The Foreign Service Journal, October 2007

56 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 n 1905, Naguib Azoury, a Maronite Ottoman bureaucrat turned Arab nationalist, proclaimed that “Two important phenomena, of the same nature but opposed … are emerging at this moment in Asiatic Turkey. They are the awaken- ing of the Arab nation and the latent effort of the Jews to reconstitute on a very large scale the ancient kingdom of Israel. ... [They] are destined to fight each other continually until one of them wins” [emphasis added]. By the 1920s, Jews and Palestinians had already laid com- peting claims to Palestine, and their interaction had turned violent. Israel’s June 1967 victory in the Six-Day War and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip seemed to sug- gest a permanent end to the conflict, but that turned out to be an illusion. Since 1967, there have been numerous attempts to resolve the conflict diplomatically, but they have all failed. Even the 1993 Oslo accord and subsequent negotiations only temporarily halted the fighting. So, a century after Azoury penned his grim prediction, has history vindicated him? Can we glean insights from the apparent inability of diplomacy since 1967 to resolve the con- flict? If that failure reflects idiosyncratic factors, we would have to conclude that there is nothing to learn from history. However, if the failures reflect a specific problem, one can presumably address it and move forward to a solution of the underlying conflict. To apply this logic requires examining the diplomatic attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1967, and identifying the positions of the primary actors involved: Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization/Palestinian Authority, and the international actor sponsoring almost all of these attempts, the United States. All these initiatives have focused on the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (here- inafter referred to as “The Territories”), which Israel occupied in 1967. The list is long: United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), the [Secretary of State William] Rogers Plan (1969), President Carter’s Geneva Plan (1978) and Camp David Summit (1978), the Saudi Plan (1981), the Reagan Plan (1982), the London Agreement (1987), the PLO Overture (1988), [Secretaries of State] George Shultz’s and James Baker’s plans (1988 and 1989, respectively), Israeli PrimeMinister Yitzhak Shamir’s plan (1989), the Oslo Process (1992-2001), and President Clinton’s Camp David Summit (July 2000) and Peace Plan (December 2000). There have also been numerous attempts since 2001, including the Mitchell Report, the Tenet and Zinni Plans, the Geneva Initiative, President Bush’s Roadmap for Peace, and the Saudi/Arab League Plan. The patterns revealed by the reactions of our actors to these attempts are discussed next, following which we return to our key question: Why have all these diplomatic attempts failed to resolve the conflict? The Israeli Balance Sheet The Israeli policy approach to The Territories has depend- ed upon the identity of the party leading the government — Labor or Likud — and upon whether the government was formed before or after the start of the Oslo Process (1992). Before Oslo, the Likud governments sought to annex The Territories in their entirety. The Labor governments sought to annex some of the land and surrender the rest to Jordan in C ONDEMNED TO E NDLESS S TRUGGLE ? T HE I SRAELI - P ALESTINIAN C ONFLICT T HE U NITED S TATES CANNOT IMPOSE PEACE IN THE M IDDLE E AST . B UT WITHOUT ITS EFFORTS , A LASTING SOLUTION WILL REMAIN ELUSIVE . I B Y R AFAEL R EUVENY Rafael Reuveny is a professor of political economy in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana Uni- versity in Bloomington, Ind.