After Abu Mazin? Letting the Scales Fall From Our Eyes

The Obama administration’s response to the growing crisis in Palestinian politics has certainly aggravated matters. In a strange way, that may be an achievement: it is now undeniable that the peace process has no clothes.

Is there a way out? No. Or at least not now. The best we can do is to make sure that things don’t get worse and begin creating the raw ingredients for fresh new approaches. This will not be easy.

• “West Bank first” has failed. Admittedly I never thought that the approach designed by the Bush administration and followed by Obama—build up the Ramallah government and hope that Gaza capitulates—would work.[4] But I am now worried that one possible U.S. approach would be to double our bets on it once again by placing all hopes on Salam Fayyad’s “plan” for building Palestinian statehood. There are some good reasons to continue backing Fayyad’s approach, but it is a small element of an appropriate policy, not a substitute for systematic thinking. And the United States must acknowledge its own fecklessness here in its attempts to build up a viable Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. We also need to stop hitching our hopes to any one particular figure.

• Palestinians have domestic politics too. It is generally no trouble for American politicians to remember their domestic political context; the Israeli political system also imposes easily identifiable constraints. Politics does not stop at the 1967 lines, however. The Goldstone report fiasco shows what happens when we forget that the Palestinian public has opinions, and that there is an intense internal political game. Ironically, the report itself provided unsettling reading about Israel and about the Hamas-led half of the Palestinian Authority. The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, by contrast, emerged largely unscathed but so far is the only actor to pay a heavy political price.

• Don’t forget Gaza. The debate over the Goldstone report has focused on conduct during the Gaza war and whether Israel targeted Palestinian civilians. That may be an important argument. But there can be no disputing the larger picture of devastation in Gaza. Rarely discussed—at least in U.S. policy circles—is the degree to which civilians in Gaza have had their economy destroyed as a result of international sanctions (imposed chiefly by Israel but also by Egypt and with some broader international support). Of course, it is clear why Israel would not want military material brought into Gaza. It is not at all clear why pasta and paper are military material.
The extent of the disaster must be recognized: Gaza’s economy was wrecked before the recent war. Now much of its infrastructure is destroyed along with a significant amount of its housing. Relief has been possible; reconstruction has not been. This should matter to us partly because it matters to so many people throughout the world—people who hold the United States responsible in part for the humanitarian disaster. It should also matter to us because the barely concealed purpose of the strangulation policy—to make it impossible for Hamas to govern—is clearly backfiring. Hamas has used its control of the tunnel economy to dig itself in deeper.
The United States has quietly pushed to alleviate a few of the more severe aspects of the closure on Gaza. But it has said very little in public and implicitly endorsed much of the closure by failing to press hard for reconstruction. It is not clear if there is an attractive policy for a U.S. leadership understandably concerned about a re-armed Hamas. But ignoring the problem or treating Gaza suffering as an unfortunate price that its people must pay (as we do now) undermines the rest of our regional diplomacy.

• There are no quick fixes to the challenge of Hamas. Hamas has dug itself in deeply in Gaza; it is merely in hibernation in the West Bank; and it has some strong support in some diaspora communities as well. The road the United States has not taken—working to incorporate Hamas into diplomacy—would not be an easy one and failure is a real possibility. But defeating Hamas has not worked nor will the organization simply wither away. The decline in Hamas’s public standing is quite real, but there is no easy way to use fleeting opinion polls to toss Hamas out of power.

• Settlements do matter. The Obama administration’s diplomacy on the Israeli settlement issue was problematic, but it did not create the problem. Any approach that is based on the assumption that settlements are a side issue (as some have bizarrely claimed) or that the matter is resolved by simply drawing the borders in the right way and relocating a small number of settlers (as is routinely asserted) ignores how extensive the settlements are, how rapidly they grew during the peace process, how difficult any relocation would be for Israel, how powerful settlers have become in domestic Israeli politics, how corrosive they have been for Palestinian hopes for a two-state solution, and how difficult “border adjustments” would be for a Palestinian leadership to accept.

• Use the lull. The Israeli–Palestinian situation is bleak right now but there is little fighting. In the past, we have used such lulls to let our attention wander elsewhere, spin our wheels in open-ended diplomatic processes, or decide that we could wait until the parties get serious. This time should be different: we cannot end the conflict now but we can take a longer-range view of how to maintain the current calm without entrenching its injustices or making a future round of fighting inevitable.