The Peace Paradox 

By Henry Kissinger
Los Angeles Times Syndicate International
Monday , December 4, 2000 ; Page A27 

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in calling for new elections for the
Israeli Parliament, also has indicated that he will use the interval
to resume the so-called peace process. Since the last
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations four months ago turned first into
stalemate, then into intifada, it is important to deal with two
questions: What went wrong? How can another debacle be avoided?

The realities that produced the peace process in the first place have
not changed. Neither side can defeat the other.  The Palestinians
cannot win because Israel is too strong militarily, and Israel cannot
win because the Palestinians are too strong politically. Both sides
are therefore condemned to coexistence, the chief issue being whether
this comes about as a military stalemate or from some sort of
agreement.

Failure to keep these fundamentals in mind was a principal cause of
the breakdown of negotiations. President Clinton and Prime Minister
Barak had convinced themselves that the peace process resulted from
nothing less than a Palestinian conversion to peace in the abstract
rather than from the pursuit of historical Palestinian objectives by
less violent means. This is why both ignored Yassar Arafat's repeated
warning that the time was not yet ripe for a summit.  Whatever one's
judgment of Arafat's motives, it is important to understand the
philosophical gulf between the way Israel and America define peace and
the way the Palestinians do.

Israel regards peace as a culmination of the struggle for a homeland
and defines it as a normality that ends claims and determines a
permanent legal status. Israeli and American leaders were applying the
concepts of the 20th-century liberal democracy; but the
Palestinians--or at least many of them--live by convictions more
comparable to those of Europe during the 17th-century religious
conflicts. To them--and to many Arabs--Israel is an intrusion in
"holy" Arab territory. The territorial compromises proposed by Israel
and American mediators are viewed as amputations of their cultural and
theological patrimony.

When Barak opened the Camp David summit by offering Arafat something
like 92 percent of the pre-1967 West Bank territory, he was going far
beyond any previous Israeli prime minister. But to the Palestinians,
the 1967 borders represent a concession in themselves, fully
acceptable, if at all, only to the most dovish among them--always
cited by Israeli and Western intellectuals as the genuine expression
of Palestinian convictions, though recent events have produced little
evidence to that effect. The majority of Palestinians treat
territorial compromise the way France accepted Germany's annexation of
Alsace-Lorraine in 1871--as an imposition to be reversed at the first
opportunity.  And a significant minority--surely larger than the
doves--do not accept the state of Israel and favor all-out
confrontation.

Thus what Barak considered a huge concession was, to Arafat, a minimum
offering that he would not be able to present to his constituency as a
significant achievement. If he risked accepting it at all, he was
bound to treat it as a stage in a process of the ultimate fulfillment
of Palestinian demands that he has been careful not to make
explicit. In addressing Palestinian audiences, Arafat never strays far
from the vocabulary of Jihad and the recovery of Jerusalem, however
ambiguous his language to Westerners.

It is also why the Israeli demand at Camp David that the quid pro quo
be a formal renunciation of all future claims--the essence of
reasonableness to Americans and Israelis--proved impossible for
Arafat. In the face of 3 million Palestinian refugees, he could give
no such assurance without losing the support of a significant segment
of his constituency.

Arafat no doubt was reinforced in his stonewalling by the precipitate
Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, which he was more likely to interpret
as weakness than generosity, and by Clinton's eagerness for an
agreement. In any event, when Israeli territorial concessions were
made conditional on Palestinian "compromises" regarding the holy
places, the looming stalemate headed for a blowup.

Paradoxically, the focus on finality proved the principal obstacle to
agreement. The linkage of the holy places to the territorial disputes
expanded the negotiation from a Palestinian to a pan-Arab, even a
pan-Islamic, issue, simultaneously extending Arafat's influence and
limiting his flexibility. So long as the controversy concerned
territory, moderate Arab leaders could treat it as a Palestinian
problem and even urge some compromises. But once that religious issue
was on the table, no Arab leader could ignore the looming
fundamentalist threat to his own rule.  Therefore, Clinton's appeals
to Egyptian and Saudi leaders, urging them to intervene with Arafat,
were doomed to frustration.

Camp David failed because American and Israeli policymakers had
deluded themselves about the nature of the peace process. The
emotional outpouring that followed Yitzhak Rabin's handshake with
Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 caused a growing segment of
Israeli opinion to treat the peace process as a mutual psychological
adjustment--an attitude encouraged by an American administration prone
to treat international schisms as misunderstandings.

All this obscured how deep-seated the conflict really was. Until then,
both sides had acted as if they could wear down the other: the
Palestinians by intifada and the mobilization of global political
pressure on the model of so-called wars of liberation; Israel by
refusing any dialogue and enlisting American support in that course.

