The international community's role and impact on the Middle East Peace Process

ABSTRACT

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, international actors such as Canada, the European Union, European member states and the United States have played a leading role in building a Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) meant to drive Israel and the Palestinians towards conflict resolution. However, their efforts appear to have reached an impasse. Western MEPP policy at present represents both an analytical and a policy failure. While Western governments have been able to sustain this failed policy for years, developments in the Israeli-Palestinian arena could shift the nature of the conflict and therefore, shatter conventional Western policy towards the region. This article posits that the MEPP’s failure may be tied to structural-cognitive weaknesses in the international community’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These weaknesses, which simultaneously undermine both the Palestinians and Israel, include a failure to confront false and misleading collective assumptions in donor policy, a main contributor to the failure of the MEPP. Meanwhile, changed realities on the ground and a paradigm shift brought on by the apparent demise of the two-state solution present challenges and opportunities for the international community as it struggles to remain relevant in conflict resolution in the Israeli-Palestinian arena in the coming years.

RÉSUMÉ

Depuis les accords d'Oslo de 1993, les acteurs internationaux tels que le Canada, l'Union européenne, les États membres européens et les États-Unis ont joué un rôle de premier plan dans l'élaboration d'un processus de paix au Moyen-Orient (PPMO) visant à pousser Israël et les Palestiniens vers la résolution du conflit. Cependant, leurs efforts semblent avoir abouti sur une impasse. Actuellement, la politique occidentale du PPMO représente à la fois un échec analytique et politique. Alors que les gouvernements occidentaux ont été capables de maintenir cette politique ratée pendant des années, les développements sur la scène israélo-palestinienne pourraient changer la nature du conflit, et par conséquent, faire voler en éclats la politique occidentale conventionnelle à l'égard de la région. Cet article postule que l'échec du PPMO pourrait être lié aux faiblesses structurelles et cognitives dans la gestion du conflit israélo-palestinien par la communauté internationale. Ces faiblesses qui, simultanément, minent les Palestiniens et Israël, comprennent l'incapacité à se confronter aux hypothèses collectives fausses et trompeuses de la politique des donateurs, qui ont largement contribué à l'échec du PPMO. Entretemps, l'évolution des réalités du terrain et un changement de paradigme causé par la disparition apparente de la solution à deux États présentent des défis et des opportunités pour la communauté internationale qui s'efforce de rester pertinente dans la résolution des conflits sur la scène israélo-palestinienne au cours des prochaines années.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestinian self-determination
• Israeli security
• international aid
• Western policy
• conflict resolution

Introduction

The Israeli-Palestinian issue remains one of the most intractable conflicts of the last century. The successive failure of the Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) warrants a reappraisal of the international community’s role in moving the parties towards conflict resolution. Like few other issues, this dispute triggers unconscious assumptions, biases, and preconceptions even among those tasked with making peace. A clear and dispassionate analytical view of the problem is thus central towards finding policies that sustainably address Israeli and Palestinian grievances.

For the past three decades, the international community has invested in the idea that establishing a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only option to resolve the conflict. The creation of a Palestinian state roughly along Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries in the territories that Israel captured during the six-day war in June of that year (including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank) has become known as the international two-state consensus (Moughrabi, 1987; Tilley, 2015). Towards achieving this goal, the international community has provided over US $35 billion to Palestinian areas between 1993 and 2018, with the European Union being the largest donor (Hemmer, 2010; World Bank, 2018).

While the parties themselves bear a fair measure of responsibility for failing to bridge the gaps in their positions (Lintl, 2018), some accountability also falls on the international community due to its extensive involvement in the MEPP over the past three decades. The MEPP’s failure, as shown later, has been partly due to certain structural-cognitive weaknesses underlying Western efforts to resolve the conflict.

