it’s also a confounding one. Elsewhere in the text, the UNESCO resolution refers to the “Bilal Ibn Rabaḥ Mosque/Rachel’s Tomb” in Bethlehem and the “Al-Haram al-Ibrahimi/Tomb of the Patriarchs” in Al-Khalil/Hebron, referring to these sites by names by which they are known by Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The fact that UNESCO chose not do the same for the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount is troubling, and reveals its political purpose. This resolution seems to be the latest in a series of pointless stunts by a Palestinian leadership desperate to create the illusion of progress, but bereft of actual ideas. It does nothing to advance the Palestinian cause, while doing a lot to provoke Israeli fears and provide another useful tool for the Israeli right to use to distract attention from the occupation.

Problems with the UNESCO resolution aside, however, it’s important to put this in context of other events in East Jerusalem. While the denial or downplaying of the Jewish historical connection to the Temple Mount area is ahistorical and offensive, it really can’t be compared to the countless ways in which Israeli policy functions — not just in words in some resolution, but in actual deeds on the ground — to undermine the Palestinian connection to Jerusalem. Indeed, Jewish historical claims are among the instruments often used by the Israeli government to justify the constriction of Palestinian life and seizing of Palestinian property as it seeks to reshape East Jerusalem, in violation of its commitments under international conventions. The UNESCO resolution deserves criticism, but let’s understand what the genuine threats to peace, dignity, and equality really are.

Earlier today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office tweeted out a short video in which Netanyahu confronts the claim, made regularly by the United States and the rest of international community, that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an obstacle to a Palestinian state. Netanyahu rejects this, which is not surprising, but he goes even farther, condemning the idea of settlement withdrawal as “ethnic cleansing”:

[T]he Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one precondition: No Jews. There’s a phrase for that. It’s called ethnic cleansing.

Americans for Peace Now has an excellent takedown of this canard, which surfaced back in 2009 in a messaging study written by Republican pollster Frank Luntz (who also happens to be the former boss of current Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer) for the pro-Israel PR shop The Israel Project on how to defend the settlements to the U.S. public. After criticism, the term was dropped. It has now been taken up again by Netanyahu.

Every peace plan since the 1990’s has been premised on the withdrawal of a certain number of settlements, for the plain reason that without such a withdrawal a Palestinian state would be economically unviable (which is, of course, the reason for building the settlements in the first place.) By casting settlement withdrawal in these terms, Netanyahu basically is accusing Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and all of the officials who have worked on these issues, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of promoting ethnic cleansing.

Regarding Netanyahu’s claim about Palestinian demands, Palestinian leaders have made clear that Jews can be citizens of a future Palestinian state, but that they will not accept the presence of enclaves of Israeli settlers peppered throughout that state (as, of course, no state would):

“Any person, be he Jewish, Christian or Buddhist, will have the right to apply for Palestinian citizenship,” [PLO Executive Committee member Hanan] Ashrawi told The Times of Israel. “Our basic law prohibits discrimination based on race or ethnicity.”

She added, however, that Palestinians would not accept “ex-territorial Jewish enclaves,” where residents will maintain their Israeli citizenship status. Abbas, she said, had no problem with Jews within the Palestinian state, including in the international security force deployed in the Jordan Valley.

In addition to cynically invoking memories of the Jewish people’s past oppression and expulsion (which could clearly be considered a form of incitement), Netanyahu’s use of “ethnic cleansing” is particularly offensive given that Israeli policies of home demolition, land confiscation, and expulsion — which the U.S. and its partners have criticized with increasing alarm — are far more deserving of it. The fact that Netanyahu made this message in English suggests, among other things, an effort to rebut those steadily escalating criticisms, and lay the groundwork for opposition from his American supporters in the event that the U.S. attempts to do anything about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

While the various Middle East crises have seemingly sidelined the Palestinians, the recent proliferation of Israeli-Palestinian peace initia­tives reveals the conflict’s continued regional and global salience, as well as its domestic political relevance for a number of countries involved. As yet, however, these efforts have produced no significant break­throughs.

Since the Madrid conference of 1991, which led to the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993, the United States has played the role of moderator, broker and man­ager of the peace process. US President Barack Obama entered office pledging to make Palestin­ian-Israeli peace a priority of his administration and on his first day in office named former senator George Mitchell his Middle East Peace envoy.

