ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE TALKS:
SOME UNDERREPORTED CONCERNS
AUGUST 2013 Howard Laitin
Previously I reported:
That Gen.John Allen (former commander of US forces in Afghanistan and former supreme commander of NATO) had been tagged for the military-security track to supervise the negotiations on security matters .
This is intended to give the US the leverage to dictate the pace of this track AND OVERRIDE EFFORTS BY ISRAELI SECURITY AND MILITARY OFFICIALS TO BRING THEIR WILL TO BEAR.
Subsequently Gen. Allen was appointed to this position. In his public remarks (2013 )he emphasized that in his discussions with various high-ranking Muslim Mideast officials they emphasized to him the critical central importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .
Further, to set the framework of his assignment a U.S. State Department official emphasized that the U.S. position remains the same as outlined by President Barack Obama in May 2011: a Palestinian state based on 1967 lines, mutual land swaps, Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland of the Jewish people, and a Palestinian state as the homeland of the Palestinian people.
"We remain absolutely committed to that position. But it would not be safe to say that the parties have necessarily accepted that as the basis for their negotiations going forward," the official said.
Several articles introduce points of very serious concern. These include:
1. The experience and judgment of the American decision-makers--How Can Israel Entrust Its Security to People Who Got Egypt So Wrong? Evelyn Gordon 8-15-13
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/08/15/how-can-israel-entrust-its-security-to-people-who-got-egypt-so-wrong/
The problem isn’t just that the chaos on Israel’s previously stable southern border decreases its willingness to take “risks for peace” that could replicate this situation in the West Bank. It’s also what the situation says about the Obama administration’s judgment.Yet now the same people who got Egypt so badly wrong are demanding that Israelis trust them to referee an Israeli-Palestinian deal.
2. The United States and other Western governments don’t seem to understand that to many Muslims, the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict is much more important than the conflict with Israel.
Gen. Allen in his public statements has widely reported that based on what his Muslim hosts told him (and other Westerners to influence their outlook) that what Muslims care about most is Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinians, and secondly America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, if you want to understand what really matters to Middle Eastern Muslims, a good rule might be “follow the violence.” This means looking at what Muslims care enough to put their lives on the line for–a far better indication of concern than mere talk. Then a very different conclusion emerges: Important parts of the Sunni Muslim world view the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict as more important than the battle against either Israeli or American “aggression.”
Recent developments make this evident.
The first is a religious ruling by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most influential clerics in the Sunni Muslim world, whose weekly television show on Al Jazeera attracts tens of millions of viewers. Qaradawi said that any Sunni “trained to fight … has to go” join the war in Syria. What makes this noteworthy, the report said, is that Qaradawi hasn’t issued similar rulings in other cases: “In 2009, he wrote a book titled Jurisprudence of Jihad, in which he dismissed the individual duty argument for the jihad in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”
Though Qaradawi deemed all those cases “legitimate jihad,” meaning any Muslim who wished to fight there was permitted to do so, only in Syria’s case did he say that Muslims able to do so must join the fight. Thus he clearly views the Syrian war as more important than those in “Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” even though the latter all pitted Muslims against either Israel or America, while the former is a strictly intra-Muslim affair pitting Sunnis against Shi’ites, with no Israeli or American involvement whatsoever.
The same conclusion emerges from a recent New York Times report on the rising number of Western Muslims joining the war in Syria–about 600 so far. “More Westerners are now fighting in Syria than fought in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen,” the report says. Western Muslims have also largely sat out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a 2003 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv perpetrated by two British Muslims made headlines precisely because it was so anomalous). And the same goes for non-Western Muslims: Altogether, the Times reported, some 6,000 non-Syrian Muslims are now fighting in Syria; by contrast, only a handful of non-Palestinian Muslims have fought in the West Bank and Gaza in recent decades.
3. The difficulty of structuring an arrangement that actually CAN and WILL be enforced.
http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com/2013/08/will-gen-allens-security-plan-project.html
The Palestinians are demanding a fully independent state. A fundamental inescapable fact is that once a sovereign independent Palestinian state is established , it retains that status even if it utterly and completely ignores – or even openly violates – the terms of the peace agreement that served as the platform for the creation of that sovereign independent state.
Israel is demanding concrete steps that assure they will never again face terror from Palestinian territory.