This study examines the core assumptions embedded in the international community’s approach to the MEPP and assesses whether these assumptions advance or undermine the goal of peace in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By exploring the underlying mental constructs that shape and influence international policy-making, specifically in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this study expands the literature on conflict resolution. It also explores the core challenges facing the international community in a post-Oslo (or post-MEPP) world and the implications for the future of peacemaking in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

The paper starts with a definition of the term “international community” and moves on to examine the MEPP’s achievements and shortcomings. To provide a more balanced view of the peace process and to situate its importance for future peacemaking, the second section, “MEPP Accomplishments”, outlines how it has positively contributed to the overall Israeli-Palestinian dynamic. The third section, “The Peace Model and its Failures”, provides a short review of the existing arguments on the MEPP’s failure and where this essay fits into that. The following three sections outline the main structural weaknesses and faulty assumptions in the MEPP and how these undermined Palestinian self-determination, as well as Israel’s long-term security. The main structural weakness argument is dealt with in section four “Policy Group Think in the Donor Community”. Section five, “Restraining Palestinian Self-Determination” examines how donor assistance has restrained Palestinian political room for maneuver while increasing their dependency on donor aid. This is followed in section six by a consideration of how the MEPP’s failure poses a threat to Israel in “Undermining Israel.” The final component of the paper is the forward-looking part in section seven, “A Post-Oslo World—Opportunities and Challenges”, which explores the Trump plan, and examines other potential developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how these might affect conflict resolution in the future.

What is meant by “international community”?

In this article the term “international community” is used to describe the majority of – mostly Western – donor countries that uphold the two-state solution as their main policy prescription. These countries support the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in the 1967 boundaries affirmed by the “land for peace formula” adopted in the UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). These countries are also the main financial backers of the Palestinian state building effort and they maintain robust diplomatic relations with Israel. They include Canada, Japan as well as European Union member states such as France, Germany, the UK, Spain, The Netherlands, and the Nordic states Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. The United States was the main guarantor of the Oslo peace process and, until recently, has been instrumental in keeping the peace process alive (Elgindy, 2019b). The MEPP was built on an international consensus envisioning the establishment of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state in twenty-two percent of historical Palestine – also largely referred to as the Green line or pre-1967 boundaries – in the West Bank, Gaza Strip with a capital in East Jerusalem (Huber & Kamel, 2015; US Department of State, 2016). The actions of the Trump administration, especially the “Peace to Prosperity” vision unveiled in January 2020, represent a marked departure from the international consensus on two-state solution. The American plan unilaterally carves out new boundaries well beyond the 1967 borders incorporating as much as 30 percent of the West Bank into Israel, there would be no shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, and Palestinian statehood would be conditional on Palestinians meeting security and governance requirements set by Israel and the United States (“Peace to Prosperity”, 2020). Even if the plan is quietly set aside by a new American administration, its introduction has irreparably damaged years of MEPP work and highlighted the importance of maintaining a collective international vision of peacemaking in this arena.

MEPP accomplishments

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the MEPP has spawned an industry of experts, desk officers, political analysts, peace practitioners, peace envoys, Track II professionals and special coordinators. There have been hundreds of backchannel initiatives, thousands of official government condemnations, countless diplomatic demarches, and ritualistic UN General Assembly votes and Security Council resolutions. Even though the Oslo Accords faced incredible criticism for its failings nearly 30 years on, the peace process yielded some accomplishments as well. For instance, donor funding and technical expertise helped prepare Palestinians for statehood by building a range of institutions from the ground up. In 2011, based on reports prepared by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations said that Palestinian “governmental functions are now sufficient for a functioning government of a state” (UN, 2011, p. 1). According to the UN, the Palestinians were prepared to function as a state in the following areas: ensuring the rule of law and human rights; livelihoods; education and culture; health; social protection; infrastructure and water (Assadi, 2011). Without the international community, building and readying Palestinian institutions for statehood would not have occurred.