Mitchell’s efforts ran into trouble almost immediately, as newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu refused to meet the US demand for a settlement freeze (a pre-existing commitment under the 2002 road map, in addition to an obligation under international law) and Obama did not press him on it. Mitchell left the job in May 2011.

The Obama administration’s subsequent efforts met a similar fate.

Read the rest of the article at The Arab Weekly.

Writing in today’s Washington Post, former U.S. peace negotiators Dennis Ross and David Makovsky observe the steadily deteriorating situation in Israel-Palestine. “As the risk of escalation grows, both sides are becoming even more doubtful that there will ever be peace. With Palestinians divided and their leaders increasingly discredited, and a right-­wing government in Israel, the conflict is not about to be resolved,” they write. “But that is all the more reason to think about what can be done to preserve the possibility of a two-state outcome, particularly with the Palestinians entering a period of uncertain succession.”

What can be done, Ross and Makovsky suggest, is that rather than continuing to oppose all settlement growth, the U.S. should change its policy to differentiate between the large settlement blocs which many assume that Israel will retain in a final peace agreement (contingent upon land swaps negotiated with the Palestinians), and the smaller outlying settlements and outposts, which it won’t.

“A new U.S. approach would acknowledge that building within the blocs does not change the contours of the ‘peace map,’” they write. “While not formally endorsing settlement activity, it would nonetheless seek to channel it into areas that will likely be part of Israel in any two-state outcome.”

This is very similar to proposal last November from Israel Policy Forum’s Michael Koplow. My colleague Mitchell Plitnick responded at the time with a piece laying out some of the problems with this approach, noting that, “This approach did not lead to progress when Bush took it. It would likely be much worse if Obama did it now, given the current situation, where Israel has lurched further right, the U.S. has lost most of its credibility as broker, and Abbas is hanging politically on by a thread.” It also bears some similarities to a recently proposed, and similarly problematic, plan by Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, which I critiqued here.

But Ross and Makovsky go even further. In addition to accepting the legitimacy of the settlement blocs — which, let’s remember, are illegal under international humanitarian law — they actually suggest that the U.S. should compensate Israel by promising to veto any UN Security Council resolution that Israel doesn’t like, agree not to present the Council with parameters on a final resolution to the conflict, and press European and Arab allies to denounce Palestinian efforts to “de-legitimize” Israel, a term that the authors do not define, but which presumably means seeking international legal relief at the International Criminal Court and other venues for Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights.

For good measure, the authors suggest that the president “could also highlight the contrast between Israel adopting a settlement policy consistent with a two­-state outcome and Palestinian behaviors that undermine such an option.”

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, but suffice to say that it’s painfully typical of an approach that privileges Israeli political concerns and treats Palestinians’ basic rights as an afterthought, or at most as goods to be traded. The fact that this approach has failed, time and time again, to deliver any positive change to the Palestinians’ situation (or, we should also note, to provide Israel real security) is one of the main reasons that Palestinian leaders, at least those like Mahmoud Abbas who advocate for diplomacy and against violence, are increasingly discredited at home, and deeply frustrated with the U.S.-brokered process. Ross and Makovsky’s approach would not only repeat that dynamic, it would amplify it.

Providing Israel with more, always more carrots is, by definition, the path of least resistance in DC, which helps explain why people keep recommending it. But, as I wrote in an earlier piece (and as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself repeatedly, and rightly, made clear with regard to Iran), carrots alone won’t do the trick in any negotiation. You need some sticks. The challenge is making sure that the carrots and sticks, the incentives and disincentives, are lined up in such a way as to lead toward the goal. For instance, I think there could be value in recognizing the legitimacy of settlements blocs as recommended here, but only as part of a formal process with a defined, time-limited end state, similar to the P5+1 acceptance of Iran’s uranium enrichment as part of the 2013 Joint Plan of Action. But granting this concession simply in the hope that good things will happen doesn’t seem like a smart plan.

I agree with Ross and Makovsky’s diagnosis of the situation. It is dire, and it is deteriorating,  for the Israelis who’ve endured terror attacks and for the Palestinians who endure the violence of military occupation and settler colonization every day. Following their prescription, on the other hand, wouldn’t arrest this decline, it would accelerate it, while shredding whatever credibility as broker the U.S. still has.

