Amb. Daniel C. Kurtzer on 'Reviving the Peace Process' (TRANSCRIPT)

Dr. Steven L. Spiegel: You think it's a mistake to wait around for the end of this administration’s first term – or this administration (however the election turns out) – and not do very much until next year. Can you explain why you think it is imperative that we act now?

Ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer: Sure. First, hello to everyone and to IPF, a great organization. If the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Arab-Israeli peace process would do us a favor by hibernating for the next 10 or 11 months that might be ideal. We are going through our own political process, Israel may in fact go through an electoral process sometime this coming year and certainly there is ferment within the Palestinian community. The question remains whether or not Hamas and Fatah reconciliation will go forward. In an ideal world, if we were writing this up as a scenario we would say let’s put this all on hold, and everyone stays away happily and nothing changes for the worse, and we pick it up perhaps when everyone is stronger. But status quos are not status quos and people know that. They either get better – or more commonly – they actually get worse because they are left neglected. I fear that this status quo, over the next 10 or 11 months if there isn’t some very significant policy activity, will deteriorate into violence. This violence could either emanate from Gaza, unhappy groups that are not satisfied with what Hamas is doing, or from the West Bank or even from radical settlers who have designs to undermine the rule of law of Israel in the West Bank. For that reason alone it is important that the United States not pretend that they can put this issue on hold for a year.

You don’t think that the Israeli government on its own can handle these three problems, or any others that arise, and deal with the settlers of the West Bank and Gaza violence?

I would like to hope that they could, but they have not shown any determination to do so. Settlement activity according to Peace Now settlement numbers were up twenty percent last year. Having just come back from Israel with a group of Princeton University students, I can tell you that building is going apace. There is a lot of chatter about getting these West Bank settlers under control, but so far nothing has been done. And now we see the so-called “price-tag” attacks. When Israel decides to act against an outpost these folks act against Arabs or now against the IDF. There is no indication that the Israeli government has the will to do it, they certainly have the capability to clampdown, but I am not sure they have the will to do it, given the political configuration of the current coalition.

Now what about these arguments that are often made that while Netanyahu has been in the past a supporter of the settlers and continues verbally to do so, he has actually been much more controlled than previous prime ministers. After all, he has had this argument about supporting the Palestinians with an improved economic position and although he has a murky-at-best policy on the peace process, he has actually done more for the Palestinians than many previous prime ministers. Is there any accuracy to this?

First issue—I don’t buy it. When you mention “Peace Now” people say they are a biased organization. But I have found through very carful study that when they put out facts and figures they are correct. The facts that they put out to my knowledge have never been disputed by the Israeli government and I recall a time when I was the Ambassador and I wanted to show the then defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, some information about settlements and I couldn’t use classified material so I used peace now material and he looked at it and said “oh it is Peace Now” and I said tell me if it is wrong. I went back about two weeks later and he said “yes the information was correct.” If Peace Now is correct, which I think it is, Netanyahu has not been hesitant about conducting settlement activity. There was a ten-month pause in new housing starts during the second and third year of the Obama administration, but it never stopped settlement construction and you now have a resumption of the settlement building process. On the question of Netanyahu as a ground-up builder of Palestine, this is something Salam Fayyad has articulated as a goal in 2009 and everyone dismissed it as simply talk that the Palestinians will never get their act together. However, he has produced what he said he would produce. Has that benefited from a more benign Israeli government view, yes it has. However, it is also benefited from the fact that the security forces that we helped train, these so called Dayton Forces that are now conducting security in a professional manner in the West Bank have given the business community in the West Bank towns the confidence to go ahead and make investments. When I took my students to Ramallah just two weeks ago we were at the Mövenpick Hotel, which is better looking than almost any hotel in Israel. There is a lot of investment there. Yes, Israel gets a little credit for not stopping the investment, but I would not put up a statute of Netanyahu in the Ramallah town square and say he is responsible for the construction of Palestine.

You have a four-point program in your National Interest piece. Could you tell us about your four-point program?

I have been arguing this for a couple of years. I started the argument almost three years ago when I testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. My problem with the approach that we have followed over the last few years is that we have chosen tactics rather than strategy. Therefore, what I would like to see us do is plan an across-the-board strategy. Element number one is to come up with “Obama Parameters.” We know from the Clinton Parameters that he tried to capture approximately where the parties might start to negotiate. In other words, it wasn’t the outcome plan, but it was a going-in idea where you start negotiations. And we now know from the negotiations that have taken place over the last decade about where the tolerance points are for the two sides to start negotiations. President Obama could put them out – not as a plan for the outcome of negotiations – but rather where the parties should start and he should tell the parties when he puts them out.