In addition to helping Palestinians prepare for self-governance, donor countries have made modest contributions to conflict resolution. These include hosting closed discussion where the parties could engage directly with one another. Although some issues were considered too contentious to broach, some Western countries tackled it head-on, bringing the parties together for talks behind the scenes and eventually building roadmaps for resolving core issues. An example is the work that Canada undertook as “gavel holder” of the Refugee Working Group launched following the 1991 Madrid Conference to address Palestinian refugee needs. Canada later worked behind the scenes in what became known as the “Ottawa Process”, a series of Track II initiatives from 1997 to 2001 between Israelis and Palestinians (Brynen, Alma, Peters, El-Rifai, & Tansley, 2003; Robinson, 2011). With the support of the Canadian government, the work continued with International Development Research Centre (IDRC) taking a lead in bringing Israelis and Palestinians together, generating joint options to address the Palestinian refugee issue that included compensation, resettlement, and repatriation (Brynen & El-Rifai, 2007). Another contribution from Canada was the Jerusalem Old City Initiative which laid out a proposal for the shared management of the contested city without prejudicing the sovereignty claims of either party (Jerusalem Old City Initiative, 2010).

In addition to preparing Palestinians for statehood and laying the foundation for implementing a negotiated peace, another MEPP achievement of the international community was to uphold public attention needed for conflict-resolution. In line with these efforts, European states took steps to set labelling standards for goods made in Jewish settlements versus those made in Israel (Weinzuerl, 2020). Although European measures to set criteria and raise such business awareness are not formally part of the MEPP, these actions nonetheless contributed to the overarching principle that settlements are illegitimate and that their non-recognition remains central to the international consensus on the conflict. While not changing the reality on the ground, these steps played a symbolic role in preserving the idea of a Palestinian state.

The peace model and its failures

Criticism of the MEPP comes from numerous quarters and those critiques at least partially explain the international community’s inability to significantly move the parties closer to conflict resolution (Amr, Lustick, Kahwaji, & Freeman, 2017; Lustick, 2013; Qumsiyeh, 2009; White, 2017). The numerous failed peace initiatives that came on the heels of Canada’s last Track II discussions include Bill Clinton’s 2000 Camp David summit, the 2001 Taba talks, the 2002 Arab Peace initiative, the 2003 Geneva Initiative, the Middle East Quartet’s (Russia, USA, UN, EU) 2003 Roadmap initiative, the 2007 Annapolis discussion, and the 2014 Kerry process (Lintl, 2018).

Some analysts highlight that donor funding has allowed Israel to maintain a low-cost occupation for years and that this diminishes any incentive for it to vie for a formal political settlement (Dajani & Lovatt, 2017). Mandy Turner points out that Western peacebuilding strategies of governance, security coordination, and neoliberal economics in Palestinian areas assisted Israel’s “methods of population control to ensure acquiescence to the process of colonisation” (Turner, 2015, p. 97). The MEPP’s failure has also been linked to the inability of the “process” to address the power asymmetry between the parties or alter the terms of engagement that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to meet as equals (Ben-Porat, 2008; Turner, 2011). The process was flawed from the outset because the “practical meaning of mutual recognition as understood by the parties was too far apart to be bridged in a manner amenable to practical implementation” (Ben-Porat, 2008, p. 260).

In terms of the European Union’s role specifically, some highlight that Europe went along with the process at the expense of conflict resolution. Esra Bulut Aymat notes that the

admirable objective of pulling the parties towards crucial concessions by going along with their plans in good faith, when not met with the capacity to unleash pulling power, has left the EU in a position of participating in polarising processes that appear to weaken prospects of a negotiated settlement. (Aymat, 2010, p. 23)

Hugh Lovatt notes that while affirming its commitment to the two-state solution, European Union states “shy away from deploying the tools necessary to help make this a reality” and “in continuing to promote a broken model, the EU and its member states are punching below their collective weight … .Instead of taking the initiative, they continue to act solely as a placeholder in between successive rounds of United States-led diplomacy” (Lovatt, 2016, p. 2). Meanwhile, despite all the institutions and organizations in place that constitute the MEPP – from the office of the Quartet to the myriad “special envoys” to the region¹–these have been unable to “construct an institutional framework as well as relational space for mitigated antagonism to develop” (Aggestam, Cristiano, & Strömbom, 2015, p. 1742). In equal measure, the role of the United States cannot be ignored when examining the MEPP’s failure. Khaled Elgindy proposes that a leading factor in the failure of the peace process is a historic American domestic “blind spot” that overlooks the great power asymmetry between the parties and Palestinian political realities (Elgindy, 2019a). Perhaps more relevant to the current discussion is the potential unconscious biases of Western MEPP officials themselves. Brown & Nerenberg note that the MEPP has become a “façade” that “persuades only the mediators of its viability” and that benign neglect and denial on the part of world leaders of the local realities – especially Palestinian institutional decay and Israeli rejection of the two-state solution – accurately describes where we are currently at in the history of the conflict (Brown & Nerenberg, 2016, p. 25).

