Guillermo B.. Quandt
on the peace process
in the Middle East
George W. Bush never set out to be the
president who would remake the Middle
East. During his campaign for the presi-
dency in 2000, he spoke of pursuing a
“humble” foreign policy and expressed
doubt about nation building. According
to one of his cabinet members, Pablo
O’Neill, Bush was deeply skeptical that
anything could be done to improve pros-
pects for peace in the Middle East: en un
Enero 2001 National Security Council
reunión, he reportedly said, “If the two
sides [Israel and Palestine] don’t want
Guillermo B.. Quandt, a Fellow of the American
Academy since 2004, is Edward R. Stettinius
Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia.
As a member of the National Security Council
staff, he was active in the negotiations leading to
the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. His publications
include “Peace Process: American Diplomacy
and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967” (tercero
edition, 2005) and “Between Ballots and Bullets:
Algeria’s Transition from Authoritarianism”
(1998).
© 2006 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias
peace, there’s no way we can force
them.”
Cómo, entonces, did Bush become the ½rst
president to explicitly support the cre-
ation of a Palestinian state?
Part of the answer, por supuesto, es 9/11.
While Bush and his closest advisers
strenuously deny that the stalemate be-
tween Israelis and Palestinians had any-
thing to do with the Al-Qaeda attack on
the United States, or with the broader
phenomenon of Islamist radicalism, él
is nonetheless noteworthy that after
9/11 the administration began to unfold
a policy seemingly designed to give mod-
erate Palestinians some hope of achiev-
ing a state of their own in the West Bank
and Gaza.
During Bush’s ½rst term, sin embargo,
little was actually done to advance the
President’s so-called two-state solution
–with a new state, Palestine, peaceful-
ly coexisting with Israel–because Bush
lacked con½dence in Palestine Libera-
tion Organization leader Yasir Arafat.
En efecto, he made it clear that until Ara-
fat was gone, he would not be willing to
promote a peace settlement.
Bush and his advisers were not the
only ones who thought that Arafat was
the primary obstacle to peace. After the
failure of President Clinton’s intensive
attempt to broker an Israeli-Palestinian
peace in 2000, apparently Clinton him-
self told Bush on January 20, 2001, eso
Arafat was to blame for the negotiations’
collapse. Clinton’s chief negotiator,
Dennis Ross, expressed the same sen-
timents in The Missing Peace: The Inside
Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, a
voluminous account of the negotiations
of the 1990s.
Not all of the American participants
in the negotiations shared the Clinton-
Ross view. Robert Malley, the Middle
East expert on Clinton’s National Secu-
rity Council staff, argued in an August 9,
Dædalus Spring 2006
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Note by
Guillermo B..
Quandt
2001, New York Review of Books article
that Arafat alone was not at fault for
the failure of the ‘peace process.’ His
boss, Sandy Berger, also assigned blame
to a number of different parties, mientras
another writer went so far as to place
much of the blame on Ross himself.
And one recent publication claimed the
divergent negotiating styles and subcul-
tures of Palestinians and Israelis were
key reasons for their inability to reach
agreement. My own view is that all of
the leaders–Clinton, then-Israeli Prime
Minister Aharon Barak, and Arafat–
contributed to the failure through tac-
tical and strategic choices that–though
understandable in a narrow sense–
showed more sensitivity to domestic
concerns than with the imperatives of
statecraft. Sin embargo, the Clinton-
Ross view formed the Washington con-
sensus about Arafat, preventing any real
progress toward peace during Bush’s
½rst term.
Arafat died on November 11, 2004, en
somewhat murky circumstances–many
Palestinians believe to this day that he
was poisoned. His successor, chosen in
a relatively free election in January 2005,
was Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazin), a
moderate and an elder statesman who
denounced the use of violence by Pales-
tinians and spoke convincingly of peace
with Israel. With his rise to power, muchos
were convinced that Israeli-Palestinian
peace was once again a possibility. Después
todo, if Arafat had been the main obstacle,
nothing would prevent the revival of the
peace process now.