For Israel, that means control over the air space, borders and military capabilities of a future Palestinian state unlike anything required of any other country.
Such demands have been rejected by Palestinians in the past who have yet to offer an alternative solution - a situation that makes a deal this time around as unlikely as in the past, say analysts.
Jonny Daniels, an advisor to Israel's deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, says Israel will be willing to remove all its security forces from a new Palestinian state.
"But as far as other things on the table, such as an international airport, that's not going to happen," he says of Palestinian demands that they be allowed to have control over their air space.
"There's no way to know what they're bringing in on those planes (and) we still need to know what's happening in our back yard."
Secretary of State John Kerry told Jewish leaders that a crucial new aspect of the new peace process is to deal with security issues separately, and that assurances Israel would require would be guaranteed in an agreement with the United States.
Former President Bill Clinton offered to place American troops in the Jordan River Valley for 50 years during the failed Camp David negotiations in 2000. Thus,the United States might offer to take an active role to satisfy some of Israel's security needs, such as control over the Jordan River Valley, which separates the West Bank from Jordan and that Israel insists it wants to patrol and monitor.
But foreign peacekeepers have had a dismal record on Israel .
United Nations peacekeepers vacated the Sinai peninsula in 1967 when Egyptian President Abdel Nasir ordered them out while saying he would invade and destroy Israel.
U.N. peacekeepers returned to the Sinai after Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 and returned the desert territory to Egypt, but in recent years the area has become a terrorist safe haven despite the U.N. presence.
In south Lebanon, Hezbolla and Palestinian terrorists have operated for years despite the presence of U.N. peacekeepers.
And U.N. peacekeepers guarding the Israeli-Syrian border on the Golan Heights fled into Israel earlier this year when they were caught in the middle of fighting between Syrian reb
And Israelis have always been opposed to bringing in foreign troops and depending on foreign troops for their own security,"Their view is that the foreign troops would be in the way and would not respond in the same decisive manner as Israeli troops would.
Israelis "also distinguish themselves from other American allies that have required American troops to defend them, whether South Korea, Japan, Iraq or Kuwait.They don't want to be in that group.
There are certain assurances that the United States can give to Israel independent of what Israel agrees to with the Palestinians--the United States can promise to protect Israel from Iran or provide border monitoring equipment or other aid. The United States might also offer Israel a formal defense treaty, which would need approval by Congress, but it's unclear if the Israelis would accept.
4. Some of the Israeli military and intelligence high-ranking officers working on the specific plans and proposals have a record of sponsoring previous plans that would have resulted in tremendous fiascoes and increased the threat to Israel.
Quoting from Dr. Aaron Lerner,IMRA Weekly ,Aug 7,2013:
"Back in 2000 Israel's Senior Negotiator With Syria, Major General (Res.) Uri Saguy , who had served in the past as head of Military Intelligence, took the position that “peace will not eliminate the strategic threats to Israel, but will prevent their materialization”. Saguy believed that since Assad’s goal was to recover the Golan that once he had that Syria would not attack Israel. That belief served as the basis for his support for grossly unworkable security arrangements in the North as part of a plan to leave the Golan.
"Saguy is in very good company. Most of the top people in Israel’s various security and defense systems share a similar ideologically driven optimism regarding the efficacy of “land for piece of paper”.
"Time and again over the last two decades the embarrassingly naïve analysis of Israel’s security people led them to advocate reckless plans and arrangements – with many of those actually implemented literally blowing up in our faces."
My own personal experience with certain high-ranking individuals in Israeli intelligence is not reassuring.
For several years we had been alerting several of our Israeli counterparts concerning the rapid improvement in capabilities of the Egyptian Armed Forces. We were brushed off with the statement that after Egypt's stunning defeat in the Six-Day War, it would take the Egyptian military 10 to 15 years to recover. We were told that the antitank defenses along the Suez were impenetrable. The Israeli analysis was based on impossibility of explosives creating a breach and the impossibility of earthmoving equipment creating a breach. However, the Egyptians developed a method using high-pressure water flows to create a breach.
My later involvement was to assist in Israel obtaining and deploying the Tow antitank weapon and the Maverick air to ground missile. Both of these systems played a key role in Israel's defense . On this mission I found the tactical, engineering, and supply personnel of the IDF to be very bright, dedicated and imaginative.
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