The above arguments allude to the faulty cognitive frame in which the international community operated throughout the MEPP. These flawed assumptions are best reflected in the collective donor belief that eventually the conditions for peace would be right on both sides, and they should in the meantime keep reinforcing the MEPP. This assumption failed to account for changing realities on the ground that made establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank increasingly unviable. For instance, according to Peace Now (2019), an Israeli NGO, at the start of the peace process in 1993, there were 116,300 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank. The Jewish settler population in the West Bank – not including those in East Jerusalem – has reportedly reached 463,535 as of January 2020, according to information compiled by an Israeli statistical firm using population figures from Ministry of Interior (AP & TOI, 2020). This does not include the estimated 218,000 Israelis living in East Jerusalem that most of the international community views as illegal (Seidemann, 2019). Long before the spectre of annexation, growing settlement infrastructure in the West Bank was the key obstacle to a viable Palestinian state. Some Western policymakers intentionally set aside this inconvenient reality while others did so unconsciously; nevertheless, almost all MEPP officials operated under the same cognitive frame and accepted similar overarching assumptions.

Policy groupthink in the donor community

To fully unpack how the international community has approached the MEPP it is important to explore the assumptions that policymakers used to formulate policy and programming towards the region. In response to criticism that there is closing window for a two-state settlement, a common refrain among MEPP officials has been that “it doesn’t matter how much things change on the ground because everybody knows what the final settlement will look like”, i.e. a two-state solution largely along the 1967 boundary. This “everybody knows” argument absolved MEPP professionals from constructing policies that imposed costs on the parties for taking unilateral steps that changed realities on the ground (Friedman & Seideman, 2010). Yet, the international community now finds itself in a three decade state-building project that was only supposed to last five years as envisioned under the Oslo paradigm. The above assumption reflects one of the problematic cognitive frames of international peacemakers and it constitutes a key structural weakness of the MEPP.

A process well understood in psychology is that human perception “constructs” rather than “records” reality and that we “tend to perceive what we expect to perceive” (Heuer, 1999, p. 8). The process of inference-building where people construct their own version of reality is very much grounded in a person’s own assumptions and preconceptions (Heuer, 1999). Nowhere was this more at play than in the collective thinking in MEPP policy circles over the past thirty years. Western countries who sought to uphold the two-state solution convinced themselves that their efforts would eventually pay off, even if the realities on the ground were moving along a different trajectory. The collective impression that emerged was founded on a range of problematic assumptions that is best characterized by the “groupthink” phenomena.

Groupthink is the phenomenon whereby unchallenged analysis is adopted and circulated within a closed setting. As originally outlined by psychologist Irving Janis, groupthink is a syndrome where pressure to reach a consensus – or concurrence-seeking – supersedes differences within the group (Hart, 1991). In this case the policy prescription is reinforced by other like-minded policymakers adopting the same conclusions. Policymakers in Western countries have fallen into this trap when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

They assume, for example, that if the international community keeps the two-state formula alive, both rhetorically and through programming, then it will remain a viable conflict resolution model despite contradictory realities on the ground.² This view is closely linked to the “everybody knows” argument where MEPP professionals internalized the belief that the contours of a final settlement were well understood and the only missing ingredient was political will that would eventually materialize. The second subsumed assumption is that there is simply no other alternative that could be palatable to both sides, and therefore, no other conflict resolution option should be explored (Hussein, 2015). Policymakers accepted the idea that Israelis would never agree to a bi-national state since this would efface the Jewish-majority in Israel, while downplaying the importance of Palestinian civil rights (Farsakh, 2017). The third and most problematic assumption is that both parties must negotiate amongst themselves for there to be a lasting agreement. This last point overlooks the great power asymmetry between the parties, which undermines the very principle of making any negotiation viable or any deal implementable (Thiessen, 2017, pp. 7–8).

