The idea that “direct, bilateral negotiations are the only viable path to achieve an enduring peace,” is repeated often in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The truth of it is obvious; any lasting agreement will require the full buy-in from both Israelis and Palestinians, and it is unlikely that an imposed settlement of the conflict would hold. The frequency with which this axiom is repeated suggests that an imposition of an agreement by outside actors such as the United Nations, the European Union or even the United States is a real possibility. In fact, virtually no one
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
seriously suggests that an agreement simply be imposed on Israelis and Palestinians.
The real issue is how the statement is defined. In general terms, supporters of Israeli policies take this rule to mean that no pressure should be brought upon Israel, as any such pressure is seen as undermining bilateral negotiations. Opponents of Israel’s occupation, on the other hand, tend to see outside pressure, in the form of international diplomacy or economic pressure, as crucial to incentivizing both sides into serious negotiations and toward making the difficult compromises necessary to achieve a final agreement.
As the administration of President Barack Obama enters its final months, there has been a good deal of speculation about what, if anything, the outgoing president will do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Relatively free of political pressure, it seems to make sense that Obama would not want to leave this conflict as it stands, with a peace process in shambles, an increasingly isolated but aggressive Israel and a Palestinian population in deep despair and seeing violence as the only available, albeit futile, route open to them.
According to reports, the administration is considering several options: a United Nations Security Council resolution on the two-state solution, a resolution on the settlements or some combination of the two, either at the UN or in a statement of final status parameters by Obama. Any of these alternatives are staunchly opposed by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his supporters in the United States.
In order to counter such measures, the argument being made is that only bi-lateral talks can resolve the conflict, and therefore no outside pressures can be brought, in accordance with the Netanyahu government’s view that outside pressure is incompatible with direct negotiations.
In fact, outside pressure does not interfere with bilateral talks, it facilitates them. One example would be last year’s completion of the agreement to halt potential military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. The United States and Iran were the key players, but the involvement of the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany – countries that had a variety of views of and interests in the agreement – clearly helped keep negotiations on track and helped both sides to make difficult compromises.
When dealing with a conflict between two peoples that are equally passionate about their nationalism, rights, fears and historical claims, but far from equal in terms of negotiating strength, outside influence is indispensable. The compromises both Israel and the Palestinians would need to make to come to a final agreement will be difficult and will face strong domestic opposition. As with Iran, international advocacy for compromise will be indispensable for embattled leaders in both sides.
But external pressure would serve a more direct purpose in the case of Israelis and Palestinians. Israel currently has a government that, despite its Prime Minister giving lip service to a two-state solution, has worked hard to prevent one from ever coming about. Israelis who voted for Likud, the Jewish Home and other right wing parties, by and large, oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. Most Israelis see a Palestinian state as a huge risk, even if they support the creation of one. Meanwhile, Israel is an economic and political oasis in an unstable region, with the majority of its citizens enjoying a standard of living comparable to most Western countries. Without outside pressure, any Israeli leader, much less a right wing one, has no reason to take the tough, politically risky decisions that ending the occupation would entail.
On the Palestinian side, a fractured and divided leadership makes any political progress difficult. This is compounded by the loss of confidence among the Palestinian populace in both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and the failure of two decades of negotiations to free Palestinians from the occupation. The reality that any agreement will require compromise on both sides is complicated for Palestinians by their view that they have already sacrificed 78% of their homeland for the possibility of a sovereign homeland on the remaining 22%.
The political will required for an agreement with Israel is unlikely to be forthcoming from a Palestinian leadership that is perceived as corrupt and comfortable in positions of relative wealth and power in Ramallah. Only external pressure can push that leadership to make these decisions. The alternative is political chaos and an unknown future leadership that will almost certainly have to show more steadfastness than willingness to compromise, at least in the short run.
It is, of course, conceivable that the two sides might eventually talk again even without any outside pressure. But, as has been the case for over twenty years, talking does not lead to results by itself. The international community, especially the United States, is not merely justified in putting expectations on both sides and creating consequences for failing to meet those expectations; doing so is a requirement if there is ever to be a diplomatic resolution to this conflict.
The claim that outside pressure is the same as dictating a solution is simply false. Those making such a claim must be asked why. Opposing outside influence on both Israel and the Palestinians, and claiming that any pressure is the same as imposing a solution, is a sure way to block peace, to keep Israel and the Palestinians locked in conflict, and to prevent the realization of a two-state solution.
During the height of the Algerian revolution against French rule, Albert Camus, the celebrated writer, philosopher, humanist, and tenacious foe of fascism, was asked why he did not forcefully condemn the atrocities committed by OAS ultras and French military torturers against Algerian Muslims. Camus was a pied noir—born and raised among the European settler community in Algeria. “I love justice,” he answered, “but I love my mother more.”
