At the end of the Arab Revolt in 1939, with WWII approaching, the Zionist movement agreed to participate in an international conference in London, which included a Palestinian delegation and senior representatives from five Arab states. As a result of Palestinian/Arab refusal to sit down with the Zionists, Britain was forced to negotiate with each party separately, although Jews and Arabs met behind the scenes in unofficial capacities. The failure of this conference led to the publication of the British White Paper of 1939, which seriously restricted to Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The second conference was held in Lausanne in 1949. Israel was about resubmit its request to join the UN in May 1949 and could not be seen as an opponent to a UN conference addressing the consequences of the 1948 Arab-Israel War, primarily the question of refugees. Here, too, representatives met separately to no avail.

Twenty-five years passed until the next international conference met in Geneva in December 1973. Golda Meir and her government were overwhelmed by the repercussions of the October War, could not refuse the American-Soviet demand for a conference a mere ten days before the elections. Jordan and Egypt attended, Syria did not, and the conference ended after two days with no notable achievements. However, it served as a springboard for bilateral talks with Egypt and Syria, which ultimately led to the signing of two Disengagement Agreements between Israel and Egypt (1974 and 1975), and between Israel and Syria (1975), under the leadership of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In the 1970s and 1980s, numerous attempts reconvene the Geneva conference failed. Israel and Syria both obstructed these efforts, each for its own reasons. The London Agreement, signed in April 1987 by Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein, outlined the principles for an international conference under the auspices of the UN, but this attempt was foiled by Yitzchak Shamir, prime minister of the unity government at the time.

Shamir, however, was eventually forced to participate in the Madrid Conference of October 1991 following the collapse of the USSR and the Gulf War. US pressure, combined with the fact that the conference was attended by relevant Arab states, including Syria, forced Shamir to partake in a gathering attended by a JordanianPalestinian delegation, some of whose delegates were not PLO members (but effectively received instructions from the organization). The Madrid Conference jumpstarted three tracks of bilateral talks: with Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians, and the regional players also conducted multilateral talks on the issues of arms control, environment, water and refugees. Although the tracks with Syria and the Palestinians soon stalled, deadlock with the Palestinians prompted the opening of the secret communications channel that led to the Oslo Accords. The Syrian track can also be considered as the prelude to the negotiations that took place later in the 1990s.

The 2007 Annapolis Conference convened by the US was the last international conference designed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to date. Along with representatives of Israel, the PLO, the Quartet, Egypt, and Jordan, attendees included representatives from several countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel such as Saudi Arabia and Syria. It was the first and only time Israel was a willing partner in such an international process. As in the past, the conference was to serve as the starting point for negotiations between the Olmert Government and Abu Mazen. Indeed, these talks continued until the end of Olmert’s administration and almost resulted in an agreement.

What can we learn from this short history of peace conferences? First, except for the Annapolis Conference, Israel was never a willing participant. It was typically forced to attend due to historic circumstances or international pressure. Second, Israel’s opposition to such conferences stemmed from a fear of being isolated and subjected to heavy international pressure that would force it to agree to policies the government deemed unfavorable. Moreover, Israel consistently feared a unified Arab front that would naturally be based on the Arab lowest common denominator. Third, Israel has always believed that direct bilateral talks allowed it to retain the greatest flexibility and has consistently supported direct negotiations with the Palestinians, with US mediation at most. Fourth, no conference has led to a breakthrough, although they have, at times, served as an important stepping stone toward a new formal or informal negotiation channel. Finally, no international conference has damaged Israel.

In light of these conclusions, the refusal of the Netanyahu government to participate in the Paris peace conference should come as no surprise. And yet, Israel’s portrayal as a country that opposes peace causes it tremendous international harm. Therefore, an international conference such as those held in Geneva, Madrid or Annapolis, might be a launching pad for a new negotiation process. If, however, the government has no desire to promote peace with the Palestinians, participation in such a conference would be quite risky, especially if France’s position is perceived to be pro-Palestinian.

Clearly an agreement can be reached only through negotiations between the parties themselves if they are willing. If Netanyahu hopes that Prime Minister al-Sisi and the Saudis will throw him a lifeline and save him from the deluge of peace proposals in the form of regional conferences, one might ask, what is the point of another international conference? In the absence of genuine Israeli and Palestinian motivation and determination to solve the conflict, no international conference will bring us closer to our ultimate goal of peace.