In addition, the assumptions above overlook not only the changing realities on the ground, but also the transforming attitudes of the Israelis and Palestinians. For instance, support for a two state-solution among Israelis fell from 69 percent in 2012 to 55 percent in 2017 (Shear, 2018). A 2019 poll found that only 34 percent of Israelis support the two-state solution, with 42 percent backing West Bank annexation (Kraft, 2019). Similarly, among Palestinians, 65 percent supported the two-state solution in 2006 and only 43 percent by 2018 (Shikaki & Scheindlin, 2018). Such inconvenient facts have either been dismissed or not given sufficient weight in the international peace process machinery.

Groupthink may be an unavoidable feature for large bureaucracies where critical thinking is hampered and public servants are forced to operate within narrow guidelines that discourage dissent (Hirst, Van Knippenberg, Chen, & Sacramento, 2011; Macias, 2020). The collective assumptions within the MEPP community obscured critical thinking and allowed “process” to develop into a life of its own. Over time, this led to bureaucratic policy drift that sustained the Western-led peace process status quo.

Restraining Palestinian self-determination

As the MEPP got underway after the Oslo Accords, Western – including American, Canadian, and European – programming in the region steadily increased. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have increasingly become dependent on external funding and donor aid is now the main driver of the Palestinian economy (Taghdisi-Rad, 2010). This support has ebbed and flowed over the years, even though the overall trajectory is one of decline (World Bank, 2020). The rationale for financially supporting the Palestinians rests on the premise that donors are building and training Palestinian institutions to ready them to run a state of their own (Persson, 2018). Various arguments attempt to situate why this international aid exists and persists; however, at its core it endures primarily to induce Palestinians to “buy into a peace agreement with Israel” (Wildeman & Tartir, 2014). Some argue that international donor assistance, while aimed at state-building, contributed to the fracturing of Palestinian politics and undermined democracy and economic development in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Farsakh, 2016; Turner, 2014). A particularly relevant critique of the international community in the Palestinian arena is that they internalized Israeli security concerns when engaging Palestinian interlocutors. One could not be a “partner for peace” in the MEPP if Palestinian entities were not approved by Israel (Turner, 2011). By using such discourse, Turner argues that donors promoted the “right” type of elite that MEPP institutions could deal with, which undermined Palestinian society, promoted elite fragmentation and confrontation, and diminished the legitimacy of the PA (Turner, 2011).

Two decades of donor assistance has also constrained the political space for Palestinian leaders to pursue self-determination. Palestinian rule is limited only to enclaved urban municipal areas (area A) of the West Bank. Area A is administered by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose mandate expired in 2010. Abbas has governed by decree since and the international community continues to underwrite his rule. In some way, the donors are complicit in preserving an undemocratic and increasingly authoritarian regime in West Bank cities. According to June 2019 polling, some 57 percent of Palestinians want President Abbas to resign and 80 percent believe there is corruption in the Palestinian Authority, which most (67 percent) believe is deep-rooted (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 2019). With external funding continuing to flow to Palestinian Authority areas despite the suspension of electoral democracy, Palestinian governance essentially relies on the international donor community. This donor funding imposes constraints on Palestinian governance. For instance, any move to step back from the Oslo Accords (Oslo I in 1993 and Oslo II in 1995), abandon the Palestinian Authority or turn over control of “Area A” to Israel would jeopardize donor funding and threaten the livelihood of thousands of people employed by the Palestinian Authority.

