Moreover, framing it, as senior American and Israeli officials have done, as yet another win for Israel within the Arab and Muslim world, is a cynical spin that constitutes nothing less than diplomatic gaslighting.

Since Kosovo has declared its independence from Serbia in February 2008, it has won wide international recognition. Among those who recognized it have been the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Unfortunately, and despite Kosovar efforts to win over Israel and forge diplomatic relations with it, Israel refused to do so. Until now, that is.

Israel’s refusal to recognize Kosovo stemmed from a host of reasons, most of which reflect a deeply-seated anxiety over an imaginary parallelism between Kosovo and Palestine, including:

Fear over the dangerous precedence of unilateral declaration of independence: Jerusalem regarded Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence as a dangerous precedent, one that would undercut its own ongoing case against a similar move by the Palestinians.

Anxiety over internal Arab-Palestinian secession: Jerusalem worried that recognition of Kosovo might help establish a universally applicable precedent for unilateral secession, one that could encourage Israel’s internal Arab-Palestinian minority – especially in the Galilee – to secede. (Of course, on this Israel was not alone. Other countries that have withheld recognition from Kosovo – notably, within the European Union, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania – all share the same anxiety.)

Concern over the validity of an internationally-imposed solution: Since Kosovo’s independence was imposed on Serbia from the outside, Jerusalem was apprehensive lest a perception of success on Kosovo should bolster the resolve of the international community to try and impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Additional reasons include strategic calculations vis-à-vis Russia (Serbia’s age-old patron, which has strongly opposed Kosovo’s independence), and sheer and plain islamophobia. As Aryeh Eldad, the former right-wing member of Knesset, claimed shortly after Kosovo’s declaration in 2008, “The flag of Kosovo is that of Islamic proliferation and a source of serious anxiety to Europe.”

The fact that the Netanyahu government has now decided it was ready to recognize Kosovo is due, first and foremost, to American pressure (a desire by the White House to boast another diplomatic victory, along with the announcement that Serbia would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem). But Israel’s decision to yield to American pressure also reflects the fact that the traditional reasons that have prevented it from recognizing Kosovo until now have lost their force.

After all, the Palestinians’ standing on the global stage is at a new low point in years. Accordingly, they are in no position to declare their independence, and even if they did – as they threatened to do in response to Israeli annexation – their action would probably not win universal support.

At the same time, secessionist sentiments among Israel’s Arab-Palestinian population increasingly appear to have no real bearing on the ground. Indeed, as evidenced by the uproar created by the clause in Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan that would allow for the transfer of areas within the so-called Triangle to the future state of Palestine, Israel’s Arab-Palestinian population are more focused on enjoying full equality within Israel than in seceding from it.

Finally, concern over an internationally-imposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has significantly dissipated over the past few years. The world is suffering from acute Middle East fatigue, and no such threat seems imminent under either President Trump (whose plan for solving the century-old conflict has turned out to be vehemently anti-Palestinian) or the Democratic contender, Joe Biden, should he win the November election.

Not only does Israel’s decision to recognize Kosovo come 12 years too late, therefore, it also seems motivated by the wrong reasons. Concern over the perceived parallelism with Palestine betrayed an Israeli anxiety rather than a clear-headed policy – one, moreover, that the Serbs themselves capably fueled by publicly proclaiming that “Kosovo is our Jerusalem.”

This and more, contrary to statements by the U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Israeli U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan, the breakthrough between Israel and Kosovo cannot be couched within the larger effort to bring peace between Israel and the Muslim world.

Doing so is a cynical spin that gaslights the fact it is Israel that has refused to recognize Kosovo all these years, not Kosovo that has refused to recognize Israel.

That Kosovo’s population is a majority-Muslim nation must not turn into yet another conquest for Trump or Netanyahu. Turning it into one, and hailing it “Another great day for peace [in the] Middle East,” as President Trump has done, denigrates its historical and geographical significance and undermines the very spirit that Israel’s agreement to recognize Kosovo should, at long last, usher.

The article was published on Haaretz, 6 September 2020.

הפוסט Trump and Netanyahu’s Barefaced Gaslighting on the Israel-Kosovo Deal הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Like many before him, Arens claims that only the Palestinian refugees have been used “to serve as a festering sore that would prevent peace.” For years, if not decades, Israelis have insisted that “no one else does this.” In other conflicts, writes Arens, war refugees were resettled. He is right about this to some extent, however the refugees were not resettled as he describes.

Arens says that after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, “millions were displaced from their homes by the subsequent fighting in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Most have been resettled.” The basis for this assertion is unclear. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, by 2004, 1,000,473 refugees had returned to Bosnia from abroad – i.e., less than a decade after the war’s end, about half (more than a million out of more than two million refugees) returned to their country and were resettled there.

