Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 41-43
2021 Conference Magazine
By Zaha Hassan
THANK YOU TO THE Washington Report and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy for inviting me today to share the new policy paper, “Breaking the Israel Palestine Status Quo.” This paper was prepared by a group of former policymakers who worked directly on the Israel-Palestine file, together with experts and various think tanks, advocacy organizations that work on Israel-Palestine peace, human rights groups and thought leaders. They came together to assess what U.S. engagement has been in the region and to re-imagine that engagement.
The recommendations [of the paper] are not just to the Biden administration. They are also for our future administrations because we recognize, in the paper, that we need to be focused on the long game. We were not interested in working on short term fixes or economic peace sort of palliatives. There is no two-state solution open for the taking, at the moment. Likewise, there’s no one-state solution that offers equal rights for all that is likely to come in the next few years. However, the rights and security of Israelis and Palestinians should not be held hostage to a diplomatic process that has gone nowhere and that is indefinitely offline.
So, what went wrong with the U.S. engagement in the last 30 years of peacemaking? Mainly, what we say in the paper is, much of what has been preventing an end of occupation and a negotiated comprehensive agreement has been this warped incentive structure that the U.S. engagement in the peace process has created.
To put this in context, I want to draw attention to Article 47 in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It has a basic truth for thinking about occupied people on occupied territories. It says:
“Protected persons who are in occupied territories shall not be deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of this humanitarian law convention by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the occupying power, nor by any annexation by the latter of the whole or in part of the occupied territory.”
Basically, this prohibition recognizes that you can’t sign a peace agreement if your hands are shackled. That is not rocket science—it’s common sense.
So, what has U.S. engagement been? The idea behind U.S. engagement for Palestinians, and why Palestinians wanted the U.S. involved, was because they believe only the U.S. can deliver Israel. On the flipside, the Israelis wanted the U.S. involved to monopolize the mediator role, in order to elbow out others, like the U.N. and the EU, and to remove international law as the basis for an agreement.
As a result, the peace process has been one in which, over time, the U.S. has suspended reference to rights, and international law, and the parameters for peace. Israel has leveraged its participation and negotiations on the condition that the U.S. back off demands around freezing settlements and provide Israel with political cover in the U.N. and in other fora to prevent accountability for violations of the law.
The U.S. relationship with Palestinians has been conditioned on not accessing mechanisms to reinforce the two-state solution through, for example, obtaining full U.N. membership or accessing the mechanisms for accountability, like the International Criminal Court. And, finally, no democratic governance if that means allowing parties who oppose the Oslo peace process and recognition of Israel to be included in a Palestinian government.
The result has been predictable given these conditions. While settlements were expanding during the Oslo period, from 1993 onward, the U.S. overused its veto power at the U.N. Security Council preventing all but one resolution condemning Israeli land confiscations and settlement construction from passing.
THE ROLE OF CONGRESS
Congress has also played a role in how warped the U.S. engagement has been on Israel-Palestine peacemaking. At every step of the way, from the start of the U.S./PLO relationship in 1983 to when President Trump evicted the PLO mission from Washington in 2018, Congress has sought to tie the hands of the administration and put obstacles around Palestinian agency, thereby undermining the PLO’s ability to negotiate.
For example, in 1983, when secret talks were just starting between Reagan officials and the PLO, Congress was there to stop it by codifying a prohibition on contacts with the PLO. Then in 1987, when the First Intifada started, a largely a non-violent uprising, Congress was there to label the representative body of the Palestinians, the PLO, a terrorist organization. And then in 1990, when there was talk of Palestine becoming a member state of the U.N., Congress passed a law to cut funds to the U.N. should it extend membership status to Palestine. During final status talks under the Olso framework in 1995, Congress decided to legislate that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and the U.S. Embassy must move there by 1999—the date when the Oslo talks were scheduled to produce a comprehensive agreement.
Over this same time period, the changing maps show how the area allotted for the Palestinians has been shrinking, too. From the promise of Oslo—the West Bank and Gaza with a territorial link, the 2000 Clinton proposal with adjusted parameters, to the 2020 Trump plan, rendered a Frankenstein monster of a territorial map.
Under Trump in particular, the U.S. position on refugees also took a turn and the U.S. started to leverage its assistance to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The U.S. had traditionally provided a third of UNRWA’s budget but, after initially cutting it by two-thirds, the Trump administration cut it off completely leaving the organization strapped and in trouble.