There seems to be a growing recognition that donors cannot continue financially supporting the Palestinians indefinitely. Funding to Palestinians has been in decline since 2009 (Goldenberg, Shamni, Novik, & Bauman, 2016; World Bank, 2018). This donor fatigue is likely brought on by other crises that compete for assistance but also by the lack of progress towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The arrival of COVID-19 and the global economic fallout will almost certainly increase pressure on donor countries to redirect their resources internally to deal with the pandemic. One argument for restructuring aid posits that donors should shift away from short-term support and towards making Palestinian institutions “more resilient over the medium and long-term” with the aim of keeping “their institutions viable, both at a grassroots level and as a national community in a manner that would make it possible for future leaders to negotiate on their behalf” (Brown, 2018, p. 2). This argument, however, leads to the same predicament/impasse that has currently confronted the donors, as it reinforces their unwillingness to accept the reality that the two-state solution is no longer viable and that the ongoing donor programming is not serving its intended aim.

Undermining Israel

Many supporters of Israel are critical of the perceived singling out of the Jewish state at the UN and in other international fora. They simultaneously question the “disproportionate amount of attention and condemnation” that Israel receives from international institutions, which they argue serves to “reinforce the victim narrative adopted by the Palestinians” (Menenberg, 2011, p. 27; Muravchik, 2013). As the only self-declared “Jewish and democratic state”, Israel is bound to attract greater scrutiny due to its close association with Western countries that express support for human rights, universal values, and international law (Mertes, 2015).

Israel’s failure to meet some of these obligations in its dealings with the Palestinians is not the fault of Western countries, but they should be accountable for their inability to translate their rhetorical support for Israel into concrete actions in the MEPP. Donors failed to accelerate the creation of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. Establishing such a state would have been a key factor in safeguarding Israel from impending demographic and security burdens while preserving its “democratic and Jewish” character. In addition, by consciously or unconsciously avoiding the growing possibility that the collapse of the two-state solution will lead to a struggle for Palestinian civil and human rights, the international community is contributing to a dynamic where Israel will be further isolated and vilified on the global stage.

Currently, the overall Arab Palestinian population is nearing or equal to the number of Israeli Jews living in the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In 2018, an officer in Israel’s military Coordinating Organization of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) estimated that the Palestinian population living in the West Bank is between 2.5 and 2.7 million while a Palestinian Census put that number at 3 million (Heller, 2018). Avi Dichter, former Chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said that with the addition of the 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Israel controls the lives of approximately five million people (Heller, 2018). According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics there are some 1.84 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, and adding that number to those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, yields a total of 6.8 million Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, roughly the same number of Jewish citizens of Israel (Heller, 2018). From this demographic reality emerges an unpalatable choice for Israel: remain a democracy or deny Palestinians the ability to vote.

In a scenario where Israel grants citizenship to all residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, it would lose its “Jewish character.” Numerous Israeli leaders and experts have warned against this move. For instance, Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Guiron, believed that preserving Israel as a Jewish and democratic state was a national priority and this should remain paramount if Israel wants to avoid becoming a bi-national Jewish-Arab state (Markovsky & Ross, 2019). While this threat to Israel is generally less understood and incorporated in the MEPP, there were warnings in at least one Western foreign policy unit as early as the 1940s. Elisabeth MacCallum, Canada’s leading expert on the Middle East serving in the Department of External Affairs advised that equally protecting the rights of both Jews and Arabs was the only road to diminishing the threat posed to a Jewish national home in Palestine. She argued at the time that pushing a pro-Zionist solution to the British mandate of Palestine not only did not serve Jewish interests, it “jeopardized Jewish presence in Palestine by alienating the Arabs” and engendering hostility (Newport, 2014, p. 148).

In this conflict, time is not on Israel’s side. MEPP professionals treated time as an inexhaustible resource. They invested in the belief that Palestinian self-determination was synonymous with establishing a “state” and not with ending the occupation, which is what most Palestinians want.³ Western countries overlooked the probability that the Israeli-Palestinian issue will increasingly be viewed internationally through a human rights prism and not a dispute over territory. Willingness to censure Israel is on the rise after decades of failed negotiations, creeping annexation, and the Trump plan. For instance, France reportedly pushed European Union member states to impose economic sanctions on Israel if it annexes territory (Emmott & Guarascio, 2020). In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert foreshadowed the danger to Israel: “if the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished” (BBC, 2007).