Speaking at a national security conference in Tel Aviv last month, Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog announced a new plan to “separate” from the Palestinians. Declaring a two-state solution unachievable in the foreseeable future, Herzog said that Israel should take a set of unilateral steps in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem while still keeping the two-state option open for the future. Those steps include limiting settlement growth to the so-called “blocs,” expanding areas of Palestinian Authority political and economic control (while still retaining full Israeli security control), completing the security fence, and separating some Palestinian neighborhoods from Jerusalem.

In an analysis (which I encourage you to read) of Herzog’s plan as outlined in the speech, my colleague Mitchell Plitnick observed that it “seems more tailored for domestic political gains than for actually resolving the vexing problems Israel faces.” Mitchell concluded that while Herzog’s plan “has some points that might be worked with, it is not, on balance, sound policy. It has little chance of achieving the quiet Herzog envisions; on the contrary, it is likely to further enflame the conflict.”

Herzog’s announcement caught a lot of people by surprise, including members of his own party. Hilik Bar, the Labor Party’s secretary general and head of the Knesset’s Two-State Caucus, was overheard slamming Herzog’s shift as a lame political maneuver. “If he [Herzog] is going to be a pathetic copy of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, the people will run from him,” Bar said.

Nevertheless, days later Herzog successfully managed to get Labor to endorse the plan, including Bar, who assented out of a stated interest in party unity. Shelly Yachimovich, Herzog’s predecessor and main rival for Labor leadership, pointedly refused to speak at the Labor gathering, and has stated her opposition to the plan. Yariv Oppenheimer, the head of Peace Now, also criticized the plan. “If we want mandates, we need to differentiate ourselves from the Likud,” he said. “Whoever copies Netanyahu will be irrelevant.”

My friend Michael Koplow, policy director of Israel Policy Forum, wrote of the plan that, while it has flaws, it’s better than nothing. “One can take the Netanyahu approach, which is to sit on one’s hands and do nothing, or one can try to advance an alternative that is highly suboptimal but that beats the status quo,” Koplow wrote. “I would rather see the latter option be tried rather than continuing to sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect.”

I’m a big admirer of Michael’s work, but I think there are some problems with this. It’s really not the case that Netanyahu is “sitting on his hands and doing nothing.” As multiple U.S. administration officials have warned over the past few months, Netanyahu’s government has been doing a lot of things to shape the environment in the West Bank – none of them good. The occupation’s system of radical inequality has become even more entrenched, settlements continue to grow at a rapid clip, Palestinian lands continue to be expropriated and homes demolished, and the Palestinian Authority continues to be politically undermined and weakened to a point just short of collapse. This isn’t the absence of a plan from Netanyahu. This is the plan.

Koplow wrote that “Herzog’s measure can theoretically be a good initial step if it is done right,” and identifies a set of questions need to be answered: How are the settlement blocs defined? What steps will be taken to facilitate Palestinian economic growth? What exactly will this separation of Palestinian neighborhoods from Jerusalem look like? These are, of course, hugely important questions. Each of them is potentially politically explosive, for both Israelis and Palestinians. The fact that Herzog does not even address them affirms Plitnick’s (and Bar’s) argument that this is simply a political maneuver and not a serious policy alternative.

The problem is that even political maneuvers have consequences. The effect here is to remove any political pressure on Netanyahu by essentially affirming his diagnosis of the situation (and unfortunately adopting his racist language, which is particularly disappointing from a self-identified progressive like Herzog), and to reward the settlement movement for decades of law breaking, and incentivize even more, by legitimizing the blocs. Meanwhile, the plan offers nothing to arrest the decline of the Palestinian Authority and enable the Palestinian economic growth that is absolutely necessary for the security of both sides.

A number of left-leaning Israeli analysts have strongly criticized the plan. “Even politically, its unilateralism makes no sense,” wrote journalist Noam Sheizaf in +972 Magazine. ”All the difficult steps Israel refuses to take in negotiations — in order to build trust or as a temporary solution (such as a settlement construction freeze) — it is now supposed to implement without receiving anything in exchange, without anyone taking responsibility on the other side. In short: it’s unclear what Labor’s plan is supposed to achieve, since it is neither meant to be a permanent solution nor a temporary one. So why bother?”

