Flotilla fallout: strategize and disentangle
Issandr El AmraniI want to get this quick thought down amidst tons of work and much distraction from Twitter and the flotilla fallout.
There are three issues that have been raised at the heart of international debate as a result of the flotilla murders:
- The need for an investigation into the incident;
- The need to lift the Gaza blockade;
- The longer-term need for a breakthrough in the deadlock in the Middle East peace process caused in part by Israel's intransigeant and aggressive behavior, from settlement expansion to landgrabs to assistance to attacks by settlers to its lack of desire for a permanent resolution that is in anyway reasonable (or indeed, its lack of interest in a viable two-state solution)
These must be disentangled from one another and prioritized. The international response so far, at the UN, has put the focus on the investigation. It should instead be moved to lifting the Gaza blockade. Several governments have explicitly come out in favor of this, as well as many opinion leaders around the world.
The investigation process is underway, and there will inevitably be battles over what direction it takes. There is a principle in parts of international law that countries get to conduct investigations on their own actions themselves, and that things go to an international investigation only after the country in question is shown to be incapable of conducting a fair investigation. This is certainly the case with Israel — the precedent of the military investigation into the Gaza war, which was inadequate and led to the Goldstone report suggests that. There may also be a legal argument that Turkey should be conducting the investigation, although that's up to Turkey. I say let that process take place and be debated, but do not allow it to take center stage.
Gaza is the crux of the matter. An international effort towards lifting the blockade must be inventive and propose a solution to a complicated problem quickly. They should be focused on lifting the restrictions Israel imposes on goods coming into Gaza and ensure that reconstruction materials are allowed in. They must also tackle the security demands that Israel will make to prevent weapons going into Gaza. International institutions like the UN will almost certainly have to play a role, and perhaps also the European Union as monitors (as has been suggested before.) This is costly both politically and financially, support needs to be rallied around the idea. But an immediate aim must be allowing aid and reconstruction material, and secondly relinking the Gazan economy to that of the West Bank, i.e. restoring Palestine's economic integrity.
This brings us to reviving an admittedly discredited peace process.
Update: to clarify (see Helena Cobban's comment below) I think focus peace process and what follows from here should take place after the blockade on Gaza is lifted.
Fully normalizing Gaza's status has to mean abandoning the "West Bank First" strategy implemented by the Bush administration in 2006, endorsed by the Quartet and continued by the Obama administration. It has to mean working towards Palestinian reconciliation leading to new elections and a legitimate Palestinian representation (neither the PA nor the Hamas government are currently legitimate, since their electoral terms have expired), and turning the proximity talks into preliminary talks while that can happen. It means renewed efforts at stopping potential spoiler states (Iran, Syria, Egypt and the United States) and spoiler factions (parts of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Dahlan Gang, Shas, Israel Beiteinu and others). And it may mean abandoning some of the legal infrastructure of the Oslo process and the Quartet process and bringing a fresh approach. I'm not optimistic, but as I see it this might be necessary. There is a great risk that various parties involved in this conflict will choose to grandstand and temporize — the Arab states with their threats of reneging the Arab Initiative, the US by continuing a policy based entirely on shielding Israel from hard decisions and sensible behavior. Now is the time to push, not retreat.
Out of chaos and tragedy, a breakthrough is possible — but only with intensive and continuous effort.
Update: Along the same lines do read Helena Cobban, who has much deeper knowledge of the intricacies of the Middle East peace process than I do: How to end the siege of Gaza and How to end the siege of Gaza, addendum.
Reader Comments (10)
Issandr, I quite agree that the first thing is to focus on ending the siege of Gaza and reviving the search for longterm peace. (I don't even like to use the word 'process' in this regard.)
And you're right of course to note that to open Gaza, the present Fath-US veto on having real Fateh reconciliation with Hamas has to end. However, I don't think we need to insist on elections or anything else like that in this regard. It can simply be done.
I blogged about this some this morning here: http://justworldnews.org/archives/004013.html
Helena, I don't mean that elections should take place before Gaza is opened, I mean that they need to take place before negotiations with Israel can take place (after Gaza is reopened).
The reconciliation talks broke down over the formula for elections. Fatah, Egypt, and probably the US, want some guarantee the elections formula will be such that Fatah's win will be predetermined. We have to allow for the (likely, in my view) possibility that a straight first-past-the-post, district-by-district vote would produce a government opposed to negotiations. What then?
Ah, I just read Helena's posts.
Helena, it seems to me the possibility of quiet, third-party negotiations between Hamas and Likud is a poor horse to bet on if the goal is a lasting, regional agreement. But any further, and I hit a wall.
I agree with you both that the priority now should be pressing to an end to the siege of Gaza, but I don't see any Israeli government agreeing to Hamas guys represented on the border force, or conceding the victory to Hamas on the siege, particularly ahead of Palestinian elections (which are overdue).
