Elliott Abrams: The Paris Peace Conference
What is the point of this endeavor? According to the French, it is to show support for the two-state solution and urge both parties, meaning Israel and the PLO, to negotiate. That is a demonstration of bias, because it is the PLO not Israel that has been refusing negotiations and rejecting peace plans again and again for years—indeed decades. To treat the government of Israel and the PLO as if their desire for peace were identical is wrong and unfair. If the participants at the conference truly wished to advance peace, they would be pressuring the Palestinians to stop rewarding and inciting terrorism by glorifying terrorists, and pressuring them to start negotiating seriously. This will not happen. There is every reason to believe Mr. Abbas will leave Paris satisfied with the circus and feeling zero real pressure to do anything at all.Why the Palestinian Question Won’t Be Resolved by the Paris Conference
The other point, perhaps the real point, of the conference is to pressure Israel to stop all settlement growth. In this sense it is a follow-up to UN Security Council resolution 2334 of December, and shares its conclusion that the real barrier to peace is the increasingly rapid, uncontrollable, endless, limitless growth of Israeli settlements. But this is false, as the statistics show. Settlement populations are growing, at about four percent a year, but the notion that they are rapidly gobbling up the West Bank and making peace impossible is a fiction.
There may be a third objective for the conference: pressing President-Elect Trump not to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We can expect language about leaving Jerusalem as a final status issue and doing nothing at all that changes the status quo. If you believe the President-Elect will be dissuaded by such a declaration from a conference such as this, well, I don’t agree.
So the conference will soon be nearly forgotten, and go down as yet another feeble effort to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Of course if you ask the French, they will angrily deny that this was their purpose. I agree that it was not the purpose, but it is the effect, predictably. Like Resolution 2334, it is another diplomatic blow against the Jewish State, trying to isolate it and criticize it and undermine its ideological and diplomatic defenses. And meanwhile, this very month, we will see the PLO pay more money to prisoners convicted of terrorist acts and name more schools or parks or squares after murderers and would-be murderers. But there will be no Paris conference about all of that.
Yet while the change of administration in Washington may strengthen Israel’s diplomatic position for the immediate period, and while the Palestinians will have to get to the back of the line in terms of international priorities, the Palestinian question itself will not disappear. In many ways, it will find its status enhanced.
To begin with, there’s the public domain. And this brings us to something that the Europeans have never understood: The historic Palestinian strategy has never been about achieving statehood, but about preventing a negotiated solution in order to perpetuate the image of the Palestinians as the people to whom history has dealt the cruelest blow. It’s why the Palestinians make deliberately unrealistic demands, like the “right of return”—a goal the Palestine Liberation Organization originally pledged to achieve through violence—and suing the United Kingdom for the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
In terms of building up public support around the world, it’s a strategy that has worked. Hence, we can assume that if President-elect Donald Trump does a 180-degree turn on President Obama’s approach to the Israelis, the narrative of the Palestinians—ignored by America, facing 50 years of “occupation” under Israel—will become emblematic of public resistance to the foreign policies of the Trump administration. In the American context, the Democratic Party is now the most significant barometer of that process.
The Palestinians can also play power politics. They can carry on with their campaign to achieve membership in international bodies as an independent state. They can curry favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the next stage of his conflict with the West. And they can insert themselves into domestic issues—rising anti-Semitism, the political culture on university campuses, the legality of boycotts—in a way that few other foreign policy issues can do.
As I said, Netanyahu may well be right about the last gasp of Obama’s strategy to secure Palestinian independence. But none of us should believe that these battles are over.
An indulgent, damaging MidEast "peace" conference
The French initiative for a conference was made tempting with promises of incentive packages for both Israel and the Palestinians if agreement could be reached on a peace arrangement.
It is laudatory that each people understand the basic needs of the other party. But there is a basic asymmetry in the situation. There are legitimate disagreements on Israeli settlements, but the state of Israel threatens no other nation or people.
On the contrary it seeks satisfaction of its security needs and defense against unending terrorist attacks, most recently in the truck attack in Jerusalem. Israel is not reinforcing the worst stereotypes of Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when it accuses them and responds to terrorist attacks.
It is time for the international community to consider the real nature of the problem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict exists and has always existed because of the refusal of Palestinians to acknowledge the right of Israel, a Jewish state, to exist.
The US administrations, particularly Secretary of State John Kerry, have forgotten the statement of Madeleine Albright in March 1994 when she was US Secretary of State, “We simply do not support the description of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war as ‘occupied Palestinian territory.’”
The solution can only come through negotiations between the two parties, bilateral talks, and not by statements or intervention by the US, the UN, or any other nation or international body.