If Mideast special envoy George Mitchell wants to end his
career with his reputation intact, it is time for him to resign. He had a distinguished tenure in the
U.S. Senate — including a stint as majority leader — and his post-Senate career has
been equally accomplished. He was
an effective mediator of the conflict in Northern Ireland, helped shepherd the
Disney Corporation through a turbulent period, and led an effective
investigation of the steroids scandal afflicting major league baseball. Nobody can expect to be universally
admired in the United States, but Mitchell may have come as close as any
politician in recent memory.
Why should Mitchell step down now? Because he is wasting his time. The administration’s early
commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace was either a naïve bit of bravado or
a cynical charade, and if Mitchell continues to pile up frequent-flyer miles in
a fruitless effort, he will be remembered as one of a long series of U.S.
"mediators" who ended up complicit in Israel’s self-destructive land grab on
the West Bank. Mitchell will turn
77 in August, he has already undergone treatment for prostate cancer, and he’s
gotten exactly nowhere (or worse) since his mission began. However noble the goal of
Israeli-Palestinian peace might be, surely he’s got better things to do.
In an interview earlier this week with Time’s Joe Klein, President Obama acknowledged that his early
commitment to achieving "two states for two peoples" had failed. In his words, "this is as intractable a
problem as you get … Both sides-the Israelis and the Palestinians-have
found that the political environments, the nature of their coalitions or the
divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to
start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think we
overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran
contrary to that" (my emphasis).
This admission raises an obvious question: who was
responsible for this gross miscalculation? It’s not as if the dysfunctional condition of Israeli and Palestinian
internal politics was a dark mystery when Obama took office, or when Netanyahu
formed the most hard-line government in Israeli history. Which advisors told Obama and Mitchell
to proceed as they did, raising expectations sky-high in the Cairo speech, publicly
insisting on a settlement freeze, and then engaging in a humiliating retreat? Did they ever ask themselves what they
would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ should have expected? And if Obama now realizes how badly
they screwed up, why do the people who recommended this approach still have their
jobs?
As for Mitchell himself, he should resign because it should
be clear to him that he was hired under false pretenses. He undoubtedly believed Obama when the president said he was genuinely committed to achieving Israel-Palestinian peace
in his first term. Obama probably promised
to back him up, and his actions up to the Cairo speech made it
look like he meant it. But his
performance ever since has exposed him as another U.S. president who is unwilling to do
what everyone knows it will take to achieve a just peace. Mitchell has been reduced to the same hapless role that Condoleezza Rice played in the latter stages of the Bush
administration — engaged in endless "talks" and inconclusive haggling over
trivialities-and he ought to be furious at having been hung out to dry in this
fashion.
The point is not that Obama’s initial peace effort in the
Middle East has failed; the real lesson is that he didn’t really try. The objective was admirably clear from
the start — "two states for two peoples" — what was missing was a clear strategy
for getting there and the political will to push it through. And notwithstanding the various
difficulties on the Palestinian side, the main obstacle has been the Netanyahu
government’s all-too obvious rejection of anything that might look like a
viable Palestinian state, combined with its relentless effort to gobble up more land. Unless
the U.S. president is willing and able to push Israel as hard as it is pushing
the Palestinians (and probably harder), peace will simply not happen. Pressure
on Israel is also the best way
to defang Hamas, because genuine progress towards a Palestinian state
in the one thing that could strengthen Abbas and other Palestinian
moderates and force Hamas to move beyond its talk about a long-term hudna (truce) and accept the idea of permanent peace.
It’s not as if Obama and Co. don’t realize that this is
important. National Security Advisor James Jones has made it clear that he sees the Israel-Palestinian issue
as absolutely central; it’s not our only problem in the Middle East, but it
tends to affect most of the others and resolving it would be an enormous
boon. And there’s every sign that
the president is aware of the need to do more than just talk.
Yet U.S. diplomacy in this area remains all talk and no
action. When a great power
identifies a key interest and is strongly committed to achieving it, it uses
all the tools at its disposal to try to bring that outcome about. Needless to say, the use of U.S. leverage has been
conspicuously absent over the past year, which means that Mitchell has been operating with
both hands tied firmly behind his back. Thus far, the only instrument of influence that Obama has used has been
presidential rhetoric, and even that weapon has been used rather
sparingly.
And please don’t blame this on Congress. Yes, Congress will pander to the lobby,
oppose a tougher U.S. stance, and continue to supply Israel with generous economic
and military handouts, but a determined president still has many ways of
bringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant clients. The problem is that Obama refused to use any of them.