I can see why you'd argue for a national unity government by fiat, rather than by elections. On the other hand, if the goal is building a Palestinian state, then the Palestinian impulse to at least try to respect things like the timing of elections should be supported. The (by no means exclusively Palestinian) impulse to determine the outcome of the elections ahead of time should not. Ultimately, though, I'd agree that the importance of getting a national unity government trumps the importance of adhering to an increasingly irrelevant piece of paper.
There are no good options from an international or particularly US perspective. I can see why so many like to hew to this fiction that Abbas is important, in the hope of producing a 2-state deal. If successful, this at least would have the merit of postponing the problem, of buying time, improving lives, and cooling tempers before the much messier process of actually integrating Israelis and Palestinians on the land they now share.
But I can't escape the conclusion that if it's so hard to get Israelis and Palestinians even to start negotiating a provisional solution, it'd be more efficient to go straight a discussion about what full integration would look like.
The harder people all over the world push for some semblance of peace and justice in the middle east, the harder governments and their elites, but most especially the US and Israel, seem to push back. It's almost as though the deeper issue has to do with governance, and is global in signifigance. Do people make the decisions or do elites make them?
Tim Seah / Helena:
I think elections would probably return a national unity govt anyway. The point is that you have to get away from the current international and regional approach. The national unity talks did not break down because of an inability for the two to agree, they broke down because although people wanted to have a reconciliation process in place, they never wanted it to succeed. Reconciliation would have meant the US abandoning the peace process - this is what needs to change, the US-driven Quartet refusal to deal with a government that includes Hamas members.
Thank you for your clarifying thoughts. Ending the Gaza blockade is indeed the focus of this whole series of events. We need to keep sending ships against this blockade until world pressure brings it down. This recent tragedy is a nightmare for the IDF propaganda folks, but even though it called world attention to the cause, it is still also a setback to the cause for Gaza. In the future (and I hope they send 100 ships), the ships need to be streaming video continuously from lots of cameras when they are intercepted, and the passengers must be trained in passive resistance tactics.
Why would reconciliation mean the US' abandoning the peace process?
As I remember, one of the sticking points in the negotiations was whether the new government would "respect" (Hamas' preference) or "abide by" agreements signed by previous governments (Fatah and Egypt's preference). Seems silly on the face of it, but it's a question of Hamas' abandoning the option to "resist," and of reassuring the Israelis that the government wouldn't engage in "terrorism."
But it's a hair's-breadth difference, and practically speaking, the US and the other Quartet members should have been flexible enough to accept Hamas' "respect" for Arafat's agreements -- already a major concession -- for the sake of ending the siege and bringing Hamas into the tent and to the table (w. apologies for the mixed metaphor).
It's hard to give the Obama administration credit for much now, after watching them flunk their response to this latest crisis, but I do give them credit for a smarter line on Hamas. Rather than the blanket refusal to deal with them we saw under Bush and Clinton, the Obama administration opened the door to talks, provided they respected their international "obligations." (And yes, it would be nice to see the same line applied to all parties to the conflict... imagine if the US refused to deal with Israel until it respected its international "obligations" and the Road Map!)
Tim,
If you look at Hillary Clinton's April 2009 testimonies to Congress, she made it clear that the US would not give aid to a Palestinian govt that included Hamas in its cabinet. If it was aid alone, that would be a surmountable obstacle — the Saudis and others could step in — but the reality the administration will not stomach a fight with Congress over keeping negotiations open with a NUG - they are not ready to "negotiate with terrorists" as the conventional thinking in DC will have it. So that probably means a collapse of the US role in the MEPP. I don't think the Obama administration was really pursuing a different line on Hamas, it opened the door rhetorically but in practice is not ready to deal with them, hence sticking to meaningless "respect" for previous agreements and giving up violence (since when, in a war, do you expect one side only of the belligerents to lay down weapons before negotiations — as opposed to ceasing fire?)
Israel is at war not with the just the Palestinians or "terrorism" but the international community as a whole. This is the truly terrifying aspect of this regime in Israel. It jails and incarcerates not only the Palestinians who it opresses and dissendents within Israel itself. But it also sees its jurisdication of terror as world wide. (That's why "the international waters" part doese not bother proponents of Israeli agression one bit.)
We have already seen Israel's flagrant contempt for the sovereignty of other countries in the identity fraud fiasco in the dubai assassination so the events on the flotilla against other countries citizens were sadly only the natural conclusion of such a rampage. The true question here is what will we, not just a palestinains, muslims, jews, christians, turks, or americans, but as people of the world do to bring an end of such a vile and accepted impunity?
http://www.fpif.org/articles/israels_latest_violation
http://www.fpif.org/blog/us_support_for_israel_mirrors_80s_support_for_el_salvador_junta