If the Obama administration’s view of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could be summed up in a sentence, it is this: The status quo is unsustainable.
“The status quo is unsustainable for all sides. It promises only more violence and unrealized aspirations,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual Washington policy conference in March 2010.
“The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel must too act boldly to advance a lasting peace,” President Barack Obama said in his May 2011 speech at the State Department, laying out his vision of the U.S. role in the Middle East after the Arab Awakening.
“Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained. It’s not sustainable,” Secretary of State John Kerry told the Munich Security Conference in February. “It’s illusionary. There’s a momentary prosperity, there’s a momentary peace.”
Although the Obama administration may have coined the phrase, the sentiment is not new. Every president since Jimmy Carter has, in some fashion, recognized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict creates costs for the United States in the region and that the U.S. has an interest in resolving it. In the words of General David Petraeus, the conflict “foments anti-American sentiment … limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region], and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”
Since the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords, the historic set of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization aimed at securing a peace treaty between the two sides, a strong international consensus has formed behind a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Yet even in the face of this consensus, the status quo persists, year after year, defying the efforts of the world’s most powerful country to change it. The Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all put considerable effort into reaching a deal that would end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Obama made achieving this goal a priority of his presidency, appointing a special envoy in his first week as president in 2009, and yet now, five years later, Secretary Kerry is working overtime just to keep the parties at the table (a task made even more complicated by the recently announced Fatah-Hamas reconciliation), never mind hammering out a final agreement.
One of the ironies is that, as a concept, the two-state solution is more broadly accepted than ever, even as achieving it seems more remote. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s adoption of the two-state solution in his 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech may have been so heavily qualified as to make it almost meaningless, but the fact remains that he recognized the need for making the speech.
Even though polls of both Israelis and Palestinians over the past decade have consistently shown majority support for a two-state solution, rejectionist factions—hard-line Israeli settlers, Palestinian extremists—have managed to wrest control of the process at key moments and play a spoiler role. Still, the two-state solution remains the most favorable one: Plan A. Its broad outlines have long been understood, and even many of its most difficult details have been hashed out in exercises like the Geneva Accord, in which a group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators signed a model final agreement, and in negotiations between President Mahmoud Abbas and then–Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as journalist Bernard Avishai reported in 2011. Still, it’s only responsible to consider a Plan B in the event that Plan A remains elusive.
In a recent interview, Obama nodded toward some of the costs that would accrue to Israel in the absence of a two-state deal. The Palestinians have made clear that if talks break down, they will escalate their campaign to gain membership in various international organizations, a move strongly supported by the Palestinian public. President Abbas took a step in this direction in early April, responding to Israel’s reneging on its commitment to release prisoners by signing documents joining 15 international conventions. These efforts could create an enormous headache for Israel, forcing it to play a game of diplomatic whack-a-mole as it tries to head off challenges in various international venues, and it could become increasingly costly for the U.S. to provide diplomatic cover. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach,” the president said, “then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.”
But beyond these warnings of consequences, which have also been echoed by Secretary Kerry, there has been little discussion of what the U.S. policy response might be to the loss of faith in a two-state solution. How would the U.S. contend with the heightened international criticism and isolation that would likely be directed at Israel when its control of the West Bank became formalized? With growing calls for divestment and boycott of settlement products in Europe, how would the U.S. respond to its European partners’ developing a more independent approach, as they have been hinting at doing for years?
For understandable reasons, it’s difficult to get currently serving officials to respond to questions like these. “Talking about Plan B kills Plan A,” is how one Israeli official put it. That may be true for those closest to the negotiations. But for others, it’s worth thinking about.
http://prospect.org/article/us-israel-and-palestine-whats-plan-b