It is still in trouble despite the fact that the Biden administration has resumed some aid to UNRWA. It has only resumed a fraction, still leaving in question whether or not this is going to be a wind down of UNRWA or whether it’s going to be just a step toward rebuilding the level of aid UNRWA used to receive. In fact, there is a letter recently sent by 20 Republican members of the Senate to the secretary of state, saying that they want aid to UNRWA conditioned and stopped. They believe that the numbers reflecting the descendants of refugees is keeping the refugee issue alive rather than the fact that Israel refuses to allow Palestinians the right to return.
So fast forward to today, there is no two-state solution open for the taking. Likewise, a one-state solution that offers equal rights is just as unlikely. Precisely at this moment, when Israel is entrenching apartheid, the U.S. says it is de-prioritizing its engagement because it has other more important domestic and foreign policy concerns to attend to.
Essentially, the authors of the Carnegie U.S. Middle East Policy paper say that to do so, after 30 years of U.S. engagement that has resulted in where we are today and while Palestinians are weaker than they have ever been in the region with the normalization ongoing between Israel and the Arab States—which this administration, wholeheartedly supports even while those agreements are undermining Israeli-Palestinian peace and international law—is disingenuous. The rights and security of Israelis and Palestinians should not be held hostage to this diplomatic process that is going nowhere.
The “Breaking the Israel Palestine Status Quo” paper, in line with what we heard in our consultations with experts in the U.S. and in Israel and Palestine, identifies four principles for re-imagining U.S. engagement between Palestinians and Israelis. First, and most important, is centering rights in human security. Second is rolling back Trump administration actions and its “Peace to Prosperity Plan” in its entirety and reaffirming the importance of international law in peacemaking.
Third is clarifying the expectations that the administration has for Israelis as well as Palestinians and back those up with the levers of U.S. policy. And fourth, working collaboratively with multilateral mechanisms and the U.N. so that the rules-based international order is strengthened rather than undermined by U.S. engagement on a durable solution for Israelis and Palestinians.
Contrary to what many policymakers think, this does not mean more U.S. involvement. Rather it requires less but smarter engagement. If the U.S. continues the policy of shielding Israel from accountability for its conduct, particularly now as more and more legal experts and human rights organizations are describing Israel’s system of domination over Palestinians as apartheid, the U.S. will have to expend more and more of its time, resources and political capital defending Israel.
This will undermine U.S. interests in the region where the Palestinian cause is still a principal concern of the Arab constituency. It will undermine the U.S. as it seeks to regain its stature as a global leader. A rights respecting approach also happens to align with President Biden’s overall U.S. national security strategy. But centering rights also involves centering the rights Israeli and Palestinian leaders owe to their peoples.
The warped incentive structure mentioned earlier that has been created over the years to maintain negotiations, also impacts Israeli governance and empowers the ultra-nationalists who seek to prevent any kind of compromise position. In the occupied territories, the PA and PLO relationship to their people has also been negatively impacted in an attempt to conform to the image of a good peace partner to the U.S. The Palestinian leadership has prioritized the peace process over strengthening national institutions in democratic governance.
Of course, centering rights does not get to a peace agreement tomorrow. But what it does do is it changes the political calculations of the parties so that over time they are encouraged to recalibrate their actions vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis their own constituencies. This produces a better chance of creating the environment needed for conducive, meaningful negotiations toward a durable solution.
The authors of the policy paper don’t think that the Biden administration is going to take this up and run with it. It’s still very early and it still needs time to grow. This policy paper is part of the effort to expand that discourse and to open up space within policymaking circles because there’s been a disconnect between where the U.S. electorate is and where policymakers are.
Year after year, Americans are saying they favor by a big majority, two-thirds, a neutral U.S. policy when it comes to Israel-Palestine. Fifty-three percent in a Gallup poll said they want to see more pressure on Israel to make peace. Now the policymakers have not gotten there yet, but that’s why civil society has to be a lot louder and more organized. Our theory of change, from the start, was to engage with civil society actors and to empower them with policy recommendations and an approach that they could push with their elected leaders and this administration to try to see the change that we think needs to happen for U.S. policy to be a positive player.
Zaha Hassan is a human rights lawyer and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focus is on Palestine-Israel peace, the use of international legal mechanisms by political movements, and U.S. foreign policy in the region. Previously, she was the coordinator and senior legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team during Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership, and was a member of the Palestinian delegation to Quartet-sponsored exploratory talks between 2011 and 2012. She regularly participates in track II peace efforts and is a contributor to The Hill and Haaretz. Her commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Al Jazeera English, CNN and others.
