On one hand, the thought that Israeli officers will be prevented from leaving the borders of the state, or, God forbid, will be imprisoned and locked up, makes me cringe. Although I am a peace activist, I am not a pacifist. I have great appreciation for the IDF’s role in defending Israel, and in advancing the ability of Israel to promote peace. I have served in a significant position in the army and my children also served and are serving, as they were educated to do.

I am frightened that past and present military personnel will pay the price for the arrogance, distorted values and stupidity of the political echelon. As a graduate of the First Lebanon War, I witnessed firsthand the tragic folly of entering into Lebanon, and the long and unnecessary stay in Southern Lebanon.

I was much younger, but still remember the unnecessary and tragic Yom Kippur War.

If our leaders would have received the outstretched hand of the Egyptian president before instead of after the bloody war we could have avoided much suffering.

Our country is full of unnecessary graves and scarred souls and bodies of Israelis who wholeheartedly believed they were protecting the land. However, they were sent on missions that did not contribute to our protection, and in many cases, they, in fact, damaged our security.

It is not surprising that most senior IDF officials, members of the Mossad and of Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) become supporters of peace and the use of diplomatic tools after their retirement – they understand the damage that the current policies are causing to both the physical protection of the state and to our moral values.

Because of this, on the other hand, I look forward to developments that will constitute a wake-up call for us that we have to end the predicament in which we find ourselves. I am repeatedly shocked by the indifference of the Israeli public to the reality of the occupation, both morally and in terms of its strategic implications for the future of Zionism.

I am also welcoming any international recognition of Palestinian sovereignty and any Palestinian access to international organizations, with the hope that they will lead to the actual establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel and prevent the binational catastrophe, which the current toxic status quo points to.

Recently, the situation on the ground has worsened, partially because of the Trump administration’s support for the disastrous policies of the Netanyahu government. It is also due to the attempt of the Netanyahu government to establish facts on the ground before the Biden administration completes their appointments and starts full-time work. There has been an alarming rise in the measures designed to prevent the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict by allowing new settlements, as well as an increase in settler violence against the Palestinian population under the auspices of protecting the settlers and their land instead of fighting against the injustices they are committing. These events are hardly reported in the Israeli media and do not interest the majority of the public.

How does one reconcile the horror of the idea that IDF officers will be arrested abroad, with the hope that the Israeli public will remember that we are still occupying another nation and that we will eventually pay a price for it?

I would certainly have preferred that the reminder of the moral and strategic problematic nature of the occupation would come from a less problematic institution, but since this is the given situation, it is important to promote serious consideration of the International Criminal Court decision. But we should not agree with the hysterical accusations of the so-called antisemitic motive of the ICC that we have already heard thrown into the air in a “Pavlovic response,” nor the calls to boycott the ICC, which was established as a lesson from the tragedy of the Jewish people.

We must call on the IDF to investigate any wrongdoings in a full and transparent manner and to ensure that no horrific acts are carried out under its auspices on the ground, as has been happening more and more recently.

We should work hard to end the occupation that eventually corrupts even basic moral individuals. We have to prevent our leaders from continuing to lead us in the current direction, which is a dead end to our future. I wish we didn’t need such problematic reminders to reconcile our problems on the ground.

**The article was published on The Jerusalem Post, 4 March 2021

הפוסט ICC investigation is Israel’s wake-up call הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

So what happens if negotiations actually renew and then break down again? What’s next for the Palestinian agenda?