“It is impossible to separate from the Palestinians without a Palestinian state. There cannot be a vacuum,” wrote Mikhael Manekin, executive director of the Israeli think tank Molad. “Either we (Israel) are the sovereign or the Palestinians are. If there is no Palestinian state, we will be forced to continue to dominate the territory (the airspace, imports, exports, currency, and other matters). In other words, we separate from the Palestinians, but we still keep our military reservists in the Territories.”

“The most problematic point in Herzog’s document,” Manekin concluded, “is that his worldview is identical to Netanyahu’s — ‘We will forever live by the sword.’ All we can do is buy time between one boxing round and another. It will never be possible to live a normal life in Israel. And the best we can aspire to is a better fence.”

Herzog’s plan is an alternative to Netanyahu’s only in the sense that smoking one pack of cigarettes a day is an alternative to smoking two. Sure, one is better than two, but you probably shouldn’t expect your doctor to congratulate you. Herzog’s plan, at least as currently outlined, leads us to the same place that Netanyahu’s does: Palestinians confined to what are essentially Bantustans, with nothing on the horizon to address the hopelessness that many, including Israeli security chiefs, have identified as a key driver of violence. It’s hard to imagine that this is a recipe for more security and stability rather than less.

Matthew Duss is the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Previously, he was a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, where his work focused on the Middle East and U.S. national security, and director of the Center’s Middle East Progress program.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has an op-ed in today’s New York Times expanding upon remarks he made last week regarding the upsurge in violence in Israel-Palestine. It’s worth taking a moment to consider why this op-ed was necessary. In last week’s remarks, Ban unequivocally condemned terrorism, just as he did in today’s op-ed, while also noting, “security measures alone will not stop the violence.  They cannot address the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians – especially young people… As oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to this as he always does – ignoring the condemnation of terrorism, acting as if all the blame had been laid upon Israel, and rejecting the notion that the Israeli occupation might have something, anything, to do with Palestinian violence. He even went as far as to accuse Ban of encouraging terrorism with his remarks (Yes, it is odd to suggest that a statement from the UN Secretary General would incite violence while also rejecting as outrageous the notion that a half-century of military occupation might do so, but let’s leave that aside for now).

Israel’s own security chiefs have said the same thing – that Palestinian despair at the occupation ever ending is a major driver of violence, and that genuine steps to ameliorate that situation, rather than simply cracking down harder, must be taken.

Netanyahu’s government has made an unfortunate habit of treating every criticism, no matter how carefully or constructively worded, as an attack on Israel’s legitimacy. While we might have expected this from the Israeli right wing, it was really disappointing to see an anti-hate group like the Anti-Defamation League hastily echoing it, in a press release calling Ban’s words an “apparent justification of Palestinian terrorism.”

Ban’s analysis shouldn’t be at all controversial. Indeed, Israel’s own security chiefs have said the same thing – that Palestinian despair at the occupation ever ending is a major driver of violence, and that genuine steps to ameliorate that situation, rather than simply cracking down harder, must be taken.

In a recent report, Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service concluded that young Palestinians were motivated to act, in part, “based on feelings of national, economic and personal deprivation.” The head of Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence, Maj. General Herzl Halevi, told a meeting of Israel’s cabinet that “feelings of rage and frustration” were major factors driving young Palestinians to these acts and that they “felt they had nothing to lose.” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro laid out a similar critique in a recent speech to an Israeli security conference – receiving a similarly over-the-top Israeli government response.

No one seriously would argue that the Shin Bet and the IDF are trying to justify Palestinian terrorism. Neither was Ambassador Shapiro. And neither is the UN Secretary-General, as he made clear in his initial remarks, and again in today’s op-ed.  Understanding the factors that contribute to violence is not remotely the same as “justifying” that violence. On the contrary, it’s necessary in order to develop an effective policy response. It really shouldn’t be hard to understand that the daily abuse, humiliation and dispossession that Palestinians experience under Israeli occupation is a major contributing factor in the decision of some Palestinians to resort to terrorist violence. Acknowledging this does not make terrorist violence any less reprehensible. And avoiding these facts, or suppressing discussion of them, will only result in more of that violence, not less.

Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro caused a stir by ever-so-gently telling the truth about the occupation. Speaking to a conference at Tel Aviv’s respected Institute for National Security Studies, he addressed “the latest increase in tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians,” and observed, “Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities; too much vigilantism goes unchecked; and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians.”

