by Prof. Hillel Frisch
As the Oslo Accords proved, peace is not made on the White House lawn but in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Gaza.
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,111, March 13, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: US
officials and envoys dangle the prospect of peace with Arab states in
front of Israel as bait to encourage it to make painful concessions on
the Palestinian issue. It would be a grave strategic mistake for Israel
to fall for this gambit. As the Oslo Accords proved, peace is not made
on the White House lawn but in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Gaza.
President Donald Trump, PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and
numerous US officials have all warned that both sides of the
forthcoming “agreement of the century” are going to be asked to make
painful concessions.
To reduce resistance to those concessions on the
Israeli side, US officials and envoys like Jared Kushner and Jason
Greenblatt are offering Israel the prospect of peace with Arab states as
bait. This idea has numerous supporters among Israeli politicians,
think tanks, and academics who invoke the Arab Peace Plan of 2002 as the
basis for such a solution.
However, linking the Palestinian issue to peace
with Arab states would be a grave strategic mistake for Israel. Simply
put, the rewards of making peace beyond the two Arab states with which
Israel already has a peace treaty – Egypt and Jordan – are too paltry to
warrant linkage to the complex and important Palestinian issue.
This holds true whether one considers the danger
of a binational state to be a mortal danger to Israel (the position
defining much of Israel’s center and center left) or see annexation of
major parts of the West Bank as Israel’s best option (the position held
by much of the right).
Why is the prospect of peace with other Arab
states an insufficient sweetener? Primarily because of the radical
decline in power and influence of those states over the past forty years
– a process that seems to be accelerating in recent years.
The logic that lies at the basis of Trump’s
thinking is the idea that the Arab states would have sufficient
influence over the Palestinians to ensure that any deal they accept will
not be characterized by irredentist drives in the future – for example,
directed towards Israel’s Arab citizens – in the quest to further carve
up Israel in the Palestinians’ favor.
This premise is false, as history clearly
shows. Consider the Arab Plan itself. The plan was drawn up by the
Saudis, undoubtedly the Arab state with the most financial clout. It was
publicized over 16 years ago. Yet it has had no influence whatsoever on
Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab relations since then.
The plan was irrelevant to the continuation of the
so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada,” which was only defeated in the West Bank
by military assertiveness. The lack of such assertiveness in Gaza
yielded three major bouts of confrontation there between Israel and
Hamas.
Nor did the will behind the plan prevent the
inter-Palestinian partition between a Hamas-dominated Gaza and Abbas’s
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has rendered peacemaking
complicated if not impossible.
Certainly the Arab states had no influence over
the other war waged between Israel and an Arab adversary – Hezbollah, a
proxy of Iran. Though some of those states intimated that they were on
the side of the Israelis, their intimations had no effect in terms of
either intensifying the war (which states like Saudi Arabia might have
desired in the hope of decisively defeating an Iranian proxy) or
bringing it to an end.
The Arab states’ lack of clout with the
Palestinians is not the only reason for doubt. Their inability to act
collectively must also be considered. In the 74 years since the
emergence of the Arab League, little has occurred to suggest that the
Arab states will unify effectively on the matter of Israeli-Palestinian
peacemaking.
The only example of near unity was in 1973, and it
concerned making war with Israel, not making peace – as the temporary
isolation of Egypt after it signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979
proves. Unity also prevails in the verbal belligerency these states
express towards Israel at the UN and in other international fora.
There is every reason to believe Arab disunity
will continue to feed both Israeli-Palestinian and inter-Palestinian
tensions, even if the peace treaty is signed. Three Arab states are
obvious candidates to play the role of spoiler – Syria, as Iran’s proxy;
Lebanon, forever on the verge of becoming one; and Iraq, which the US
is trying to keep from sliding into the Iranian orbit. Iran and its
proxies will have a strong vested interest in undermining the agreement.
Close at their heels are Qatar and Turkey – not an Arab state, but a political actor with clout in the Arab world.
Even relations among more Israel-friendly Arab
states can exacerbate tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship,
as they have in the past. There is no assurance that Egypt, Jordan, and
Saudi Arabia will see eye to eye on many aspects of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace.
All these tensions will all too readily be
absorbed in a local setting characterized by the hard and fast division
between a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Gaza and a nationalist PA.
Rest assured that immediately after the signing of
the agreement on the White House lawn, Hamas will launch rockets,
incendiary balloons, and thousands of demonstrators and terrorists at
the fence to assert its claim to all of Palestine. They will go back to
the playbook of over 25 years ago, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad sent
their terrorists into action after the signing of the Declaration of
Principles.
That comparison proves, in fact, just how weak is
the bait of Arab regional support. The Palestinian spoilers pulled off
their destructive feats at the height of US hegemony. It was soon after
the demise of the Soviet Union, and the American military triumph of
defeating Iraq – a blitzkrieg on a par with Germany’s onslaught on
Poland and Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War – was still fresh.
Today, Trump – like his predecessor Obama – is
signaling an American retreat from the Middle East. Under such
circumstances, local spoilers, supported by their regional sponsor,
Iran, will certainly be willing to play the same role they did over a
quarter century ago.
As Prof. Benny Miller observed, cold war and cold
peace are made with the help of international powers. Warm peace and hot
war are made exclusively by the locals.
One thing is for sure: peace will not be made on
the White House lawn, but in Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Gaza. Anything
else is wishful thinking.
This is an edited version of an article published by the Jerusalem Post on March 12, 2019.
Prof. Hillel Frisch is a professor of political studies and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-peace-arab-states-palestinians/
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