When Netanyahu dug in his heels and refused a complete settlement
freeze — itself a rather innocuous demand if Israel preferred peace to land — did
Obama describe the settlements as "illegal" and contrary to international law? Of course not. Did he fire a warning shot by
instructing the Department of Justice to crack down on tax-deductible
contributions to settler organizations? Nope. Did he tell Secretary
of Defense Robert Gates to signal his irritation by curtailing U.S. purchases
of Israeli arms, downgrading various forms of "strategic cooperation," or
canceling a military exchange or two? Not a chance. When Israel
continued to evict Palestinians from their homes and announced new
settlement
construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August, did Obama
remind Netanyahu of his dependence on U.S. support by telling U.S.
officials to say a few positive things about the
Goldstone Report and to use its release as an opportunity to underscore
the need
for a genuine peace? Hardly;
instead, the administration rewarded Netanyau’s
intransigence by condemning Goldstone and praising Netanyahu for "unprecedented"
concessions. (The
"concessions,"
by the way, was an announcement that Israel would freeze settlement
expansion in the West Bank "temporarily" while continuing it in East
Jerusalem. In other words, they’ll just take the land a bit more
slowly).
Like the Clinton and Bush administrations, in short, the
idea that the United States ought to use its leverage and exert genuine
pressure on Israel remains anathema to Obama, to Mitchell and his advisors, and
to all those pundits who are trapped in the Washington consensus on this
issue. The main organizations in
the Israel lobby are of course dead-set against it — and that goes for J Street
as well — even though there is no reason to expect Israel to change course in the
absence of countervailing pressure.
Obama blinked — leaving Mitchell with nothing to do-because he
needed to keep sixty senators on board with his health care initiative (that
worked out well, didn’t it?), because he didn’t want to jeopardize the campaign
coffers of the Democratic Party, and because he knew he’d be excoriated by
Israel’s false friends in the U.S. media if he did the right thing. I suppose I ought to be grateful to
have my thesis vindicated in such striking fashion, but there’s too much human
misery involved on both sides to take any consolation in that.
So what will happen now? Israel has made it clear that it is going to keep building settlements — including
the large blocs (like Ma’ale Adumim) that were consciously designed to carve up
the West Bank and make creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
Authority, and other moderate forces will be increasingly discredited as
collaborators or dupes. As Israel
increasingly becomes an apartheid state, its international legitimacy will face
a growing challenge. Iran’s
ability to exploit the Palestinian cause will be strengthened, and pro-American
regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere will be further weakened by their
impotence and by their intimate association with the United States. It might even help give al Qaeda a new
lease on life, at least in some places. Jews in other countries will continue to distance themselves from an Israel
that they see as a poor embodiment of their own values, and one that can no longer
portray itself convincingly as "a light unto the nations." And
the real tragedy is that all this
might have been avoided, had the leaders of the world’s most powerful
country been willing to use their influence on both sides more
directly.
Looking ahead, one can see two radically different
possibilities. The first option is
that Israel retains control of the West Bank and Gaza and continues to deny the
Palestinians full political rights or economic opportunities. (Netanyahu likes to talk about
a long-term "economic peace," but his vision of Palestinian bantustans under complete Israeli
control is both a denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations and a severe obstacle to their ability to fully develop
their own society. Over time,
there may be another intifada, which the IDF will crush as ruthlessly as it did
the last one. Perhaps the millions
of remaining Palestinians will gradually leave — as hardline Israelis hope and as
former House speaker Dick Armey once proposed. If so, then a country founded in the aftermath of the
Holocaust — one of history’s greatest crimes-will have completed a dispossession begun in 1948 — a great crime of its own.
Alternatively, the Palestinians may remain where they are,
and begin to demand equal rights in the state under whose authority they have been forced to dwell. If Israel denies them these
rights, its claim to being the "only democracy in the Middle East" will be
exposed as hollow. If it grants
them, it will eventually cease to be a Jewish-majority state (though its
culture would undoubtedly retain a heavily Jewish/Israeli character). As a long-time supporter of Israel’s
existence, I would take no joy in that outcome. Moreover, transforming Israel into a post-Zionist and
multinational society would be a wrenching and quite possibly violent experience
for all concerned. For both reasons, I’ve continued to favor "two states for two
peoples" instead.
But with the two-state solution looking less and less
likely, these other possibilities begin to loom large. Through fear and fecklessness, the United
States has been an active enabler of an emerging tragedy. Israelis have no one to blame but
themselves for the occupation, but Americans — who like to think of themselves as
a country whose foreign policy reflects deep moral commitments-will be judged harshly for our own role in this endeavor.
The United States will suffer certain consequences as a
result-decreased international influence, a somewhat greater risk of
anti-American terrorism, tarnished moral reputation, etc.-but it will
survive. But Israel may be in the
process of drafting its own suicide pact, and its false friends here in the
United States have been supplying the paper and ink. By offering his resignation-and insisting that Obama accept
it-George Mitchell can escape the onus of complicity in this latest sad chapter
of an all-too-familiar story. Small comfort, perhaps, but better than nothing.