The Foreign Service Journal, December 2006

The best recent example of the hypocrisy that characterizes our policies was the U.S. reaction to the Hamas victory in the Palestin- ian elections of January 2006. Nearly a year later, we still refuse to recognize and deal with the vic- tors unless they agree to three pre- conditions we insist upon: recog- nize Israel; renounce violence; and accept all previous agreements signed by their Fatah opponents. But which Israel, with what bor- ders? Hamas had already ob- served a truce for more than a year in order to join the political competition. Those agree- ments they are told to accept have been mostly ignored or violated by the other signatory, Israel. Similarly, we refuse to deal with other Islamist parties that have achieved some electoral success: Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. What about the undemocratic, authoritarian regimes in the region that are not our allies, such as Iran and Syria? Both are major actors who need to be engaged if peace is ever to be established in the Middle East. Yet we have had no relations with Iran for 27 years, and have recent- ly threatened that country with regime change. The same goes for Syria, where we have an embassy (but no ambas- sador for more than a year), but constantly criticize and threaten its government. We have followed a policy that says merely talking with them would be a reward and therefore must be earned through their good behavior. This is a remarkable change in the fundamentals of diplomacy, which tradi- tionally considered talking with potential and actual adversaries as being as important as exchanges with one’s allies. This is not rewarding them, but keeping them engaged in a useful dialogue. A New Madrid Conference Now would be a good time to organize a repeat of the Madrid Conference of October 1991, but with an expanded membership and host list. That conference, coming after the first Persian Gulf War, did not bring peace to the Middle East, but it did achieve new mea- sures that facilitated the process. For the first time there were direct official talks between Israelis and Palestinians before an international audience, though some fictions were main- tained. These talks were a pre- lude to the later Oslo negotiations that for a while advanced the cause of peace. The Madrid con- ference also led to an actual peace treaty between Israel and Jordan three years later. This time the hosts should not be the U.S. and the USSR, but rather the U.S., U.N. and E.U. The negotiators should be Israel and all of its Arab neighbors — Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, plus Saudi Arabia. The agenda should be the Arab Peace Initiative adopted by the Arab League — with all 22 members approving, including the Palestinian delegation — at the League summit held in Beirut in 2002. The goal would be final implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the “land for peace” formula that has been the foundation concept for any final peace agreement since 1967. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel, so the primary interlocutors on the Arab side would be the two states that still have outstanding land issues with Israel — Syria and Lebanon — and the Palestinians (most of all), who need to end the occupa- tion and establish their new sovereign state on what remains to them of the land of the British Palestine mandate — that is, the 22 percent of the land of that entity that Israel occupied in the 1967 war. Saudi Arabia should be included both because it was then- Crown Prince, now King, Abdullah who proposed the initiative at the 2002 summit, and in recognition of that country’s close proximity to Israel and its prominence in the Arab world. The Arab Peace Initiative is in fact the very best offer still on the table and could provide the basis for a fair, just, legal, comprehensive and permanent resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as peace between Israel and all of the Arab states. There is no doubt that the Palestinian delegation fully supported the initiative at the time. In a speech to the summit by video feed (because Israel would not guarantee Arafat’s return to Ramallah if he left to attend the summit) the Palestinian president endorsed the offer. (How many people know F O C U S 48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 6 The best recent example of the hypocrisy that characterizes our policies was the U.S. reaction to the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections of January 2006.