A Last Chance at Middle East Peace?

President-elect Obama will be the last American president who has a chance to save the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. If he does not achieve this goal during the first year of his presidency, the two-state "horizon" that George W. Bush pursued so ineptly is likely to disappear for good. But even a quick engagement by the new president will fare no better than previous US peace initiatives--all of which have gotten nowhere--if Obama and his advisers approach the task believing that some more "peace processing" or "confidence-building measures" will achieve the goal.

The Israel-Palestine conflict has defied US "facilitation" over these many years not because of procedural shortcomings or a paucity of ideas. The terms of a workable agreement--formulated in the so-called Clinton Parameters of December 2000 and elaborated in the Taba discussions that followed in January 2001--are well known and enjoy near-universal support. They call for minor rectifications in the 1949 armistice line (which served as Israel's pre-1967 border) in order to allow Israel to retain a cluster of nearby settlements based on an agreed equal exchange of territory on both sides of the border; a capital for the new Palestinian state in Arab East Jerusalem; a limited return of Palestinian refugees to their former homes in Israel in agreed numbers that do not significantly alter Israel's ethnic and religious balance; a nonmilitarized Palestinian state that addresses Israeli security concerns while respecting Palestinian sovereignty; and a US-led international force that would ensure security and assist with Palestinian nation-building for a transitional period.

What has been missing is the political will to get the parties to act on these parameters--a political and moral failure that has doomed all previous efforts. This failure has not been the result of ignorance but of cowardice--a willful disregard by Israel and successive American administrations, as well as by much of the international community, of certain unchanging fundamentals that underlie this conflict. Peace initiatives that ignore these fundamentals and seek an agreement on the cheap cannot succeed.

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