Kerry has said that progress needs to be made by the fall, presumably to circumvent future Palestinian actions at the UN; it’s clear that one of the conditions for resuming talks was a halt in the Palestinian internationalization campaign while talks are ongoing. The common Israeli prediction is that the Palestinians could build off their 2011-2012 UN campaign and do something as drastic as going to the International Criminal Court to air their grievances. This battle of global public opinion is one of the few areas of Palestinian diplomatic strength, and a severe concern for the Israelis. Yet if that’s the next move in the eyes of the Israelis, the feeling isn’t mutual in Ramallah. Indeed, as one senior Fatah official pointed out to me, the ICC is the last organization on a list of organizations triaged in importance to the Palestinian internationalization campaign. What is more likely, then, is a renewed Palestinian diplomatic campaign at the international level, a campaign that starts with the Palestinians seeking to sign some of the less-threatening international treaties such as the UNICEF Rights of the Child. These treaties and conventions are referred to by Palestinian leaders as the “first clusters”; relatively minor organizations and treaties that escalate as the campaign continues. Becoming signatories to some of these treaties has two main benefits for the Palestinians: first, they show the Palestinian people a palpable engagement on the international level, and second, they do very little to antagonize the United States and Israel.

But where did these “clusters” and contingency plans come from? The shift in the Palestinian leadership was gradual but recent. Faced with a moribund peace process and a status quo that increasingly harmed their interests, the Palestinian leadership scrambled to find alternative tactical tracks to pursue. In 2009, this reached a head when Abbas was faced with roughly three main options: attempt to reconcile the Fatah/Hamas split, essentially condone an intifada, or go international and approach the UN. With less-than-overwhelming enthusiasm for reconciliation, and similar disdain for an intifada, Abbas was left with really only one realistic option: internationalization.

The justification, then, for this choice lay in the history of the Palestinian political movement. In interviews this past year in Ramallah, Palestinian officials were quick to align the recent international campaign with the historical movements of the Palestinians at the UN. This process, in their eyes, started in 1974, with the PLO’s release of the ten-point plan, a document that sought to reconcile the armed resistance, but also left room for political maneuverability. As the Lebanese war raged on, the local PLO leadership began to evolve, forming the institutions of a semi-state. This evolution continued in 1982, when PLO members began openly calling for the acceptance of Resolution 242, the UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from “lands occupied in the recent conflict.” Abbas’s own memoirs detail this evolution—as an advocate of accepting 242 in 1974, Abbas noted that by 1982 members of the PLO thought a shift towards the international community could ”break the siege [of Beirut] and preserve the PLO.”

By 1988, this evolution had reached a climax when the Palestinians issued their declaration of independence, a statement that was joined with supporting documents accepting Resolution 242 and the two-state process. Soon after, Arafat was invited to address the UN, the Palestinians’ status was upgraded to observer entity, and a few days later Arafat renounced terrorism in a teleconference. The evolution of Palestinian thought that had culminated in an international campaign was halted subsequently thereafter, as the United States and PLO began to form a tenuous, if not productive, relationship that would lead to Madrid and eventually the Oslo process. Not until this process broke down in the years following Annapolis would the Palestinians look back on their internationalization campaign. As one PA official told me, “it’s as if the stopwatch we started in 1974 and paused in 1988 was resumed in 2009.”

The beauty of the UN campaign was its flexibility. Unlike most options on the table for the Palestinians, the internationalization campaign had tremendous upside. Not only did it play to one of the last, great strengths of the Palestinian leadership, the UN, but it was able to reconcile internal Palestinian political camps, something very few policy agendas can claim in the West Bank and Gaza. For those that advocate the use of force, or at least a more stern approach to dealing with Israel, it had the advantages of appearing to antagonize Israel and the United States. For those that pledge themselves to bilateral negotiations, it had the upside of appearing to leverage the Palestinian hand, the clearest evidence of that being Kerry’s recent attempts to bring both sides to the table.