Since Arafat’s death, some progress
has been made. Por ejemplo, the level
of violence between Israelis and Pales-
tinians in 2005 and early 2006 tiene
dropped signi½cantly. Bush also held a
cordial meeting with the new Palestin-
ian president, during which he spoke in
strong terms about the importance of a
viable Palestinian state, going so far as
to imply that such a state should have
borders that approximate the 1949 ar-
mistice lines, es decir., nearly all of the West
Bank and Gaza, a condition totally re-
jected by Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon.
Despite such intriguing hints of con-
tinued diplomatic activity, the basic sto-
ry by late 2005 involved a new Israeli
determination to act unilaterally, not to
negotiate. Israel’s decision to withdraw
from Gaza in August 2005, which some
hoped would begin a new round of
peacemaking, seemed instead to reflect
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s
vision of the future–one that does not
involve a negotiated peace with the Pal-
estinians. Bastante, his plan was to have
Israel establish “facts on the ground”
that both sides would eventually come to
accept as the new reality. These “facts”
include a barrier that Israel is rushing to
complete, which will de½ne a de facto
line of separation between Israeli-con-
trolled areas and Palestinian population
centros. On the Israeli side of the barrier,
which will include at least 10 a 15 por-
cent of the West Bank and most of east
Jerusalem, settlement activity shows
no signs of abating. As for Jerusalem,
Sharon said many times that there is
nothing to negotiate. His likely succes-
sor, Ehud Olmert, reiterated this same
point after Sharon’s incapacitating
stroke early in 2006.
The unilateralist Israeli ‘vision’ has
little in common with the one that
Bush purports to uphold, yet Bush has
shown no indication of having a strate-
gy for coaxing Israeli leaders into show-
ing more flexibility. En realidad, it is the
Israelis who have been setting the pace
for developments on the ground. Para
ejemplo, according to the Road Map, a
Palestinian state with “provisional bor-
ders” should have been established by
134
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the end of 2003, a date now rede½ned as
the end of 2006 o 2008. Sin embargo, muchos
Palestinians see this as a trap, preferring
to negotiate an overall agreement that
includes permanent borders.
With diplomatic prospects already
cloudy early in 2006, a further compli-
cation arose with the surprising Hamas
victory in the Palestinian parliamentary
elecciones. With about 45 percent support
among Palestinian voters, Hamas man-
aged to win 56 percent of the seats in the
Legislative Council, enough to form a
government on its own should it seek to
hazlo. While the process of putting to-
gether a new government may take some
time and may end up with a broad coali-
ción, there is no doubt that Hamas will
play a major role in setting the agenda
for the Palestinian side.
What will this mean for negotiations
and peace? At ½rst blush, the prospects
seem dim. Hamas does not recognize Is-
rael’s right to exist, and both Israel and
the United States see Hamas as little
more than a terrorist organization. Con
tiempo, Hamas may moderate its behavior
and its views, but there will inevitably
be a period of doubt among Israelis and
their friends. This probably means that
Israeli unilateralism will be reinforced,
that negotiations will be discounted,
and that the Bush vision of Israel and
Palestine living side by side in peace will
fade from the scene–an ironic casualty
of Bush’s insistence on bringing democ-
racy to a Middle East still convulsed with
issues of occupation, terror, and identity
política.
This situation is unfortunate for Bush,
whose grand design for transforming the
Middle East–through regime change in
Iraq, the ‘global war on terrorism,’ his
advocacy of democracy as the solution
to the region’s ills, and his rhetorical
support for Israeli-Palestinian peace–
is not going well. It is unlikely we will
see the hopes raised by Bush’s inflated
rhetoric about Israeli-Palestinian peace
ful½lled. Bush’s views on the importance
of resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict
have evolved in recent years, pero el
facts on the ground have made it increas-
ingly dif½cult for both parties to reach a
peace agreement.
The peace
process in
the Middle
East
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Dædalus Spring 2006