The failure of Western leaders and policymakers to anticipate the transformation of the Palestinian struggle into a human rights issue is best demonstrated by the case of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Once a fringe group, now BDS is forming alliances with trade unions, Hollywood actors and activist counterparts globally, including the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States (Bueckert, 2020; Erakat, 2020; Horowitz & Weiss, 2010). While global activism on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be dismissed as fringe by Western governments, the growing awareness could accelerate unpredictably and further isolate Israel on the global stage.

A post-Oslo world – opportunities and challenges

Members of the international community, Canada included, are now in a holding pattern on the MEPP. There are no immediate signs that they will shift their policies on the two-state solution or aid to the Palestinians. This, however, could change as the COVID-19 pandemic forces all countries to look inward and address health and economic priorities. It may not be long before small policy changes, like the ongoing decline in donor funding, become a larger trend. On the other hand, the United States “Peace to Prosperity” vision could create avenues for members of the international community to rethink Middle East peacemaking. Already, the Trump plan has gone a long way towards ending any prospect for peace envisioned by the two-state consensus (Levy, 2020), as examined in Viveash’s policy commentary in this collection.

In January 2020, the United States released its long awaited vision. As noted earlier, the 181 page “Peace to Prosperity” document is a departure from previous proposals on the Israeli-Palestinian issue (“Peace to Prosperity”, 2020). The plan allows Israel to exercise sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, there would be no Palestinian refugee right of return, and Israel would extend its sovereignty to approximately 30 percent of the West Bank including the Jordan Valley. Within this vision, Israel would maintain control over all ports and borders, with a disjointed patchwork of isolated territorial islands linked together by tunnels and bypass roads. A future demilitarized Palestinian state could theoretically be created in the remaining 70 percent of the West Bank (Robinson, 2020). A former Israeli and Canadian diplomat reflected on how the Trump plan could undermine Israel’s global standing and partnership with Western states in the coming years:

The international community’s relative willingness to tolerate, until now, the current reality in the occupied territories, has been based on the pretense that it is only temporary … The Trump plan declares plainly that the ‘temporary’ occupation is to be replaced by a permanent military regime, which does not come with full rights for those living under its control … This will never be tolerable in the eyes of the community of liberal democratic countries to which Israel seeks to belong. (Barkan & Allen, 2020)

Palestinians resoundingly rejected the Trump plan, while reactions elsewhere were muted, likely reflecting sensitivities around relations with Washington more than the content of the approach proposed. Many donor countries echoed the EU response saying that they “will study and assess Trump’s plans on the basis of its commitment to a negotiated and viable two-state solution that takes into account the legitimate aspirations of both the Palestinians and the Israelis” (Deutsche Welle [DW], 2020). Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas went further while remaining cautious saying “Trump’s proposal raised questions about the involvement of the conflicting parties in a negotiation process and their relationship to recognize international parameters and legal positions” (Deutsche Welle [DW], 2020). While many European and like-minded countries reiterated that only a negotiated approach would succeed in resolving the conflict, none were willing to explicitly say that the Trump plan represents a death blow to the two-state model (Tharoor, 2020). Even before the prospect of Israeli annexation, an increasing number of Palestinians believed that the two-state solution was dead (Rasgon, 2018; TOI, 2020). Similarly, there is a growing awareness that a one-state reality already exists and that we are entering an era of permanent Israeli control of Palestinians (Lustick, 2019).

Despite its past failures, the international community remains vital for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The parties, on their own, are extremely unlikely to forge a political settlement given the great power asymmetry between them. With all the time and resources already spent on the MEPP, many donor countries want a return on their investment in the form of a viable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Accepting that the Oslo paradigm is dead presents a unique opportunity for Western countries to re-imagine conflict resolution and articulate a new vision. On 30 April 2020 EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell said “that the annexation of the Jordan Valley would mean the end of the two-state solution” (Borell, 2020). Even if Israel does not formally annex parts of the West Bank, settlement infrastructure and Palestinians communities have become sufficiently intertwined to make a two-state solution impractical. It is becoming increasingly difficult to cognitively dismiss the new Israeli-Palestinian dynamic and the fact that the two-state solution is over.⁴ Moreover, the incoming Joe Biden administration in the United States is extremely unlikely to reverse the steps taken by the previous one, even if the Trump plan is quietly set aside. Given the damage already done, it is very unlikely the MEPP could sufficiently be resurrected beyond maintaining the illusion of progress. All of these factors will likely accelerate the shift in some Western foreign policy circles toward new conflict resolution models.