For Abbas, a man who wants to appear committed to the bilateral process, the UN campaign followed in the footsteps of his predecessor. In May of 1999, Arafat both publicly and privately mused about what to do after the five-year interim Oslo period ended. With his trademark style of pursuing multiple tracks to varying levels of effort at once, Arafat deployed two deputies, Nabil Shaath and Saeb Erekat, to lobby European countries at the UN to recognize a possible Palestinian declaration of statehood. It was a lobbying campaign that Dennis Ross countered with a campaign of his own, as described in his memoirs; Arafat was “coy” about the possible move. However, President Clinton was able to take advantage of his working relationship with Arafat and bring him back from the brink with the promise of renewed negotiations. It was a moment that undoubtedly had an impact on Abbas when he launched his UN campaign in 2011. Palestinian officials describe Abbas as a leader hoping for Obama to intervene with proposed negotiations, to bring both parties back to the table. With Obama either unwilling or unable to do so, Abbas had walked himself into a corner where the only option was to go to the UN.

If Israeli officials describe the UN campaign as unilateral because it breaks with the spirit of Oslo, and the Palestinians describe the campaign as multilateral because it engages the international community, then the truth is somewhere in between. For the Palestinian leadership, there is an emerging group of officials and policymakers calling for an integrated strategy, a usage of tactics such as ”smart resistance,” of lobbying international countries and signing on to the “clusters” of the global community. This group is not opposed to new negotiations with Israel—indeed they support it—but they have been laying the foundation for a backup plan to failed negotiations for years. If Kerry’s proposed talks do indeed break down, or if they are unable to even start, the backup plan for the Israelis is a perpetuation of the status quo. The backup plan for the Palestinians, however, is taking the conflict back to the international arena.

(originally published in the National Interest)

הפוסט Palestine’s Plan B הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

The history of the PLO at the UN stretches back nearly 50 years when in 1964 the Palestine National Council sent formal notification to the UN regarding the establishment of the PLO. In 1974, the PLO was recognized by the UN General Assembly as the representative of the Palestinian people, and subsequently invited to partake in plenary meetings on the question of Palestine. In 1988, the General Assembly reaffirmed the Permanent Observer Mission status of the PLO to the UN in resolution 42/229 A & B, granting it rights to participate in debates in the General Assembly and co-sponsor resolutions. In 2011 the PLO took a more aggressive approach to the international governing body, seeking official member status through the Security Council. The motion was never voted on however, and a year later the PLO took their case to the General Assembly as a nonmember state, passing on Thursday by a vote of 138 to 9. The history with the UN suggests a learning curve within the Palestinian leadership, and the recent endeavors in international organizations suggest a paradigm shift within the PLO’s approach to the conflict.

For Palestinians, the UN bid was a glimmer of hope in an otherwise gloomy month; the war and subsequent ceasefire in Gaza was still very much prevalent in Palestinians’ minds, and even as celebrations in Ramallah were matched in Gaza City, pessimism loomed. According to a poll published in Ma’an earlier this month, an overwhelming majority (84%) of Palestinians supported the UN bid, but that was tempered with 90% believing Israel would enact policies to punish the Palestinians for the maneuver, and over 50% believing that the bid would have a negative effect on the Palestinians in the short-term.

The Israeli press was likewise divided in its reaction to the bid. In Israel Hayom’s print edition, the vote was labeled an “embarrassment for the State of Israel.” The Jerusalem Post was quick to address a newfound concern for Israeli leadership, running an analysis on the “overblown threat of the [Palestinian access to the] ICC.” In Ha’aretz, an editorial ran praising the Palestinian initiative, saying Israel had “no basis” for its fear of international recognition of Palestine, and that “a recognized Palestinian state will give Israel a responsible partner with international backing.” The variance in Israeli media reflected the spectrum of thought in the Israeli leadership, from Netanyahu roundly opposing the initiative, to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s surprising support for the measure.

For the peace process, the success of the Palestinians reveals the uncertainty of future negotiations. Could the international recognition and backing of the Palestinian leadership create a stronger position in negotiations? Will the Palestinians having greater access to the International Monetary Fund and possibly the International Criminal Court change the relationship between Ramallah and Jerusalem? It’s too soon to speculate what impact the upgraded status will have in the peace process, but for now, the success at the UN has given the Palestinians something to celebrate in an otherwise bleak November.

(originally published in Times of Israel)

הפוסט Much ado about something הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.