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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2008, page 61 Waging Peace The Much Too Promised Land
AARON DAVID MILLER spoke on April 18 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, to promote his new book, The Much Too Promised Land. His talk was co-sponsored by the American Task Force on Palestine and the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Miller has been involved in U.S. efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement for more than 20 years as an adviser to presidents, nine secretaries of state and national security advisers. Miller served for two years in President George W. Bush’s first administration, but he said he left public service with the belief that “there needs to be term limits for policy advisers.” He also advised that when approaching the Israeli-Palestinian issue, one needs to put oneself in context, declaring, “there is no one in this room who is objective, and I put myself at the top of the list.” He went on to describe himself as the son of a wealthy Jewish family from Cleveland, whose grandfather was personal friends with David Ben-Gurion. “Maybe the best we can do is to recognize those biases, make allowances for them, and set them aside in an effort to understand others’ perspectives and do what we believe is right,” he concluded. “I wanted to write this book because I’ve become tired of seeing America fail,” explained Miller, who later noted that since 1991, the United States has failed to broker a single Arab-Israeli peace treaty that has lasted. There was dramatic failure under both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who he described as “the most pro-Israel president yet.” “The question is, how do we reconcile the special relationship Israel has with America with the possibility of being an effective broker?” he asked. Historically, in engaging the parties, “we have deferred too much, too often and demanded very little reciprocity from the Israelis,” Miller said. This includes the 2000 Camp David Summit, in which Miller was a participant. The current schools of thought about Camp David include the orthodox interpretation, which blames Arafat, and the revisionist school, which assigns fault to both parties. Miller promotes a more self-critical view, one he calls the “determinist” model, which greatly increases the culpability of the United States for the failure at Camp David. “This was our house, and we invited them. The minute we issued the invitation it became our responsibility,” he argued. According to Miller, the Clinton team (including himself) came to the table with a lack of preparation. There was no negotiating text and no sustained strategy with which to guide the talks. The result, he said, was that “we didn’t run the summit, the summit ran us.” In Miller’s opinion, George W. Bush is the “great disengager,” who simply walked away from the process upon taking the presidency. Bush did not become serious about the issue until the most likely too-little, too-late push for peace in Annapolis. Miller admitted that The Much Too Promised Land is long on history and short on prescription, yet in it he proposes the basic criteria for a solution based on a balance of interests. The first necessity is leaders who are “masters of their constituencies”—which, Miller said, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas are not. The second is an urgency for resolution, something today’s perpetual process lacks. An outside broker, dispassionate yet involved as a “lawyer for both sides,” is a necessity for building trust, Milller maintained. This he sees as the role of the U.S., having successfully mediated the Arab-Israeli conflict in the past—although, he said, Washington is not currently behaving as a fair mediator. The final requirement is a project that both sides can work on with a reasonable chance for success, thereby allowing for a feeling of accomplishment that can propel the parties forward. —Josh Walsh |
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