Israel Matzav

Fayyad's excuses

The thing that bothered me the most about Ben Birnbaum's lengthy TNR piece on Salam Fayyad is the fact that there are no countervailing points from anyone official in Israel. As a result, Israel is blamed for most of the problems that have plagued Fayyad's term in office:

ANY HOPES OF a swift end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evaporated in early 2009. In March, two months after the end of Israel’s bloody war against Hamas in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the prime minister’s office with one of the most right-wing coalitions in Israeli history. For Fayyad, the rise of Netanyahu was a problem, since he needed Israel’s help in order to reassure Palestinians that an end was in sight to the occupation. “What he’s asking from the Israelis is very simple: Provide a sense that the occupation is lifting. Provide the opportunity for the Palestinians to take ever-increasing control of their lives,” said Robert Danin, who headed the Jerusalem Office of the Quartet—representing the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia—from 2008 to 2010. “He wants to end the occupation, he wants a Palestinian state, but he’s about Palestinian self-empowerment, and he wants the Israelis to get out of the way.”

In some respects, they did. Faced with a transformed West Bank security environment, Israel dramatically reduced the number of checkpoints and other barriers to Palestinian mobility and allowed P.A. forces to deploy in new areas. But, on other fronts, Israel was less forthcoming. Part of it had to do with the Oslo Accords. Under Oslo, the West Bank was carved up into noncontiguous patches assigned either to Area A (where the P.A. has civil and security control), Area B (where Israel has security control and the P.A. has civil control), and Area C (where Israel retains full control). About 95 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank live in Areas A and B, but Area C constitutes roughly 60 percent of the territory.

Examples of where this would pose problems for a state-building agenda are not hard to come by. Less than a year after Fayyad took office, the P.A. partnered with private developers on the construction of a new town of 40,000 called Rawabi. The footprint was completely in Area A, but the proposed road connecting the town to Bir Zeit (and, by extension, to the West Bank highway system) ran through Area C, leaving the project’s fate in Israel’s hands. The road was approved this past January—after four years of red tape.

American officials encountered similar inertia when they approached Israel with ideas for gestures to strengthen Fayyad, most of which involved expanding Palestinian access to Areas B and C. One proposed measure involved granting Palestinian stone-masonry factories in Area A greater access to rock quarries in Area C. “They weren’t taking these kinds of steps,” former Obama administration Middle East envoy Dennis Ross told me. “Oftentimes, things would be looked at very carefully and sometimes they would take a lot of time. Unless there was a real serious push from the political level—and that required ongoing, active attention—then some of these things weren’t likely to take place.”

The inertia, Ross told me, was augmented by an ambivalence among Israeli leaders about the Fayyadist enterprise. “If you look at the security establishment, they look at people like Fayyad and the Palestinian security forces as being natural partners. If you look at others, you’ll see those who sort of feel like, ‘Why should we be assisting them in a state-building effort?’ And, if you look at still others, there’s a sense that, ‘Yeah, it makes sense for us to assist them, but the context should be right, too. We shouldn’t be doing it and looking like suckers, because the Palestinians are putting pressure on us.’”

On no question did Israel undermine Fayyad as badly as on settlements. Netanyahu, under pressure from the Obama administration, did impose a ten-month settlement freeze in the West Bank in late 2009. Then, for nine months, Abbas refused to join talks, demanding that the freeze include East Jerusalem—which the Palestinians claim as their capital. Ultimately, however, Abbas caved and agreed to return to the negotiating table. In September 2010, at a glitzy White House ceremony featuring Obama, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Abbas and Netanyahu appeared together to mark the resumption of direct talks. But, shortly thereafter, Israel allowed the settlement moratorium to lapse—and the negotiations quickly collapsed. It was a major blow to Fayyad. “The main criticism of Fayyad,” Ross told me, “is that he’s making the occupation palatable.” With settlement expansion resuming, this criticism stung more than ever.

It's not at all clear to me why Netanyahu taking office should have meant an end to the negotiations, particularly after the Bar Ilan speech. Yes, it meant that the 'Palestinians' would not be offered as good a deal as they were offered by Olmert, but then they didn't take that deal when they could have, did they?

If the road from Rawabi to Bir Zeit was in fact approved in January 'after four years of red tape,' Netanyahu was not in office for 15 months of that period. Obviously, there were other reasons not to approve it aside from Netanyahu being a bad guy. Olmert didn't approve it either.

Dennis Ross seems to have taken it as a given that Israel should have turned over 'Area C' to the 'Palestinians' and yet that was not part of the Oslo conception. In fact, a 'Palestinian state' was not guaranteed by Oslo either. And if one reads between the lines of Prime Minister Rabin's last Knesset speech in 1995, it is clear that he had no intention of giving the 'Palestinians' anything in Area C. That just wasn't part of the deal.

Why should Israel be the party to build a 'Palestinian state'? Over the last 19 years, more and more Israelis have become convinced that a 'Palestinian state' will not bring us peace. If anything, it could bring war closer. Even if Fayyad's intentions are peaceful, one is hard pressed to think of anyone else in the 'Palestinian' leadership about whom the same could be said. Fayyad is clearly a minority, and there is no making concessions to Fayyad without making them to those who would murder us.

And finally, there is the whole question of the settlement freeze. Birnbaum glosses over the fact that Netanyahu froze settlements for ten months, and Abu Bluff waited nine months to come to the table, and then did so only to seek an extension of the freeze. Fayyad's problem isn't Israel - it's that his employers have no interest in reaching any kind of settlement on any kind of reasonable terms.

All in all, Fayyad has been a disappointment, but laying that disappointment on Israel's doorstep is just unfair. Getting some input from Israelis involved in the negotiations might have given the piece about Fayyad some balance.

Labels: Abu Mazen, Binyamin Netanyahu, Salam Fayyad

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:58 PM