Can you give a specific example of how the “Obama Parameters” might differ from the Clinton Parameters?

For example, on the question of Jerusalem, one of the most sensitive and emotional issues. If you remember, Clinton talked about dividing the Old City into different areas of sovereignty. Since 2001, when those parameters came out, there have been a lot of studies done by non-governmental institutions, including one I am associated with done by a number of Canadians, which is called the Jerusalem Old City Initiative. We also have what Olmert negotiated in 2007-2008 with Abbas, which rather than a division of sovereignty in the Old City it was a question of differing sovereignty and coming up with an agreed plan for governing Jerusalem. This would divide the area outside the Old City, but not divide the Old City itself, which is only one square kilometer. This might be one of the places where, instead of coming out with a sovereignty parameter of Jerusalem, the Obama administration might suggest these different creative ways of dealing with a question like Jerusalem.

Let’s go on to a second element.

The second element to the strategy is to make good on what Abbas has been talking about: this includes Palestinian institution and security strategy. They have done a good job, and with no question they are much better off now than they were a couple of years ago. However, they can do better. Especially in areas where progress has not yet been made. For example, this includes both the education system and incitement. There needs to be reform of Palestinian textbooks, public discourse and media so that you answer the argument on whether or not there is an education for peace underway or an education for continued conflict.

The third element is a throwback to the “Roadmap.” The Roadmap in 2003/2004 called for a series of actions by each side in parallel that would be mutually reinforcing. The Roadmap today is dormant, but has good ideas in it. In the context of negotiations rather than in the absence of negotiations we might be able to get some movement in Roadmap obligations. Obama tried a settlement freeze, but he tried it in the abstract and in the absence of negotiations. However, I think he would have a better chance if the parties were negotiating on the basis of parameters.

The fourth element of the strategy is to pick up on the Arab Peace Initiative. The Arabs changed their policy—they are now focused on what happens to the 1967 problem. Which is the problem of the occupied territories, they are no longer calling Israel’s existence into question. Also, nobody is using the Arab Peace Initiative. One way to use it is to revive some multilateral engagement between Israel and the Arabs even in advance of a negotiated outcome on the bilateral issues. Questions of health, water and environment still need to be dealt with and these questions transcend boundaries. If we could show that process starting again it would lend a great deal of support and a safety net for the larger process.

This is a highly admirable approach, but is it a viable one? In the United States the idea of supporting Palestinian institutions is not controversial. But the president tried to do something like a parameter on borders and got assailed last May. What has changed that would make this approach work?

It is not what has changed; it is what needs to change. Up until May of 2011 the president was putting forward tactics, and tactics don’t work in this process. In May, he began to put forward something that approached a larger strategy, but he walked away from it at the first sign of Israeli and Arab pushback. What needs to change is a willingness of the United States to stand behind what it stands for. Is this something that is important to the United States? I didn’t determine that, the President of the United States said when he entered office that this is important to the United States. This is a ‘national interest of our country.’ He took the trouble on the first full day of his administration to appoint George Mitchell as his envoy. If it is important, and that importance has not diminished over the last three years, than we ought to act as though it is important and it means you put forward a good idea. And the President’s idea in May was a good idea—and then you work it. You don’t take ‘no’ for an answer and you pushback when one or both of the parties push at you. And you modify as you need to modify. However, you don’t just walk away as we did.

No Republican presidential candidate will hesitate to criticize the President for the slightest thing that he does to promote the peace process. How does the President pursue this during an election year and can he be convinced that it would help him and not hurt him?

It strikes me that the Republicans in this campaign have given him a tremendous amount of latitude to operate because the ideas they put forward are so beyond the moon. One candidate said the ‘Palestinians were an invented nation’ and another candidate said they will do ‘whatever the Israeli Prime Minister wants them to do.’ That is not what an American president needs to do. The president needs the ability to say to the American people “I will do what needs to be done that will help the Israelis make the peace that is in their strategic interest. However, that may require some engagement beyond simply saying ‘yes’ to what the Israeli prime minister is telling me that he wants to hear.” It requires a little bit of boldness and leadership.  But these other guys who are running for office are just saying whatever makes sense to their donors. The current candidates have no responsibility for what they are saying, while the president does have responsibility. And he is on record as saying this is important so he should act like this is important.