The Kosovo war in the spring of 1999 made refugees out of a million Kosovars, both inside and outside Kosovo. But by August 1999, about two months after the war ended, the UNHRC reported the return of about 750,000 refugees; at the end of that month, the UNHRC stated that 95 percent of the refugees had returned. Since then, most efforts have focused on integrating minorities, including Serbs, who also returned to their homes in Kosovo and Croatia, despite the difficulty of living alongside one’s enemies after a bloody war in the notat-all-distant past.

The return of refugees to Kosovo is still considered a success story: A recent assessment by the UNHRC found that the refugee situation was handled well, and that the return was especially quick, at the initiative of the refugees themselves and with the support of the international community. And Kosovo is the example that Arens chooses to cite?

One reason the international community moved so quickly to effect the return of refugees to Kosovo was the reluctance of neighboring countries to resettle those people within their borders. These Western countries were wary of absorbing a large number of refugees from the same continent – and yet Arens does not accuse them of political exploitation or manipulation for the purpose of preventing peace. He finds it more convenient to completely forget that Europe not only allowed a massive return of refugees to Yugoslavia: It encouraged it. The UNHRC’s report even says that certain countries feared that the Kosovo refugees would become the “new Palestinians.”

The argument that only in the Palestinian case do countries in which the refugees reside refuse to resettle them, so as to influence a future final status accord, is incorrect as well. In the early 1990s, in the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, a million people lost their homes.

Three-quarters were Azeris who fled from the Karabakh province in Azerbaijan and from Armenia; the rest were mainly Armenians who fled Azerbaijan. Until recently, nearly 600,000 Azeris had not been permanently resettled, even while residing in Azerbaijan, because the latter does not recognize the independence of Karabakh but considers it Azeri territory under Armenian occupation. They are “internally displaced people.”

To support this political stance and ensure that in any future agreements the Azeri refugees’ right of return is recognized, the government refuses to permanently resettle these hundreds of thousands. Until not long ago, some lived in genuine refugee camps; many currently live in designated locales that lack infrastructure and are poorly served by welfare services.

The general outlines for a resolution of this conflict are accepted by the international community, and they include the principle of the return of refugees. None of this in any way justifies the poor treatment of refugees. But the notion that the demand for the right of return is exclusive to the Palestinians is patently false.

Adherents of Arens’ approach argue that the Sudeten Germans moved to Germany. Arens and others who make similar arguments should need no reminding that the Palestinians refugees as yet have no Palestinian state to which to return. Many of the Palestinian refugees have been stateless for as long as 70 years now because, unlike refugees in all the other places Arens mentioned, they have no country that they can call home.

It is time to bury the myth that everywhere else in the world, refugees whose situation resembles that of the Palestinians come to grips with their fate and the Palestinians alone refuse to do likewise. Advocates of this fallacy seek to dismiss the Palestinians’ need for solutions, and prefer to keep them as eternal enemies.

Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin is a Policy Fellow at the Mitvim Institute, researching comparative conflict dynamics. She is also a public opinion expert and an international political consultant.

(originally published in Haaretz)

הפוסט Who Said Refugees Do Not Return Home? הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

Others remain committed to a political resolution rather than an endless horizon of conflict and violence. But they have few answers for breaking down obstacles that are growing worse as time goes by. New ideas are badly needed; few are forthcoming.

In this bleak political landscape, the Mitvim Institute embarked on an effort to learn from the experience of other societies in conflict or facing related challenges. We believed that the experience of attempts to resolve conflicts in other places may serve as a source of policy options, lessons to be learned, or test cases in other regions, for assessing local developments and options in Israel-Palestine.

הפוסט Fresh Thinking for Old Problems: Comparing Conflicts to Advance Israeli-Palestinian Peace הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

הפוסט Lessons for Israel and Palestine from Conflict Comparisons הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

In 1999, NATO led the largest international military intervention in Europe since World War II, to stop Serbia’s actions in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia. The war ended with a long and tense political standoff. After negotiations in the mid-2000s failed, Kosovo declared independence in 2008, in a move vehemently opposed by Serbia.

Then in 2013, the two sides took a major step forward, signing a set of principles intended to advance future normalization of relations. It was not a full-fledged peace agreement but contained two major aspects: neither side would block the access of the other to eventual EU accession, and the small Serb minority living in Kosovo would create a municipal association, while being more integrated into Kosovo’s governing structures. Many thought Serbia was coming to accept the increasing fact of Kosovo’s independence. Kosovo implicitly acknowledged the right of the Serb minority to a measure of autonomy and special protection.

The agreement was viewed as a historic step. The international community was thrilled – cautious but unmistakably optimistic.