The outraged reaction from Israeli officials—which included a demeaning slur against the American ambassador by a former Netanyahu aide, as well as Netanyahu himself trying to shame Shapiro by noting the recent murder of an Israeli woman whom Shapiro had actually memorialized in his speech—was as overwrought as it was predictable. The fact that Shapiro’s words of concern were far outnumbered by words of solidarity and support mattered little. It has been the policy of the Netanyahu government that even the most carefully worded public criticisms by its closest friends shall be treated as an attack on the very foundations of the state.

It is simply a matter of fact that Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank live under two different systems of law—the former under Israeli civilian law, the latter under military law imposed after the territories were occupied in 1967. If an Israeli and Palestinian were to be arrested at the same spot in the West Bank at the same moment for the same crime, they would be subjected to two entirely different legal procedures, the former Israeli civil law and the latter military law. In this regard, it’s only Shapiro’s use of “seems” that seems a bit odd. Read more at Tablet Magazine 

Yesterday, the right-wing Israeli group Im Tirzu released an inflammatory and offensive video attacking four leading Israeli human rights activists as dangerous “foreign agents.” Among the activists targeted were Hagai El Ad, director of B’tselem, and Avner Gvaryahu of Breaking the Silence.

In response to this attack, the Foundation for Middle East Peace strongly affirms its support for Hagai and Avner, for our grantee organizations Breaking the Silence and B’tselem, and for all of those who work toward the cause of human rights and peace in Israel and Palestine. FMEP’s support for these groups is based on shared values of democracy, equality, and tolerance. Hateful attacks like the one launched by Im Tirzu undermine those values. The activists named in the video represent the best of an open, democratic civil society, something of which all Israelis should be proud, just as we at FMEP are proud to share in the common work of advancing human rights in our societies.

We call on other pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and pro-peace organizations in the U.S. to join us in standing in solidarity with our Israeli colleagues against the increasing atmosphere of incitement against Israeli human rights organizations.

Throughout his tenure as Secretary of State, John Kerry has repeatedly explained his commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement partly in terms of what could happen in the absence of such an agreement. Speaking Saturday at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum, Kerry offered his starkest warning yet over where the situation is headed:

I ask people to answer this question as honestly as possible. And this is not an abstract issue that you can put off for some distant day. The status quo is simply not sustainable. And the fact is that current trends including violence, settlement activity, demolitions, are imperiling the viability of a two-state solution. And that trend has to be reversed in order to prevent this untenable one-state reality from taking hold. I can’t stress this enough. The terrorist attacks are devastating the hopes of Israelis who want to believe that peace is possible, and the violence must stop. Yes.

But Palestinian hopes are also being dashed by what they see happening every day. They’re focused on a reality that few others see, that the transition to greater Palestinian civil authority contemplated by the Oslo process has in many ways been reversed. In fact, nearly all of Area C which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank is effectively restricted for any Palestinian development, much of it claimed for Israeli state land or for settlement councils. We understand there was only one Palestinian building permit granted for all of Area C all of last year. And settler outposts are regularly being legalized while demolition of the Palestinian structures is increasing. You get it? At the same time the settler population in the West Bank has increased by tens of thousands over just the past five years including many in remote areas.

This is a reality that has been pretty clear to U.S. and EU officials for years, but the first time that a U.S. official has stated it so clearly: The Israeli government is pursuing a series of policies in the West Bank that reverse the Oslo process. As Kerry importantly clarifies, this is not in any sense an excuse for violence, but it is important to understand how it creates the environment from which violence arises: Hopelessness, humiliation, weakening of Palestinian voices favoring non-violence and diplomacy, no opportunity for economic development, and no realistic prospect of it ever really changing.

Which raises the question: Why should we expect it to change? Kerry’s description of the current reality is welcome, but he and other U.S. officials, including President Obama, have offered similar warnings before, to little effect. It’s not hard to understand why. In the absence of any consequences for Israel’s efforts to roll back Oslo, why should they cease those efforts? Having repeatedly stated that a two-state solution is in the U.S. interest, what steps is the U.S. willing to take to create real disincentives for policies that threaten — indeed, are designed — to foreclose that solution? If the answer is “none,” then we shouldn’t expect much to change.