Let’s turn to the two parties. How do you get the two parties to observe the Roadmap when they haven’t in the past? On the Palestinian side you have a lot of disunity and a leader who has proven himself to be very cautious even when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in September 2008 made a far-reaching proposal. How do you get the Palestinians to take the steps the Roadmap requires? Also, how do you get Netanyahu to move when his government is particularly right-wing and he has been reluctant to take any serious initiative that might cause any controversy within his coalition?

The answer on the Roadmap is—I don’t know.  Because we have never tried to implement it in the context of a larger strategy, even when it came out in 2003. I was Ambassador to Israel at the time and it was in a very limited context and it fell apart under the burden of continued terrorism. I don’t know if we will be able to succeed with it. If you want a chance for success it has to be integrated into this larger strategy. I don’t have a ready answer for that, but we have never tried it in the context of a larger strategy. Neither of the two parties has been tested fully on a strategic approach. It was not hard for Netanyahu to pushback on settlements because settlements as an issue didn’t make a lot of sense to people not to just Netanyahu. I don’t think it was the way to go because you are not going to get an Israeli government to do that when it sees nothing else happening. When Obama made that demand he couldn’t even get the King of Saudi Arabia to allow El Al flights to overfly the kingdom. He couldn’t even get a minor confidence building measure out of an Arab state. In the abstract, a settlements freeze makes no sense and therefore Netanyahu has found it easy to dodge anything the President has thrown at him. I don’t know how easy it would be for to him to deal with a full strategic American approach that would be marketable in Israel. Dan Shapiro is a very strong Ambassador to Israel and the President needs to talk directly to the Israeli people. Same with Abbas. If you take his words at face value, he feels that Obama put him ‘up in a tree.’ What are you going to do when the President of the United States actually has a serious strategy? Are you still going to act small-minded and narrow-minded saying “I can’t go forward without my precondition”? If he does, this just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that this doesn’t go forward.

Has President Obama done anything right with the peace process?

He was 100 percent right in defining this issue as important to the United States. The United States should want peace in the Middle East because the absence of it costs us a great deal. The President was exactly right in defining it in appointing a very senior negotiator and by May 2011 he came to the realization that it was not going to be confidence building measures that move this thing forward it is going to be a reasonable approach to negotiations. I think the May 19 ^th speech last year was both fair and reasonable. I think the President has done some things that were quite positive. My problem with the President is it took him some time to move from a tactics approach to a slightly more strategic approach.

What kind of administration is most likely to produce a successful policy? David Hale doesn’t have the visibility that George Mitchell had. How do you think the President should organize your four points?

Well, it is better to have an envoy without a policy than a policy without an envoy. I think if the president makes the decision to pursue a strategy I have argued or if he has his own strategy, he needs to give the sense of an integrated and comprehensive plan. After that, it would be difficult to organize for diplomacy. The Middle East peace process has become the problem of the Secretary of State and the President. If that is the case than one way to organize this is to – in a sense – say to the Secretary of State this is now one of your options. You organize the department and when the issues start to grow than it gets pushed up anyway. You need the Secretary of State or the President to extract the real issues from the leaders.

Let’s the say the United States can’t or won’t do it. Is there any other entity or government that could pursue your strategy?

Not that I see, no. Israel hates when the United States puts some pressure on it, but doesn’t trust anyone else to put pressure on it. Since Israel is at least half the issue here you are not going to get the European Union or the United Nations or some combination of the Quartet to do this kind of thing. An Arab leader such as King Abdullah II of Jordan could actually play a significant role in future negotiations, especially if one or two more Arab leaders got together to make some kind of compelling argument to the people of Israel that changes the situation. This has happened in the past such as with Begin and Sadat. It is not likely, but still possible.

Could this happen in the aftermath of the Arab Spring?

If you look back and ask what prompted the Arab Initiative to come forward in 2002, it was a significant concern on the part of Saudi Arabia and most other Arabs. The Arab-Israeli conflict had become a heavy weight around the neck of the Arab systems in the face of Iran. There is no question that this was the concern. These countries could not deal with Iranian power projection because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The national interests that propelled the Arab states in 2002 to adopt the Arab Peace Initiative have not changed and they don’t change as a result of the Arab Spring. It remains to be seen if the Islamist leaders will see it in this light – whether they will govern as leaders or as Islamists.

Does the Iranian problem make it worse or better?

It makes it more imperative to do it faster. The Middle East dynamic changes overnight if the President takes the front seat and it also make it easier with the Russians and Chinese. It just makes it easier do diplomacy even with the Security Council. Our Arab diplomacy was facilitated in the 1990s as a result of the Arab Peace Process. If you want a large strategic reason to do this it is Iran.