Thus the first inquiry of this paper is what can be learned from this relatively recent leap towards conflict resolution that may be relevant for Israelis and Palestinians? What factors – incentives, pressure, international or domestic dynamics – contributed to Belgrade and Pristina’s progress, that Israelis and Palestinians can learn from?

The second inquiry regards the agreement itself. What are the core ideas for a workable arrangement between the two entities struggling between forced marriage and contested separation? How were Kosovo’s claims to total sovereignty reconciled with Serbia’s equally unwavering demand that Kosovo remain Serbian sovereign territory, with only circumscribed autonomy? Here the political and constitutional arrangements will be reviewed to consider applicable ideas or lessons for eventual Israeli-Palestinian final-status arrangements.

The paper will then address a third and perhaps thorniest question: the current status of negotiations. Nearly four years after the flurry of optimism, in 2017, the dialogues have been beset by major problems of both interpretation and implementation. Relations between the two regions have stagnated at best, or soured. This mixed and worrying outcome will be compared to experiences in the past and present of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to consider ways to improve such a process in the future.

The analysis reaches several key insights. One is that intensive detail for implementation of an agreement may not substitute for clarity of the core principles for resolving the conflict, and commitment to those political goals by both parties. The lack of agreement on the final status vision, sensitive as this may be, hampers negotiation and erodes chances for eventual resolution. Other insights touch on the need to include parties directly affected by the conflict in the resolution process, or boost their role in negotiations; the possibility that under certain circumstances, hawkish leaders may be the more likely figures to advance peace; as well as the need for protection of minorities while preserving sovereignty – while minimizing ambiguity of sovereignty over any given area.

The paper first outlines the background of the Serbia-Kosovo conflict, then highlights main areas of comparison to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – beginning with general core issues in common, and moving to a more detailed analysis of the trajectory of negotiations.

הפוסט Lessons from Serbia and Kosovo for Israel and Palestine: All Process, No Peace? הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

הפוסט Kosovo and its Relationship with Israel הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

It is a needless diplomatic error because, contrary to what Jerusalem thinks, such recognition will not undermine its own strategic interests. In fact, it might even advance them. The source of the error lies in a misplaced anxiety that, since Kosovo is often compared to Palestine, the diplomatic standing of the former might have dangerous implications for Jerusalem on the latter. The most anxiety-inducing implications concern the following:

A Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence: The Palestinians have threatened to declare their independence, and in the past year have sought to obtain international recognition for their statehood. Jerusalem fears that the case of Kosovo makes for a dangerous precedent, and that its own recognition of the Balkan republic would undercut its case against Palestinian independence.

Internal Palestinian secession: Jerusalem worries that recognition of Kosovo might help establish a universally applicable precedent for unilateral secession, one that could encourage Israel’s internal Palestinian minority in, say, the Galilee, to secede. (On this, Jerusalem is not alone: Other countries that have withheld recognition from Kosovo – notably within the European Union: Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania – all share the same anxiety. )

The validity of an internationally imposed solution: Since Kosovo’s independence was imposed on Serbia from the outside, Jerusalem is apprehensive lest a perception of success on Kosovo bolster the resolve of the international community to try and impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this context, Israel’s recognition of Kosovo might undermine its long-held resistance to such a diplomatic initiative.

Jerusalem’s non-recognition of Kosovo, in other words, has not been a function of a simple diplomatic lapse. It reflects instead a deliberate decision, one fueled by deep anxieties of various kinds. As it happens, these anxieties are entirely misplaced.

Even Albania, whose commitment to Kosovo is rooted in a shared ethnic identity (Kosovo’s population is overwhelmingly ethnically Albanian ) and which lobbies on its behalf on the world stage, has had no qualms about coming out against the Palestinian bid. The Albanian prime minister publicly announced as much on a visit to Israel this past November. The irrelevance of the Kosovo case for the Palestinian UN bid has gone in the opposite direction as well. Some of the very powers that supported Palestine’s statehood bid remain adamantly opposed to Kosovo’s independence, not least Russia and China, the main opponents of Kosovo’s admission to the United Nations in the Security Council.

For the case of Kosovo is ultimately a moral and historical one, and Jerusalem’s failure on this score, therefore, is all the more regrettable. Arising out of one of the worst genocidal atrocities on the European continent since World War II, Kosovo’s demand for self-determination is one that Israel cannot afford to ignore. If anything, a country that never fails to invoke the Holocaust to justify its existence should have been at the forefront of the international campaign to recognize Kosovo’s independence. To mark Kosovo’s fourth anniversary, Israel has an opportunity to right a wrong and to recognize Kosovo. It is an act that Israel owes not only to Kosovo; it owes it also to the Jewish people.

(originally published in Haaretz)

הפוסט Time to Recognize Kosovo הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.