Could A U.S. Regional - Really Regional - Plan Save The Mideast Peace Process?

It's time to feel sorry for the new Obama administration when it comes to doing anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The Palestinians are awash in internal conflict; the latest casualty is the resignation of the highly respected Salam Fayyad as Prime Minister.  Meanwhile, the Israelis seem bound to have a nightmare right-wing government that can only please the country's worst adversaries.  It appears that the new government will not even accept a two-state solution.  It will take a lot of magic for the Obama administration to get anything done.

And the recent past is not encouraging. The process has been bogged down for several years in terms of trying to gain agreement on specifics or on a comprehensive solution. Thus, the parties have been hung up on details; whether the aim has been to try to get the process moving in an incremental manner or to agree on a definitive endgame. Nothing has worked, even when the Palestinians were more united and the Israelis were less disillusioned, more interested, and led by governments more sympathetic to a neighboring Palestinian state than the one they are about to get.

What to do? The IPF Israel Roundtable, a group of specialists looking for creative diplomatic ideas, released a paper a couple of weeks ago that stressed among other ideas the concept of a US Regional Plan. At first I thought this was the same old idea of American bridging proposals publicly released that have never worked in the past (e.g. the Reagan Plan of 1982 and the Clinton Parameters of 2000).  Ho hum.  But then the idea began to grow on me.

In the past the timing was always terrible. The Reagan plan for "self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan" was timed in the middle of the war in Lebanon with poor consultation with the parties, especially Israel. The latter lost an opportunity most Israelis would dearly love today.  The Clinton Parameters were offered at the very end of the administration, and the Palestinians in particular thought they'd get a better deal from George W. Bush.  How's that for a colossal miscalculation?   And once these ideas were rejected, they seemed finished.  In retrospect, both sides would have been far better off if they'd taken the American ideas and agreed to work with them over the long term.

But the Obama administration has the time, and the will, and the personnel to pull something off.  The Israeli experts are right.  An American proposal doesn't have to be the end of the conversation, but instead the beginning.  It can, if done properly, set the stage, focus the recalcitrant parties, and develop a conversation where none exists.

But the real ingeniousness of the IPF Roundtable proposal is that the authors offer a regional context, with a special focus on the security roadblock that bothers everyone, especially all Israelis, and that barrier is Iran.  As they put it:

"The Israeli government is focused on Teheran.  For the last three years Israel has been forced to confront Iran by proxy through Hezbollah and Hamas. Therefore, it is important for the U.S. to address this central Israeli concern in a serious and determined way within a defined time frame and within the Palestinian-Israeli and Syrian-Israeli contexts, as part of a broad regional plan, and as a component of an Iranian-U.S. dialogue. Relevant U.S. security arrangements that strengthen Israel vis-à-vis the Iranian threat will be viewed positively by any Israeli government and will help assuage Israeli fears."

The Iranian issue today has become integrally related to Arab-Israeli relations because the constant threat of Iranian arms helping Israel's adversaries increases the reluctance of Israelis to make concessions, which is clear in the right-wing movement of the recent elections and in both the Lebanon and Gaza wars, especially the latter. Without Iranian interference, there would have been no Gaza war. Without Iranian obstruction, the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 would not have resulted in the escalated instability that we have seen.

But the authors recognize and clarify to American ears more directly than the point is usually made, that you cannot, in this era, have any breakthroughs or make genuine progress on the Arab-Israeli front without progress on Iran.  And that plays to the Obama administration's strength. By pursuing Palestinian-Israeli progress in conjunction with exploring new opportunities with Iran, including ways to prevent its potential nuclear force, the Administration is beginning a direction that may well achieve genuine progress. In this sense the Roundtable participants have made a series of critical additions to our understanding of what is to be done next on the Arab-Israeli front.

Here's the key point: new Clinton parameters with progress on Iran that enhances Israeli security.  No more weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, no more wars with them, but a connection to the new US plan.  That's a recipe for making regional progress on several fronts at once.

Of course, this program is far easier prescribed than achieved, and the new Iranian government of whatever stripe that emerges from the June 12 election would have to cooperate. But since half of policy making is having the right strategy, the Israeli experts' idea shows the way of making progress on the Palestinian-Israeli and the American-Iranian fronts at once.  This is a way to square lots of circles with one approach.  It's certainly at least worth considering.