On the menu today: Happy Halloween. Remember, to honor All Saints Day, a lot of candy goes on sale at drastically reduced prices tomorrow. President Biden, once a supreme skeptic of White House-driven Middle East peace initiatives, is abandoning his old doubts and wants to try his hand at fostering a lasting peace between the Palestinians and Israelis. History gives us many, many reasons to doubt that this will succeed, but there’s one potential wrinkle in the current conflict that might change the odds somewhat. What would the future of the Palestinians look like if Hamas were genuinely wiped out? Also, an illuminating story about how Chinese and Taiwanese diplomats try to get one another drunk.
The Harsh Reality of the Middle East
You may have seen this tweet from Matt Yglesias, showcasing the rival proposals at the 2007 Annapolis Conference, when the Bush administration brought together Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in yet another attempt to negotiate a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
To the naked eye, the differences between the Israeli proposal map and the Palestinian proposal map are negligible. It looks like there was a negotiated compromise on the table that would have left each side with much of what it wanted, but it fell apart because the tiniest of concessions was too much for either or both sides.
Franklin Foer’s account of the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, has a lot of sections that left me thinking less of Biden. (Er, even less.) But one section that made me think better of the president was a part indicating that when Biden took office, he didn’t want to touch a Middle East peace process with a ten-foot pole:
[White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett] McGurk liked to say if he could reduce Biden’s Middle East policy to a bumper sticker, it would read: “No New Projects.” That meant no peace processes, no grand plans for strategic realignment, no grandiose objectives. His job was to minimize the prospects of a crisis – to keep the Middle East off a president’s desk as much as possible.
As those maps from the Annapolis Conference indicate, the division between the Israelis and the Palestinians had very little to do with where the lines on the map were drawn. You’ll also notice that the 2007 Annapolis Conference did not invite Hamas, even though Hamas had won the 2006 elections. In fact, Hamas called for a boycott of the conference, as did Iran. Everyone understood that inviting Hamas to peace talks was a waste of time; the only peace Hamas was willing to offer Israelis was the peace of the grave.
When you hear that chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” you are hearing a chant that contends that Israel should not exist, and that there should not be any Jewish state in the Middle East. You notice there is no addendum to that chant, declaring that the chanters could accept the existence of a Jewish state somewhere else in the world. (Back in 2008, novelist Michael Chabon envisioned a Jewish homeland based around Sitka, Alaska.)
The objection of Hamas is not that the Jewish state is located where it is or that it has the borders that is has; the objection of Hamas is that the Jewish state exists. When you run around deliberately slaughtering infants, toddlers, schoolkids, parents, and grandparents, you can’t make your perspective any clearer. Hamas does not want peace, and it will not cease violent attacks on Israel as long as it exists.
In this sense, the degree to which the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip support Hamas is moot. If just a quarter of the Palestinians support Hamas, Hamas will not allow peaceful coexistence. If three quarters of the Palestinians support Hamas, Hamas will not allow peaceful coexistence. The elimination of Hamas is a prerequisite for a lasting peace.
We should stop looking for practicality or level-headedness where it has long been clear that it doesn’t exist. As we saw this weekend, the Jewish presence in Dagestan, Russia, is negligible, but that didn’t stop an angry mob from storming an airport looking for Jews, upon hearing a rumor that an Israeli plane was arriving. As the chief rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Reuven Azman, observed to me earlier this year, there is virulent and impassioned antisemitism in countries that have no Jews. We’re not dealing with a rational, fact-based perspective here, and there is no rational or fact-based proposal that can placate it. We’re dealing with a paranoid and conspiratorial mindset that sees sinister Jewish conspiracies around every corner and the Mossad under the bed.
The modern history of the Middle East is an excruciatingly frustrating story of one reasonable compromise after another being offered, but never accepted. Back in 2001, Bill Clinton fumed that Yasser Arafat had strung him along with the promise of a peace deal Arafat was never going to accept:
Nearly a year after he failed to achieve a deal at Camp David, former president Bill Clinton gave vent to his frustrations this week over the collapse of peace in the Mideast. And Clinton directed his ire at one man: Yasir Arafat. On Tuesday night, Clinton told guests at a party at the Manhattan apartment of former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his wife, writer Kati Marton, that Arafat called to bid him farewell three days before he left office. “You are a great man,” Arafat said. “The hell I am,” Clinton said he responded. “I’m a colossal failure, and you made me one.”
Clinton said he told Arafat that by turning down the best peace deal he was ever going to get-the one proffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and brokered by Clinton last July-the Palestinian leader was only guaranteeing the election of the hawkish Ariel Sharon, the current Israeli leader. But Arafat didn’t listen. . . .
