Final Negotiations Now

July thru August, 2005
By Marlene Nadle

The American peace camp has been drifting ineffectively ever since Israel announced its withdrawal from Gaza. That lack of direction and passivity has made former Secretary of State James Baker the most radical person around. He is one of the few who have taken on George Bush and Ariel Sharon's continuing obstacle course of preconditions that will make a final peace impossible.

As early as last December in a New York Times article, Baker wrote that "Israel should announce that upon election of a Palestinian negotiating partner it is prepared to resume substantive negotiations for peace . ..To require the absence of any terrorist act in advance simply empowers the terrorists themselves to prevent the resumption of peace talks."

Lagging behind Baker and the Europeans leaders who share his position on rapid negotiations, dazed American progressives are not focused on this stalling strategy, which demands that Palestinians destroy the terrorists, reform their own security forces, create new institution, build democracy, and, as Sharon aide Dov Weissglass said, become Finns before final-status talks are possible. Most don't notice that this some-day-over-the-rainbow approach can indefinitely postpone the discussion of borders, settlements, Jerusalem, water, and refugees needed to end the the conflict. So there was no response to the press reports that Sharon had laughed off Mahmoud Abbas's suggestion, at their summit in Egypt, that if Israeli domestic politics won't permit open talks, the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority use back channels to discuss final-status issues. There were no protesters at the White House when Bush took Tony Blair's plan for a London conference intended to jump-start negotiations and diluted it into a meeting on Palestinian reforms. There was no deluge of letters when Bush, during his meeting with Sharon, failed to urge a plan for final status negotiations and ignored Abbas's warning that security measures not paired with a political process will produce neither security nor peace.

Ha'retz columnist Akiva Eldar, alarmed by the lack of Israeli opposition to Sharon's preconditions, berated his people in a way that also applies to Americans. "No one," he fumed, "dares to question Sharon's assertion that the cessation of terror is a condition for peace negotiations and for dismantling the outposts and the cessation of settlements in the territories. . . . [They] have adapted the rule of 'Quiet - we're disengaging [from Gaza].' "

The American peace camp must stop being suckered by Gaza and by the pretext of preconditions. For long ago Bush and Sharon made a conscious choice to delay a political solution. Last January, an unidentified Israeli official told the Forward, "There will be an effort by the Americans and us . . . to steer the [Europeans] towards an incremental approach and away from fast-tracking." The mainstream Israeli press has bluntly said that Sharon's goal is to achieve a long-term interim solution that would leave the major issues unresolved and Israel in control of nearly 50 percent of the West Bank.

It is essential that the peace camp persuade Bush that backing an interim solution instead of final-status negotiations for a Palestinian state is a mistake that will escalate terrorism. To be effective in opposing an interim semi-state, they can't fall for another variation of the stalling strategy that says confidence-building measures are needed before negotiations are possible. Even former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who has been very critical of Bush on this issue, is now making statements about first building trust. This approach has already been discredited by history and by such Israeli experts as Carmin Gillon, former head of Shin Bet. In an old interview in Yedioth Achronot, Gillon described the phased approach to peace of both the Oslo Agreement and the road map as unworkable: "The stages were created to build trust between the sides, and in these ten years they have failed . . . We [ must ] make the agreements now, and then . . . begin to deal with the stages."

Those who want peace must stop drifting along on Bush and Sharon's timetable because the clock is running out on the Palestinian side. Analysts said when Abbas was elected that he had six months before he would begin to lose credibility with his people. Most of that time is gone. Amjad Atallah, an advisor to the Palestinian Peace Council, has said that great frustration is felt because they can't get final-status talks now, or even an indication of when they might start. More than five hundred Palestinian moderates and intellectuals sent Abbas a letter telling him that an interim solution was an unacceptable dead end. He is under increasing pressure to meet the need for Palestinians sovereignty as well as Israeli security if he and the peace process isn't to be doomed.

To end the conflict, people must insist on final -status negotiations, or, at least, pressure Bush to set a time frame for those talks. Doing that instead of pushing Palestinians to carry out Israeli-style military attacks that didn't end the resistance for four years, will supply the political hope Abbas needs to effectively coopt many of the militants. It will give the Palestinian public and more of the young men with guns an incentive to further marginalize the die-hards.

In June 2004 , 26 percent of the Palestinians said they were opposed to attacks on Israel. By December it was 51 percent. In the election, 62 election voted for Abbas's nonviolent strategy. The number could even go higher - if the Palestinians are given evidence that negotiations for a state will start soon. If they are only offered a stalling game of preconditions now, plus another delay of at least six months after the Gaza withdrawal while Israel has an expected election, the most extreme Palestinian views will reclaim public opinion. Israelis and Palestinians will continue to suffer in a burning landscape of multiple bombers and vengeful tanks.

George Bush has given no indication that he understands the urgency of moving to political negotiations. So far, neither has most of the American peace camp.

Marlene Nadle is a foreign affairs journalists and an Associate of the Transregional Center For Democratic Studies at the New School University in New York.