The Oslo agreement was, however, less a conversion than a recognition
by both sides of objective necessities. The Palestinians, having
backed Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, had isolated themselves from
most of the Arab states, which were looking to Washington as the most
influential outside power. The Oslo agreement provided recognition,
maneuvering room and an end to some of the most onerous aspects of
Israeli occupation.

Israel under Yitzhak Shamir, on the other hand, had clashed repeatedly
with the Bush administration over American pressures for progress
toward peace even before the Palestinians had come to the table with
Israel. The new government of Rabin wanted to put its relations with
Washington on a stable basis and saw in the Oslo process a means to
achieve a greater control over its destiny. And it was driven by a
mystical, almost eschatological, desire for peace by an ever greater
part of the Israeli population, which had moved from the pioneer
spirit of the early generations to an accommodating business ethic.

In the process, it was forgotten that the important operational aspect
of Oslo was a tacit bargain, which deferred the most difficult
issues--final borders, Jerusalem, demilitarization--to some final
negotiation down the road. It was hoped that, in the interval, a
process of reciprocal moves would build confidence between the
parties. The opposite happened. Israel was supposed to give up
incrementally control over additional territory prior to the final
negotiation.  In return, the Palestinians were to make additional
moves toward a more peaceful atmosphere between the two peoples. But
the quid pro quo for Israeli territorial concessions proved hard to
define. As a result, in Israel, the process began to appear like a
series of unilateral concessions just to keep the process going, while
the Clinton administration grew increasingly impatient with what it
considered the foot-dragging of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu.

Barak took office in the aftermath--and partly as a result of an
American-Israeli diplomatic controversy. He was determined to avoid a
clash with the one ally on whose support Israel depended, and he
wanted to make sure that Israel would not be blamed for any failure of
negotiations. Moreover, he was in a hurry lest Arafat declare a
Palestinian state unilaterally, weakening Israel's bargaining position
even further.

But the emergence of a Palestinian state is no longer an Israeli
bargaining card. Statehood had been inherent in Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin's offer of Palestinian autonomy at the first Camp David
summit in 1978. It was implicit in the Oslo accords. Even today,
Arafat is treated as a head of state when he travels. Within a
measurable time, a Palestinian state will be recognized by most
nations, including Europe, even were America to hold back for a
while. Israeli ambivalence on this subject gives Arafat a permanent
means of pressure. Once the state has been declared, the challenge
will be coexistence with Israel--which, intifada or not, remains the
option neither party will be able to avoid indefinitely.

Barak, a former commando, sought to resolve all these issues in one
fell swoop, encouraged by an American president with great confidence
in his persuasive ability and little experience with the tragic in
history. Between them, they convinced themselves that the ultimate
problem was psychological and that Arab distrust could be overcome by
unprecedented Israeli territorial concessions. The effort was bold but
bound to self-destruct, either before or after an agreement--as I
repeatedly emphasized at that time. It now becomes crucial to draw the
right lessons from the experience. These are:

First, negotiations must not start where the last ones left off. The
parties are not ready for a final settlement--at least not on terms
both sides can accept. At this stage, rather than a peace agreement,
the formula of the second Sinai accord of 1975--that the agreement
stands until superseded by another agreement--would serve the purpose.

Second, the challenge of coexistence remains. Any new negotiation
should seek to achieve a definition of coexistence between two
societies sharing a territory only 50 miles wide. It should attempt to
reduce friction between the two societies by separating them to the
greatest extent possible.

Third, the territorial issue should be settled separately from other
issues. But the resolution can no longer be--indeed, in my view,
should never have been--the 1967 borders, in which Israel's major
cities are linked by a corridor only nine miles wide. This does not
provide an adequate buffer against the sort of guerrilla war that has
characterized the conflict.

Fourth, in defining these borders, major consideration should be given
to Palestinians' concerns for their ability to lead a life of dignity
within an economically viable entity. Palestinian territory should be
made more contiguous and Israeli checkpoints significantly reduced. It
is also time for Israel to review its settlement policy, especially
with respect to those settlements that are most exposed and a constant
invitation to new outbursts of violence. They should be consolidated
now, with or without an agreement.

Fifth, the next U.S. administration should seek to redefine the
purpose and direction of a new "coexistence approach" before launching
its own diplomacy. It should not bow to international pressures to
plunge in immediately and "do something." In recent years, the United
States has been too involved in the minutiae of the negotiations and
not sufficiently attentive to overall purposes. It has used up
credibility by involving itself in detail and personalities or in
seeking to shape outcomes by influencing Israel's domestic politics.

Sixth, thoughtfulness will be more important than speed.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm that has
clients with business interests in many countries abroad.

(c)2000, Los Angeles Times Syndicate International