Clinton said, somewhat surprisingly, that he never expected to close the deal at Camp David. But he made it clear that the breakdown of the peace process and the nine months of deadly intifada since then were very much on his mind. He described Arafat as an aging leader who relishes his own sense of victimhood and seems incapable of making a final peace deal. “He could only get to step five, and he needed to get to step 10,” the former president said. But Clinton expressed hope in the younger generation of Palestinian officials, suggesting that a post-Arafat Palestinian leader might be able to make peace, perhaps in as little as several years. “I’m just sorry I blew this Middle East” thing, Clinton said shortly before leaving. “But I don’t know what else I could have done.”
One of the reasons it is seemingly impossible to get any Palestinian leader to sign on the dotted line is the harsh fact that the Middle East is full of assassinated peacemakers. In 1979, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat signed a peace deal with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, in the culmination of a process that had begun the previous year. In 1981, while reviewing the troops during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal, Sadat and eleven others were killed by an Islamist militant in an attack that also wounded 28.
Assassinating leaders who reach out to the opposition isn’t just an Arab or Palestinian habit. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo accords in 1993 and famously shook hands with Arafat on the White House lawn. He shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres. And then, in 1995, a right-wing Israeli extremist who opposed the Oslo accords killed Rabin.
In this Middle East conflict, if you try to reach out to the other side and find some form of coexistence, somebody on your side will accuse you of being a traitor and sellout and agent for the opposition and put a bullet in you. I wish that were not the case, but that is the case, and American foreign policy in the Middle East must recognize this harsh reality. The lack of peace between Israel and its enemies is not because American presidents haven’t tried hard enough. The lack of peace is because even agreeing to a partial accord is a signal for every hateful extremist to come out of the woodwork and try to kill the leadership.
But now that Israel and Hamas are at war, apparently Joe Biden has changed his mind and believes that he, too, must be another American president who puts considerable time and effort into a diplomatic initiative to find a reasonable compromise between Palestinians who want to kill Israelis and Israelis who refuse to die. During a joint press conference with Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, Biden said:
When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.
It means a concentrated effort from all the parties — Israelis, Palestinians, regional partners, global leaders — to put us on a path toward peace.
In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with leaders throughout the region — including King Abdullah of Jordan, President Sisi of Egypt, President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and just yesterday with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — about making sure there’s real hope in the region for a better future; about the need — and I mean this sincerely — about the need to work toward a greater integration for Israel while insisting that the aspirations of the Palestinian people will be part — will be part of that future as well.
I’m convinced one of the reasons Hamas attacked when they did — and I have no proof of this; just my instinct tells me — is because of the progress we were making towards regional integration for Israel and regional integration overall. And we can’t leave that work behind.
It is extremely difficult to be any kind of optimist when it comes to the Israelis and the Palestinians. But then again, we’ve seen peace emerge in some corners of the world where conflicts once seemed intractable — Northern Ireland and the Balkans come to mind. Out of 163 ranked countries, Rwanda ranked 88th in peace and stability last year. Vietnam ranked 41st.
And we have seen terrorist groups either get eliminated or wither away; the Shining Path no longer terrorizes Peru, al-Qaeda is a shadow of what it once was, and the Islamic State no longer flies its black flag over any territory. Not many people noticed that earlier this year, the head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq declared that the country was, by the standards of its recent history, stable and prospering: “To cut a long story short: with last year’s gains in political stability and an ambitious federal budget in hand, Iraq is well-positioned to seize the many opportunities in front of it.”
Sometimes, populations can get exhausted from years of bloodshed and become more willing to accept a compromise.
But as long has Hamas exists in any serious form, it’s going to attempt to blow up any peace process, metaphorically and perhaps literally as well. If you want peace in the long term, you must accept war in the short term. The only entity that’s willing to take on Hamas right now is the Israel Defense Forces.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication I write for — that’s the Washington Post, for that reader who interpreted this running joke as some sort of deliberate effort to mislead NR readers about my other employer — I take a look at how Taiwan’s diplomats cope with the cross-strait challenge from a hostile giant who rarely is in a mood to talk.
One of the quotes got shortened in the editing process, and I think the longer version is funnier and more illuminating:
“China’s consistent negotiation style is as follows: the first night, when you arrive in China, they call this night the first night and they would have a welcome party. The tradition, the must-do on that night, is to make you drunk,” Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Jan Jyh-horng said with a smile. “The second day, everyone will show up at the negotiation with the sternest face they can have. Sometimes, the negotiations would last for one day or two days. At the end of the negotiations, we need to set up party for them, and then it is our turn to make them drunk.”