הפוסט Why is Israel Afraid of an International Peace Conference? הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

In his new book, State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State, Jonathan Schanzer attempts to unravel these narratives and provide insight into how the Palestinian leadership navigates the rough seas of pseudostatehood. It’s a daunting task—as Schanzer acknowledges early on, the field is crowded with literature on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, much of that literature is written in a comparative light; it’s usually the Palestinians in relation to Israel, or in relation to the peace process, or the Arab League, and etc. In putting the internal dynamics of the Palestinian leadership as the focal point, “State of Failure” reveals some truly unsettling facets of how the Palestinians craft and implement their policies. In covering the recent tremors in the political structure, the book focuses on former prime minister Salam Fayyad and his rather inglorious fall from grace in the leadership. The internal disputes, the well-documented rifts and disagreements between Fayyad and the Fatah leadership, all are laid out cogently in the book.

The book isn’t likely to be on the PLO’s reading list anytime soon. And most certainly, if there’s one specific area of the book where Schanzer is likely to reach an impasse with the Palestinian leadership, it’s the description of the UN campaign. In the book, Schanzer takes a contemporary approach, detailing the roots of the campaign in 2005, when Palestinian diplomats began working in earnest with Latin American nations, developing a diplomatic strategy that would eventually lead to 2011. This diplomatic strategy was at times viewed as almost antagonistic to negotiations by some within the leadership, but by 2008 and 2009, when Tzipi Livni had failed to form a negotiation-centric government and Benjamin Netanyahu had ascended instead, the idea of this comprehensive and unilateral diplomatic campaign began to take hold. By 2010, with talks breaking down over settlement moratoriums and varying preconditions, the campaign became the predominant driving force of Palestinian policy. This is where things get murky.

If his approach is a pragmatic analysis of a clear-cut policy evolution, the history being touted by the Palestinian leadership is a little more holistic, a bit more nationalistic, and certainly much more paradigm-driven. In other words, Schanzer’s approach neglects a pre-Oslo history the Palestinian officials are incredibly defensive of. In a report I released this past summer, I interviewed nearly twenty Palestinian officials in search of some clarity on the campaign. Of the myriad narratives that emerged, one thing was clear: the UN campaign was not a recent phenomenon. In the historical waxing and waning of the methods of preference in Palestinian policy, internationalization at the UN has a history that precedes negotiations.

Indeed, Palestinian officials described a process that had roots as far back as the 1970s. One official has even written that the Palestinians first considered the UN track in 1969, at the suggestion of President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. By 1974, this track’s foundations were laid in the PLO’s Ten-Point Program, a political manifesto that, among other things, called for Palestinian autonomy of lands “liberated,” and didn’t explicitly rule out other forms of resistance. For a resistance-based liberation movement, the acknowledgment of partial territorial control in Palestine and alternative means of resistance was precedent-setting.

Here, too, is where a historical background would have benefited the book. For even in its brief respite from the fore of Palestinian policy, the UN campaign was never far. Indeed, in 1999, as the end of the 5-year interim Oslo period neared, Yasser Arafat dispatched two deputies, Nabil Sha’ath and Saeb Erekat, to Europe in order to begin gauging support for a unilateral declaration of statehood at the UN. The US promptly countered this campaign, and pressured the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. At the time, President Clinton had managed to dissuade Arafat through several key areas: first, leveraging the well-known fact that a Palestinian unilateral action outside of the Oslo framework would threaten the peace camp in the upcoming Israeli elections, and second, that the US would be willing to host further negotiations if Arafat held off. After a frenetic diplomatic campaign, the US was able to stave off the Palestinian action and set the stage for the Camp David negotiations.

Where does that leave the UN bid in the grand scheme of things now? The Palestinians have halted their campaign in lieu of recent negotiations, a compromise they made with John Kerry in order for talks to be restarted. Should the talks break down, however, or fail to yield an interim agreement by March, the Palestinians can be expected to again gear up for engagement at the international body this coming year. Their engagement, and specifically which entities to engage and to what degree, will be known only to the man at the top, Abbas.

Such is the clouded area of tasseography in the Palestinian Territories that State of Failure deftly interprets. Schanzer discards the rhetoric and nationalist storylines in lieu of the pragmatic, describing the recent leadership’s myopic nature in zero-sum terms. His prognosis is clear: the Palestinian leadership is struggling on two fronts: in negotiating a state’s existence and governing a state entity. In order to do the former, it must improve on the latter. It is not likely to win him many friends in the West Bank. But it is, however, a workman’s analysis of how Palestinian officials form policy and govern in one of the longest and most intractable conflicts of the modern era.

(originally published in the National Interest)

הפוסט Palestine’s Self-Inflicted Wounds 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.