Secretary of State John Kerry has visited the Middle East four times since President Barack Obama named him to the post back in February. Perhaps anticipating the large number of yawns that such a statistic is likely to produce, Kerry directly addressed — during his latest jaunt last week — the growing number of peace process skeptics on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
“There have been bitter years of disappointment. It is our hope that by being methodical, careful, patient, but detailed and tenacious, we can lay out a path ahead that can conceivably surprise people, but certainly exhaust the possibilities of peace,” Kerry told them.
However much Kerry would like us to believe that there are routes to peace that haven’t yet been explored, there is a dreary sense of deja vu about his words. Every day, it seems, a U.S. politician declares that time is running out, that windows of opportunity are closing, that the Israeli-Palestinian dimension of the broader Middle East conflict is propelling the region toward apocalypse.
It’s now 2013, and there is no state of Palestine, only a Palestinian Authority that shuns direct negotiations in favor of a unilateralist strategy to secure recognition of an independent Palestinian state by everyone except Israel.
Nor has Palestinian rhetoric changed for the better. The eliminationist desires of the Palestinian leadership — and I’m not talking here about Hamas, but about Israel’s ostensible peace partner, the PA — remain as ingrained as ever. At the end of April, for example, Rabi Khandaqji, the PA governor of the West Bank city of Qalqilya, reaffirmed that the Palestinians would never abandon the so-called “right of return.” Palestinian refugees, Khandaqji declared, would return “to Haifa, Nazareth and Akko”— all cities that lie inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel.
This isn’t code for the destruction of Israel. It’s an explicit call for the destruction of Israel.
The traditional approach of American and Western negotiators has been to play down this kind of rhetoric as ideological baggage that will disappear once meaningful progress has been made. Time and again, this patronizing, even racist, manner, which treats Arab politicians as tantrum-prone children who say things they don’t really mean, has been proved wrong by events. And yet, the template for peace negotiations has barely been modified during the last 20 years.
Which is why negotiators at the State Department would be wise to consult an important new paper published by two Israeli academics, Joel Fishman and Kobi Michael, in the journal Jewish Political Studies Review. Introducing the notion of a “positive peace,” Fishman and Michael warn against efforts to create a Palestinian state without worrying about its governance and internal political culture, since this would increase “the chances of bringing into being one more failed and warlike state that would become a destabilizing force in the region.”
Positive peace, the authors assert, is not just the about the absence of war, nor about elevating the right of national self-determination above all other considerations. “The real problem,” they write, “is that, long ago, the would-be peacemakers, in their haste and fear of failure, did not frame the problem correctly. They failed to ask the right question. In order to avoid disagreement, they concentrated on process and postponed the substantive issues of content.”
In the Israeli-Palestinian context, a positive peace entails a complete overhaul of the zero-sum attitude toward Israel that has become institutionalized in Palestinian politics. For decades, the Palestinians have regarded negotiations as simply one of several avenues in pursuing their war on Israel’s existence: armed struggle, more accurately defined as terrorism, has been another, while the global BDS campaign (boycott, divestment and sanctions) is yet another.
In marked contrast to U.S. worries that time is running out, Fishman and Michael point out that as far as the Palestinians are concerned, we’ve got all the time in the world. When the late Yasser Arafat spoke, in 1980, about “a war that will last for generations,” he was being sincere. And Arafat’s view persists because, in spite of all the economic incentives waved at the PA, the near-metaphysical belief in a struggle to the death has prevailed over the rational, sensible notion of territorial partition.
Though Fishman and Michael don’t say it explicitly, there is a strong sense in their paper that negotiations that are not preceded by meaningful, internal political reform in the Palestinian entity will share the miserable fate of the Oslo agreement.
And if that’s correct, then the “path that could conceivably surprise people,” as John Kerry put it, begins not with discussions about settlements, water rights or the size of the Palestinian security forces, but with what the Palestinians themselves believe about the world around them — and whether they are capable of change.
Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for jns.org, where a version of this essay originally appeared.