Déjà Vu All Over Again in the Middle East
By P. Edward Haley
The Obama White House's announcement that the United States does not accept the legitimacy of the continued expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank recalls a similar position taken twenty years ago by Secretary of State James Baker.
Choosing his words carefully on May 22, 1989, in an address to the pro-Israeli lobby group, American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Baker said: "For Israel now is the time to lay aside once and for all the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel." Stop the creation of new settlements on the West Bank and, at that time, Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
Yogi Berra muttered his famous déjà vu quote after watching Roger Marris and Mickey Mantle hit back to back home runs more than once. In baseball, that was a sure thing.
But he had another saying that also fits the current situation: "When you come to a fork in the road," he said, "take it." Apparently the way to his house came to a fork, with both branches eventually leading there, and he delighted in giving his friends seemingly hopeless advice on how to get to the party.
Obama's Israeli-Palestinian policy has reached a fork in the road. Bush and Baker didn't hesitate to take the turning that led to peace negotiations and a period of hope in the middle 1990s that is still remembered among Israelis and Palestinians. The question once again is whether another American president will go down the path taken by the Bush administration twenty years ago and use American economic influence to oblige Israel to accept a limit on settlements as a precursor to peace talks.
Three factors have produced this remarkable similarity in the policies of two very different American administrations across three stunningly turbulent decades filled with terrorism, war, and economic upheaval.
First, both administrations were working to bring about a peace settlement acceptable to Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states. Baker wanted to put Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a position where "he could no longer say no to new initiatives." Or, as the Obama White House puts it, ""We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions [building new settlements] make it harder to create such a climate."
Second, both American administrations wanted peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians to lead to a larger peacemaking effort across the entire Middle East, perhaps allowing new regional political and security arrangements, region wide economic development, and even conventional and nuclear arms control agreements, all of which today might ultimately include Iran.
Third, although Baker and President George H.W. Bush were able to use American economic leverage to force a pause, administrations then and now faced a steady, unwavering expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, regardless of which party was in power in Jerusalem. When Baker spoke to AIPAC there were about 189,000 Israelis living in the West Bank. Today there are at least 485,000, and the total is about to grow again.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's answer to the Obama administration confirms the pattern. Israel refuses to accept limits on settlements as a condition for talking with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Shamir refused and lost the next election, won by Yitzhak Rabin, who then opened peace talks with the Palestinians and was shot to death for his policy by an Israeli religious extremist.
A great deal has happened in the Middle East since those early Bush 1 attempts at peacemaking: 9/11, two wars in Iraq culminating in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the polarization of Israeli and Palestinian politics, with the Palestinians turning to radical Islamist Hamas in large numbers and Israelis answering with the election of parties and politicians on the nationalist and religious right, an atomizing of Israeli parties into smaller and smaller clusters. Through it all, Israeli governments left, right, and center have continued to expand settlements in the West Bank, in defiance of American policy.
In the present chaotic domestic and international context it is unlikely—at least for the foreseeable future—that an Israeli coalition will lose an election for refusing to bow to American pressure on settlements. Whether such a position can lead to peace is another matter.
P. Edward Haley is the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of International Strategic Studies and director of the Center for Human Rights Leadership at Claremont McKenna College.
