Conference Call: Improving the Prospects for Obama's Success

"Improving the Prospects for Obama's Success:
A Report from an IPF Roundtable in Tel Aviv"

 Israel Policy Forum (IPF) recently convened a Policy Roundtable Discussion of analysts, academics and former policy makers in Israel.  Below is an executive summary of the Policy Paper based on the Roundtable discussion. The paper will soon be released in its entirety.

Please join IPF for a conference call briefing as Dr. Steven L. Spiegel moderates a discussion between two of the Roundtable participants:

  Dr. Ephraim Sneh
Former Knesset Member
Former Deputy Defense Minister

and

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Shlomo Brom
Senior Research Associate, Institute for National Security Studies
Former Deputy to the National Security Advisor

Date: Monday, November 23rd

Time: 1:00pm ET (10:00am PT)

Please RSVP to Rachel Cooper at rcooper@ipforum.org or call 212-245-4227
and provide a number where you can be reached at the time of the call.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

President Obama’s “Israel problem” is not one of public relations, but of inadequate success.  This was the key conclusion arrived at by a distinguished group of some twenty former and current Israeli officials, analysts and academics during an in-depth, off-the-record Roundtable discussion convened by Israel Policy Forum (IPF) in Tel Aviv on October 25, 2009.  This discussion revealed that Israelis view America’s current policy vis-à-vis the peace process as outdated, almost fossilized in the year 2000; limited in scope, imagination, subtlety, and consistency. 

What to do about the Obama administration’s failures thus far? The majority of the group IPF gathered together did not believe that negotiations alone would succeed, but thought that Obama could achieve success either by combining negotiations with other supporting efforts, creating a multi-tier process, or by substituting a different process for the currently conceived bilateral talks under the chairmanship of Envoy George Mitchell. 

Under the first conception, the majority view, talks would be accompanied by an acceleration of a smorgasbord of activities from security to economics; from settlements to territory that would be designed to build confidence by both Israelis and Palestinians in the viability of a Palestinian state.  The assumption here is that if a Palestinian state appears practical and feasible for the first time that will inevitably and inexorably impact the political atmosphere on both sides and the viability of negotiations.

The second, and compatible, initiative that gained traction with this group was to revive the second phase of the roadmap, which advocates the creation of a provisional Palestinian state.  The Palestinians have long been skeptical of this idea because they feared the temporary would become permanent.  In order to mitigate these fears, several participants embraced the notion of a statement by President Obama on behalf of his administration that the territory of the Palestinian state will be the same size as the territory of the West Bank and Gaza before the Six Day War.  Certainly, combining the roadmap, which Israel has already accepted, with this kind of Obama statement would provide the Palestinians with greater confidence of future progress and Israeli concessions than simply depending on the tenuous results of their own unilateral declaration of independence.

Finally, some of the Roundtable participants see the original Fayyad Plan with its provisos of two years of further Palestinian institutional development followed by the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, as a potential vehicle for progress, with aspects that should be supported and encouraged by the United States. 

Under each of these options, some of the group would substitute incrementalism, a provisional Palestinian state, or the Fayyad plan for wide-ranging bilateral negotiations, but the majority would combine one or more of the options with American negotiations and the presentation of US principles and proposals as appropriate.