Iraq Study
Group Goes Astray On Israel
(Updated December 2006)
The Iraq Study Group was tasked with assessing
the situation in Iraq and the bulk of their
report is devoted to their assigned topic.
After more than 50 pages, however, the group
deviates from its purpose and, without any
analysis, improvises a number of provocative
recommendations for ending the Arab-Israeli
conflict that indicate little or no recognition
of the causes of the dispute and the obstacles
to its resolution.
The report asserts that the conflict is “inextricably
linked” to the situation in Iraq. This
is demonstrably false. If the conflict ended
tomorrow or Israel disappeared, it would
have no impact whatsoever on the situation
in Iraq. The violence is based on internal
political, social, economic and religious
rivalries that are completely unrelated to
Israel. The interjection of prescriptions
for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict was
apparently done to satisfy the authors’ desire
to weigh in on issues that were beyond its
mandate.
The authors state that “there must
be a renewed and sustained commitment by
the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli
peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President
Bush’s June
2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
This commitment must include direct talks
with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to
exist), and Syria.” They also assert
that “political engagement and dialogue
are essential in the Arab-Israeli dispute
because it is an axiom that when the political
process breaks down there will be violence
on the ground.”
In fact, the history
of U.S. diplomacy suggests
that engagement does not lessen violence
or contribute toward the achievement of peace.
Every administration has proposed a peace
initiative and they all have one common trait – failure.
The absence of peace is not a function of
a lack of diplomatic activity or the inability
to devise a formula the parties will accept;
conflict continues because much of the Middle
East, in particular the Islamists, refuses
to accept the existence of Israel.
The report is particularly deficient in
recognizing the changes in the region since
the co-chairs were directly involved in policymaking.
Today, the Arab-Israeli conflict no longer
exists. Israel has peace or de facto peace
with every state in the region. Even the
most belligerent parties, Syria and Iran,
are not prepared to directly engage Israel,
preferring to fight through terrorist proxies.
The conflict is now sustained principally
by the Islamists who have no interest in
negotiations and will never accept a Jewish
state anywhere in the Muslim
world. The failure
to grasp what is the single most important
factor shaping not only the conflict with
Israel, but the cause of much of the instability
in the region and around the world severely
diminishes the value of the report.
The authors state that UN
Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 should be the basis
for peace. Israel has agreed and withdrawn
from 94 percent of the territory captured
in 1967, but where is the peace they say
should come from giving up land? Israel evacuated from 100 percent of the Gaza
Strip last summer
and it has gotten only Qassam rockets and
terror in return.
The authors state “the
only lasting and secure peace will be a negotiated
peace such as Israel has achieved with Egypt and Jordan.” Those
agreements were indeed important achievements,
both of which were negotiated primarily without
U.S. engagement. In the case of Egypt,
the treaty with
Israel was made possible once Anwar
Sadat concluded President Jimmy
Carter’s Middle East
policy was so misguided the only way
he would recover the Sinai was to take unilateral
action and go to Jerusalem. Though the treaty
with Egypt was a milestone, it is not the
best model as the Egyptians have done little
to live up to the spirit of the agreement
and it has remained a cold peace. Similarly,
Israel and Jordan had agreed on
the framework for peace before President
Bill Clinton became
involved in finalizing the treaty.
The report’s recommendations
regarding the Palestinian issue are remarkably
weak. They simply call for negotiations “along the lines
of President Bush’s two-state solution.” It
offers no suggestion of how any of the final
status issues would be resolved or why there
should be any expectation that the Palestinians
can or will give up their irredentist views
on borders, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem.
The report says that a negotiated peace
would strengthen Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas, but what evidence is there
that Abbas has the power to negotiate? He
cannot even control his own cabinet let alone
the Palestinian
Authority, so why would any
Israeli believe he could fulfill any promises,
especially given his failure to meet the
obligations the Palestinians made to stop
terror in the Oslo
agreements and reiterated
in their acceptance of the road
map?
The recommendation to support a Palestinian
national unity government contradicts the
report’s earlier prerequisite that
negotiations take place with “those
who accept Israel’s right to exist.” The
current Palestinian Prime Minister and his Hamas party have repeatedly made clear they
will never recognize Israel and remain committed
to its destruction.
Given that the co-chair of the study group
is James Baker, it is not surprising that
the report recommends an international conference
similar to the one he organized in Madrid in 1991. He considered this meeting a great
feat of diplomacy, and it was in the sense
that it brought parties around the table
that had previously refused to meet. In terms
of advancing the peace
process or reaching
concrete agreements, however, it was a failure.
In fact, Baker and his successor’s
initiatives were so unsuccessful the Israelis
and Palestinians ultimately resorted to secret
negotiations that resulted in the Oslo
accords.
Rather than seek to have meetings for the
sake of the accomplishment of bringing the
parties together, the focus of U.S. diplomacy
needs to be on continuing to pressure the
Palestinians and other Middle East states
to end their support for terrorism. Negotiations
cannot succeed as long as the violence continues
and Israeli soldiers are held hostage.
The report’s recommendation that Israel
engage Syria ignores decades of diplomatic
history. The United States has repeatedly
engaged in negotiations with Syria and diplomats
inevitably come out of their meetings extolling
the frankness of the discussions and the
Syrians subsequently sabotage every American
initiative. To give one recent example, when
Secretary of State Colin
Powell visited Damascus
in April 2003, he emerged from a meeting
with a pledge from President Bashar
Assad to close down the offices of Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As with Assad’s earlier
pledge to Powell regarding closing down the
Iraqi oil pipeline, however, the promise
proved empty.
The report’s recommendations
regarding Syria’s obligations related
to Lebanon are
fine though, with the exception of the demand
that it seal its border with Iraq,
irrelevant to the mandate of the study group.
The authors also makes a giant leap from
stating what Syria should
do in Lebanon to
the recommendation that Israel should return
the Golan
Heights. Again,
the issue of the Golan has nothing to do
with Iraq.
Moreover, the study’s
language implies that Israel has not
already offered to trade the Golan
for a “full and secure peace agreement.” In
fact, Yitzhak
Rabin and his successors were
prepared to make such a deal, but neither Bashar
Assad nor his father were
willing to end the conflict in exchange for
any amount of territory. If anything, Assad
has only grown more belligerent since the war between Israel and Hizballah.
In the end, the study group
has produced some interesting ideas for addressing
the situation in Iraq,
but gone beyond their mandate to suggest
irrelevant and largely untenable recommendations
for addressing broader issues in the region.
The conflict involving Israel is too important
and complex to be relegated to a series
of bullet points in a 142-page document on
an unrelated topic.
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