Conclusion

The future of international peacemaking on the Israeli-Palestinian issue will eventually involve a reassessment of the assumptions that underpinned the failed MEPP for the past three decades. Such a transformation will almost certainly be gradual as international bureaucracies adjust to the demise of the two-state solution and to a new global order brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. There will also be many other competing priorities for the West’s attention both domestically as well as in the Middle East, including the ongoing conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Libya, instability in Iraq, economic malaise in Lebanon, and ongoing tensions with Iran.

In hindsight, the MEPP’s failure reveals structural weaknesses within the peace process. Cognitive dissonance and groupthink led policymakers to continuously dismiss the changing facts on the ground such as settlement activity in the West Bank. Meanwhile, faulty assumptions led to MEPP policy drift. These included the belief that the two-state solution would remain viable and the faith in the idea that political will among the parties would eventually materialize. Another flawed assumption was the belief that only direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, despite their power imbalance, could achieve success. Meanwhile, the international community undermined Palestinian self-determination by propping up an increasingly illegitimate Palestinian Authority. It treated time as an inexhaustible resource and lost sight that, with the status quo, the Palestinians had become dependent on donor aid. External aid to the region enabled Israel’s continued control of millions of Palestinians at a relatively low cost. Western policy professionals failed to take into account that Israel’s ongoing control over a majority Palestinian population is an equation that jeopardizes Israel in the long-term. By sub-consciously avoiding how the demise of the two-state solution is transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a territorial dispute into a struggle for Palestinian civil and human rights, the international community is contributing to Israel’s isolation on the global stage.

Recent developments, particularly the Trump plan and the drive towards annexation are creating unique challenges and new opportunities for the international community to re-evaluate its core assumptions on the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Will the MEPP policy community accept the one-state reality as it exists today or, will Western countries cling to the old vision of the two-state solution as the only possible hope for peace? What is certain is that the international community has an essential role to play in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in large measure because the parties themselves are unable to do so on their own. However, before the international policy community can meaningfully re-engage on conflict resolution, it must reassess its founding assumptions about the region, incorporate lessons learnt during the MEPP, and continuously push back against the cognitive barriers that prevent creative thinking necessary to sustainably resolve this conflict.

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The views expressed in this article are the author's and do not reflect those of the Government of Canada.

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Michael Atallah

Michael Atallah is a Senior Middle East Analyst at the Government of Canada's Privy Council Office. The views expressed here are his own.

Notes

1 Over the past thirty years, there have been a variety of bureaucratic positions created specifically to work on the MEPP. For instance, the United Nation’s envoy is called the “UN Special Coordinator for the MEPP”, while the European Union has a “Special Representative for the MEPP”. In the United States there was a “Special Envoy to the Arab-Israeli peace”. Before Canada abolished it in 2009, Ottawa called this post “Special Coordinator for the MEPP” and operated out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

2 This is based on numerous informal conversations with Western MEPP officials from 2002–2019.

3 Understanding what Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip want is limited by the questions posed by pollsters, however, a core underlying theme in all polling shows that Palestinians want the occupation to end, irrespective of the form that takes. See http://pcpsr.org/en; and, http://www.jmcc.org/polls.aspx.

4 As noted by Hamada Jaber:

Many European politicians and diplomats recognize the demise of the two-state solution. But they find it hard to say so publicly given that fact that the Palestinian side continues to hold on to it and because of their multi-billion dollar investment in this solution from the pockets of European taxpayers. Therefore, they prefer that the declaration of its demise comes directly from the parties concerned. (Jaber, 2019)