Issues

Updates on the Issues

Update on the issues: Driving peace

By P. Timko
AAI
Posted on Thursday February 19, 2009

While the final governing coalition and the future prime Minister of Israel are still unknown, the policies of any new Israeli government are unlikely to produce positive movement on the peace process. As Ori Nir, spokesman for Americans for Peace Now, observed on “Viewpoint” last week, “It is true that, even when Israel had a left-of center governing coalition as it did until [the elections]...construction in the settlements was not frozen, none of the illegal outposts was removed in the West Bank.” (To watch Ori Nir on Viewpoint, click here and fast forward to the 26:00 mark).

Indeed, when the leader of the most prominent “pro-peace party” refers to the West Bank as “the land of Israel,” as Kadima’s Tzipi Livni did on Monday, it is hard to believe that the Israeli government will make any significant movement toward peace. The term “Land of Israel” was popularized by the Israeli right as a means of equating the entirety of Mandatory Palestine as the biblical land of Israel, and has become the rallying cry of opponents of the peace process who are determined that not one inch of the Land of Israel be given up.

In this context, advocates for Middle East peace and a two-state solution should be thankful that George Mitchell has been tasked as the point man for the Obama Administration. Mitchell has seen this before, as he noted in an article he co-authored with Richard Haass in May of 2007, entitled “Irish lessons for peace”. They wrote:

“Parties should be allowed to hold onto their dreams. No one demanded of Northern Ireland’s Catholics that they let go of their hope for a united Ireland; no one required of local Protestants that they let go of their insistence that they remain a part of the United Kingdom. They still have those goals, but they have agreed to pursue them exclusively through peaceful and democratic means. That is what matters.”

In other words, a right-wing government in Israel is not an insurmountable problem.

So how does the peace process move forward? A number of Israeli analysts observed just after the Israeli elections that the outcome there mattered much less than how the Obama Administration’s actions. None, perhaps, put it as succinctly as Akiva Eldar did in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in which he wondered:

“So my big question is not who is going to be the next Prime Minister of Israel, but what is President Obama that was just sworn in going to tell him. ...If you look back to ‘92, for instance, when President Bush senior decided to send a clear message to Prime Minister Shamir, that he has to decide what’s more important, peace or the relationship with the United States.”

Movement on the peace process does not depend upon the Israeli government—no matter its composition—but rather on the engagement of President Barack Obama and the degree to which he stands behind Senator Mitchell’s mission.