The hard part on Mideast peace
Jason Greenblatt, the Trump administration’s day-to-day point person on the Israel-Palestine conflict, has gotten off to a strong start. He is described as a good listener, is meeting with a wide array of people on both sides and is working quietly behind the scenes to find areas of agreement on important day-to-day issues, including trying to prevent the current crisis over security at the Haram alSharif/Temple Mount from escalating.
Alll of this is but prelude. Now comes the hard part.
Since President Trump has said often that his goal is to achieve the “ultimate deal” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, we can assume that the administration is not engaged in process for process’ sake. If he insists on moving forward, he and his advisers must confront four hard realities.
First, the administration must articulate what its goal is in this diplomatic effort. Until Trump took office, it was obvious: a twostate solution in which Israel and Palestine would live side by side in peace and security. Trump, however, raised a doubt about this in February when he expressed the view that any outcome acceptable to the two sides would be acceptable to him, whether one state, two states, or otherwise.
This is not a sustainable position if Trump actually wants the parties to engage in negotiations at some point. It is also not a sustainable position to simply ask the two sides to support the concept of “two states,” since their respective conceptions of the twostate solutions are fundamentally different.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu envisions a Palestinian entity that is demilitarized, in which Israeli security control would remain in place far into the future, and from which Israel would withdraw its jurisdiction but not the settlements or settlers.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas envisions a state like other states, with some restrictions on the types of security forces and arms it could have, and the involvement of international monitors and observers, but without any long-term Israeli presence. For the Trump administration, therefore, the articulation of a goal for the peace process will at a minimum have to be accompanied by a common understanding of what that means.
A second and equally hard challenge for Greenblatt and the administration will be to develop a strategy for dealing with bad behaviors. The administration and the Congress appear to be converging on legislation (the “Taylor Force Act”) that would reduce assistance to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues to provide payments to the families of terrorists. The idea behind the proposed law, named after an American tourist killed by a Palestinian terrorist, is to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the face of Palestinian behaviors with which the United States does not agree.
The question is whether the administration and the Congress plan to do something similar in light of continued Israeli settlement activity. While there is no moral equivalence between terrorism and settlements, the settlements continue to be a very significant obstacle on the road to peace.
The United States could withhold assistance to Israel on a dollar-for-dollar basis of what Israel invests in settlement activity, including infrastructure, tax breaks, incentives and the like. In this way, there would be significant parallel American responses to behaviors that impede progress toward a political settlement.
Third, the United States must decide what it will do about spoilers on both sides.
This is complicated. On the Palestinian side, Hamas and other Palestinian organizations have already been designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. U.S. policy is already clear, even if it has had limited effect.
Israeli opponents of the peace process have not, by and large, resorted to terrorism, as Hamas and others have. But they engage in actions that are very damaging to the peace process, including violent acts against Palestinian civilians and property. Although this is an extremely sensitive issue to handle politically, if the United States is serious about undertaking an effort toward peace, the spoilers on both sides need to feel the heat.
Finally, there is the question of process: bilateral negotiations, regional talks, an international conference, or what? Thus far, the administration appears to favor a combination of the regional approach of engaging Arab states in the peace process (termed “outside-in”) and improving Palestinian economic and social conditions on the ground in the West Bank (termed “bottom-up”).
These approaches are useful but limited. The Arab states simply will not “deliver” the Palestinians in a peace deal with Israel; and, as important as economic and social improvements in Palestinian daily life are, they are not a substitute for progress toward a permanent political settlement.