Camus’s response shocked his admirers on the left, who felt their hero had failed them. Politically their disappointment is understandable, but Camus was making a profoundly important point. There is a difference in kind between attachments to principles, images, doctrines, or large, and necessarily abstract, groups—however passionate—and attachments to particular things or particular people.
If I lose my mother, the pain of that loss is not assuaged by the availability of another woman of her approximate age. My attachment was to a particular woman, not to “motherliness.” On the other hand, the pain of injustice “there and then” can be lessened by justice “here and now” because the abstract attachment to the principle of equity entails a wide set of equivalent attachments spread over time and space.
Camus loved his mother as a peasant loves and is organically attached to the place he inhabits. It is a particular and quintessentially personal attachment. Camus loved justice in the abstract way an ardent nationalist loves his “patria”—the territory of his nation—most of which he has never, and will never see or know in any personal way. Both attachments can be deep. Both can lead to enormous sacrifice, but they are different.
Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict means, among other things, understanding how these two peoples come to their attachments to the same land from very different directions. Consider a peasant’s attachments to places in his world—to the ancestral burial ground, the mountain whose silhouette shadowed all below it, and the stream with familiar tendencies to flood at particular times. Such ties were deep, so deep that separation from “home” or one’s home village, could hardly be experienced as anything less than death. But these ties were not political. They did not register, for most of human history, as relevant to the political order—usually vast and imperial—within which these “places” were organized. These attachments did not inspire those who held them to “imagine” larger political communities than those who also shared, in an immediate way, the same place of habitation. Nor did they produce an honored or iconic “map image” of a territorial space attached to hundreds of thousands or millions of other human beings to whom the bearers of these feelings could feel kindredness.
Attachment to a particular place can do much to satisfy—or make miserable—those who can preserve them or lose them, but they cannot, themselves, be the basis of what Rupert Emerson called a “terminal community”; that is, a group of people too large to be known individually but which nevertheless is considered worthy of the ultimate sacrifice.
Nationalism and national states require a kind of abstract empathy that, it turns out, humans are quite capable of, but that capacity became apparent only relatively recently in human history. Nationalism requires people to shift much of their emotional investment from personal attachments to a place to abstract attachments to a space. Indeed they must learn to experience those abstract attachments as so important that for them they would be willing to sacrifice, as the saying goes, their “lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor.” The process of transforming attachments to place into attachments to space is a long and difficult one. This is what “nation-building” entails.
For masses in both Europe and the Third World, processes of industrialization, urbanization, education, and marketization, as well as immensely destructive and dislocating wars, “socially mobilized” huge populations, throwing them into new, disorienting, and difficult circumstances. But they made those populations available for this new abstract kind of attachment. From the 17th to the 20th century Jews, and in particular European Jews, experienced these processes with a vengeance. They witnessed the utter destruction of a medieval order that had both sheltered and oppressed them for centuries. But regardless of the strength of their attachment to traditional rabbinic authority, Jewish alienation and exclusion in Christian society made them more prepared for this “modern” world of abstract political loyalties than their non-Jewish contemporaries.
As both Marc Chagall and early Zionists pictured the situation, Jews were “luftmenschen,” floating in the world, unattached to gentile institutions or the fundamentally foreign places over which they hovered. The Jewish strategy of constant migration from erstwhile refuge to possible shelter was directly related to this sociological and psychological condition. All this meant Jews did not experience an attachment to specific places as intensely as ordinary folk around them. More than that, their own cultural celebration of a not-actually-known-or-remembered land—the Land of Israel—gave them centuries of practice in the cultivation of an abstract attachment, not to a “place” of irreplaceable individual meaning, but to a “space” of collective, abstract, empathic focus.
Zionism, as a nationalist movement seeking to mobilize a dispersed population and move it to a land inhabited by others, faced more challenges than most. But a typical problem that Zionism did not face was overcoming the highly parochial attachments traditional peasant and village society developed in its laboring masses. The huge task of assimilation into a Jewish “nation” that Israel faced when confronted with hundreds of thousands of Jews from very different countries and classes, and speaking different languages, was not unusual for states seeking to build nations. But Zionism did face one unique problem. It needed to make the new country, so alien for most of its Jewish inhabitants, feel familiar. This meant great emphasis on mapping the terrain of the “Land of Israel,” marking and hiking trails, and exploring as much as possible about its springs, mountains, caves, small rivers, wadis, flora and fauna. It meant changing thousands of place names to invented Hebrew designations as well. All this activity can be understood as a strong effort to establish some sense of “place” to complement the ideological attachment to the “space” of whatever parts of the country could be acquired.
