The United States Should Now Respond to the Arab Peace Plan
Rami G. Khouri
March 25, 2015
What should Israel, the Palestinians and the world make of
the statement by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough that the United
States expects the next Israeli government to end nearly fifty years of
occupation and clear the way for a Palestinian state?
This
could be a significant turning point in one of the ugliest dimensions of the
Arab-Israeli conflict during the past sixty-six years—the apparent total
support or acquiescence of the United States for any Israeli policy or action,
and Washington’s consistent refusal to take a clear, explicit position on the
two critical dimensions of the conflict and its resolution from the Arab
perspective. These are the creation of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state
in lands Israel occupied in 1967, and the need to resolve the Palestine
refugees’ status on the basis of existing law and UN resolutions.
The
United States always danced around these with rhetorical vagueness, never fully
equating what it clearly refers to as Israel’s right to absolute security
guaranteed up front, with its softer support for Palestinians living a life of
dignity that meets their aspirations, or some other soft touch like that. It
has rarely if ever explicitly said that Israeli settlements are illegal,
usually calling them “obstacles to peace” or “unhelpful,” or said that Israel’s
control of the 1967 Palestinian lands is an occupation that is illegal in
international law, making Israel’s judaization and colonization practices
crimes that deserve adjudication and punishment.
So it is
a big deal—in the rhetoric department, for now—for a senior official like
McDonough, who is as close as you get in a surrogate for the American
president, to say what he did last weekend, in public, and in the context of
the annual gathering of the pro-Israel American lobby group J Street. He
pledged that Washington would always safeguard Israel, criticized Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's electioneering abandonment of a Palestinian
state, and bluntly said that, “An occupation that has lasted for almost fifty
years must end, and the Palestinian people must have the right to live in and
govern themselves in their own sovereign state.”
The
explicit use of the terms “occupation” and “sovereign state” have political and
probably legal and diplomatic implications, should the United States wish to
pursue this line of talk and action. It would allow the United States to adjust
its policy on issues such as votes at the UN or elements of American financial
support for Israel, such as excluding the use of American aid in the occupied
territories, so as to avoid the U.S. being taken to court for complicity in
Israeli criminal actions such as settlements.
We will
have to wait and see if this signals a critical shift in the American position,
or is just an angry emotional repost in the passing lover’s feud that is now on
show between the American and Israeli leaderships. What is clear is that the
Barack Obama administration is doing something that no other American
administration has ever dared to do, which is to confront and challenge Israel
in public on the core issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict: how to match an
ironclad commitment to Israel’s absolute security with an equally pivotal
commitment to genuine Palestinian statehood.
Striking
that balance has always been too costly for any American politician, as we see
in the detritus of the shattered careers of a handful of American congressmen
and women who dared to say what the American president’s office is now saying—that
a separate, truly sovereign Palestinian state is the best guarantee of Israel's
long-term security, and, as McDonough said, “In the end, we know what a peace
agreement should look like. The borders of Israel and an independent Palestine
should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
This
position, in the American political kitchen, is now kosher and permissible, and
it is likely to persist for a while because of the context of its utterance. It
has been stated clearly and forcefully in front of a pro-Israel lobbying group
that represents a milder form of Zionism than the extremist Likudniks of
Netanyahu’s colonial-minded militaristic world. What happens next will be
revealed in due course. The best we can hope for—and should actively work for—is
to push for a greater, explicit, and actionable differentiation in American
policy between supporting Israel’s existence and security and opposing its
occupation policies.
The
easiest and most useful way for this to happen would be for Washington now to
respond positively to the 2002 Arab Peace Plan that was approved by all Arab
states via the Arab League, which explicitly envisages a permanent peace
between Israel within its pre-1967 borders and a new Palestinian state, and a
negotiated, mutually acceptable, resolution of the refugees issue.
Rami G. Khouri is published
twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding
director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public
Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter at: @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by
Agence Global