The last time American diplomacy achieved an outright success was through the Camp David agreement of 1979, when Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty and Israel ceded back the Sinai to Egypt. The two countries aren’t best friends by any means. But they’ve lived peacefully since. For the Palestinians, the Camp David agreement was a betrayal by the United States and Egypt, which both set aside the Palestinian issue to achieve a separate peace with Israel. That doesn’t diminish the achievement of Camp David. But to be better understood, that achievement cannot be considered out of its larger context. That context is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Negotiating the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Background
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has produced no breakthroughs since the Oslo agreement of 1993. Even that agreement, originally negotiated in secret between Palestinians and Israelis under the aegis of Norway, has unraveled as a disaster in its own right. The agreement set up the Palestinian Authority and gave Palestinians in the Occupied Territories a measure of autonomy. It also established the principle of a two-state solution as the best way to resolve the conflict.
But Oslo did not touch two crucial, deal-breaking elements in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and Palestinian refugees right of return. With those questions unanswered, and Israel continuing to build settlements in the West Bank, Oslo was bound to fail. It did. The result was the second intifada, the shattered legitimacy of Yasser Arafat and his corrupt Fatah organization , and the rise of Hamas , the militant, Islamist organization that embraces terrorism.
Negotiating the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: The American Role
For the last 60 years the United States has claimed a dominant role in Middle East issues . But its record is poor. Regarding the Palestinians, it’s virtually nil. Americans have little trust in Palestinian eyes. There’s a reason why. As Aaron David Miller explains in The Much Too Promised Land , every American presidential administration playing a mediating role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict takes it for granted that it’s on Israel’s side first and foremost.
This is not just a matter of ideology. Miller describes how every document, every peace initiative, every agreement that the Americans presented in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations over the years were vetted first through Israeli negotiators. Ronald Reagan once, in September 1982, announced a peace initiative without first informing the Israelis. Then-Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin was livid. As Miller describes it, Begin
accused the United States of violating not only the Camp David accords but the U.S. commitment to consult with Israel before undertaking such an initiative. As Begin fluctuated between anger, weary resignation, and an aggrieved bitterness, it became clear that what set him off most was the American decision to coordinate the initiative in advance with both the Jordanians and the Saudis.
Consulting With Israel First: An American Commitment
That American commitment to consulting Israel first pre-dated Reagan and was re-established soon after that 1982 incident. It doesn’t just affect official American policy. It affects the perspective of policy analysts and specialists in the State Department—the actual men and women who do the grunt work behind the scenes and prepare the way for the secretaries of state and the ministers.
Aaron David Miller was one of those analysts for two decades. In the 1990s, he writes, “We had made a decision to lay out American ideas on the extent of Israel’s further redeployment from the West Bank as well as on security performance for Palestinians, and as usual we felt obliged to run our ideas by Israel first. This ‘no surprise’ understanding actually went back to Kissinger, and even [James] Baker had abided by it.”
“Dennis, like myself,” Miller adds of Dennis Ross, the head of policy planning in the State Department during the first Bush administration and the Clinton administrations, “had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point rather than from that of the Palestinians.” Speaking of actual negotiating sessions he was familiar with, Miller notes: “In truth, not a single senior-level official involved with the negotiations was willing or able to present, let alone fight for, the Arab or Palestinian perspective.”
Consequences of America’s Pro-Israel Bias
For the United States, the pro-Israel bias in all matters of diplomacy and politics is so unquestioned as to be unremarked. But from the perspective of Palestinians or other Arabs, the bias explains why American mediation can only go so far in the Middle East, why mutual trust is such an impossible task among the players in the Middle East conflict, and why little of substance has been achieved in negotiations with Palestinians. The Palestinians are to blame for plenty of failures, to be sure—for Fatah’s corruption, for the late Yasser Arafat’s lack of courage and imagination, for Hamas’ terrorism.
But there’s enough blame to go around all sides. For all of the United States’ good intentions in the Middle East, America’s pro-Israel bias is like Israel’s policy of settlement-building in the West Bank: a constant reminder, for Palestinians, that negotiations can only go so far, while mutual trust remains ultimately unattainable. That’s not a good prognosis for progress.