The Arabs in Palestine faced a very different challenge. They sought to rouse their countrymen as members of the “Palestinian nation” to defend, not the villages and locales that were the intimate framework of their lives, but a “space” called Palestine carved out of the Levant by the outcome of battles between European and Ottoman imperialists. This was a more typical assignment for a nationalist movement; one that in Europe and elsewhere took generations if not centuries to accomplish.
When the nakba destroyed the settled life of the 950,000 or so Arabs living in what became Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of refugees huddled in forests, fields, and makeshift camps. Whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan, they did not yearn to return to the “space” of Palestine, but to the “place” of their village, their farm, their fields, and their homes. The keys they treasured were to the doors of their actual houses, not talismans of a space promised and celebrated but unremembered. Unlike Zionist immigrants, these refugees needed no maps of where they lived or how to get there. Indeed one reason why tens of thousands of refugees were able to surreptitiously return and remain in Israel is because they knew the back roads and trails so well. Maps are for unfamiliar spaces, not for homey places.
Although the “two state solution” may well never be achieved, its emergence as a plausible target for a negotiated settlement entailed a difficult struggle among Palestinian nationalists to transform attachment to place to attachment to space. This required considerable finesse, along with a good deal of deception and disingenuousness. On the one hand, Palestinian leaders evoked the heartbreaking stories of refugees expelled from their homes and the homes of their ancestors, and then refused permission to return. On the other hand, those committed to the “Palestinian state” option set about transforming the Palestinian pathos into a nationalist ethos focused on “Palestine” as a space, with indistinct borders encompassing parts but not all of the country. That meant using the phrase “right of return” ambiguously, to mean—perhaps, but only perhaps, and only for a very tiny number–return to places, to specific homes, fields and villages. For most it would mean return from spaces that were not in Palestine to locations in a “space” by that name– a space that would not contain “places” of actual, original, attachment.
This is a difficult political task for any nationalist movement. But it was particularly difficult for the Palestinians, because the spaces involved are so small, and therefore where the distances to specific yearned-for places, so near and yet so inaccessible, are so tantalizingly short. From the Israeli point of view, the continued evocation by Palestinians of the “places” they were forced to abandon signals either their adversary’s inability to be satisfied with a Palestinian “space” as a basis for resolving the conflict; or their dishonesty in pretending to accept partition while actually expecting that to be a stage toward eventual liberation of all the “places” in historical Palestine.
Indeed, we may use this analysis to gain a fine appreciation of one of the most difficult points in the seemingly endless and almost certainly fruitless negotiations that have been going on between Israelis and Palestinians. When Palestinians accepted the “two state solution” they did not explicitly accept it as corresponding to two peoples—Jewish and Palestinian. In their eyes that would have been equivalent to recognizing the right of the Zionist movement to have dispossessed Palestinians from their homes and their country. Instead, a Palestinian Arab state would live, side by side, with an Israeli state, containing an “Israeli people” comprised of both Jewish and Arab citizens. This position has been softened to the extent that Palestinians have offered Jewish settlers in the West Bank the opportunity to remain as law-abiding citizens of Palestine.
Meanwhile, however, Israel has escalated its demand. Originally no Israeli leader asked for or ever expected to receive Palestinian or Arab recognition of Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state.” But beginning with Ariel Sharon’s premiership, this became a constantly repeated demand. It is now often identified by top Israeli officials as the single most important requirement before Israel can make its own “painful compromises” for peace. Palestinian leaders and negotiators have objected to the opening that acceptance might give to Israeli policies of persecution or even expulsion of Arab citizens. They have also objected to the injustice and emotional impossibility of Palestinians, as victims, granting approval to their own historical victimization. But another obstacle to Palestinian acceptance of this demand also looms large. To name Israel as a “space” that is “Jewish,” would categorically foreclose the dream of re-establishing Palestinian refugee attachments to places in that space by confining Palestinian political ambitions, now and forever, to the “space” of the pieces of whatever mini-state of Palestine emerges from the agreement.
Because of the different trajectories that brought both national movements into collision, most Israelis can literally not imagine the pain of giving up attachments to places as part of building an attachment to a space. At the same time, most Palestinians can only understand the Israeli demand that such attachments be explicitly abandoned as reflecting the brutality and inhumanity they have come to associate with Jewish power in the space of Palestine.
This is an updated version of “Places vs. Spaces for Palestinians and Jews,” Perspectives, Spring 2014.
Professor Ian Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.