What, Exactly, is His Plan? [Israel peace plan]

Medialine ^ | September 07, 2009 | Benjamin Joffe-Walt and Rachelle Kliger

[SJackson]

Following a series of leaks about the contours of the U.S. President's plans for Middle East peace, The Media Line explores what such a plan may look like.

It has been almost a year since U.S. President Barack Obama was elected, and speculation about his plans to attempt to unravel the protracted Israeli Palestinian peace process has only grown.

The 'Obama Peace Plan', as the yet non-existent plan has come to be known, is said to be loosely based on a mixture of previous initiatives, including the 'Road Map' and the 'Arab Peace Initiative'.

When, how, or even whether the U.S. President plans to reveal such a plan remains to be seen.

First, a look back:

The Saudi Initiative aka 'Arab Peace Plan'

Following the 1967 war, the United Nations Security Council called on Israel to give up the territories taken during the war in exchange for a normalization of relations with Arab states.

Neither side accepted the resolution, however, and for decades most Arab nations stood by the Khartoum Resolution, also passed following the 1967 war, which called for no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.

A major turning point in the Arab world's "Three No's" approach to Israel, was the Saudi Initiative. It essentially mirrored the UN Security Council's resolution, calling for Israel's "complete withdrawal" from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war and "a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees." In exchange, the entire Arab world would "Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over, sign a peace agreement with Israel, and achieve peace for all states in the region."

Initially proposed by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at the 2002 Beirut Summit of the Arab League, the plan was overshadowed by a Hamas terrorist attack the day before the initiative was made public, but was readopted by the Arab League on several subsequent occasions.

The Road Map

First outlined by former U.S. President George W Bush in 2002 on behalf of a a "quartet" of international entities (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations), the "road map" for peace called for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with an independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace. Meant to be implemented in three stages, the plan called on the Palestinian National Authority to abandon and crack down on the use of violence and to build democratic institutions. Israel in turn was called on to freeze settlement activity in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While Arab states were called on to make peace deals with Israel as part of the plan, it has less preconditions than the Saudi Initiative.

Obama's Plan

Ahead of his June address to the Muslim world from Cairo, there were indications President Obama would use the speech to launch a comprehensive Middle East peace plan.

He didn't.

Whether the U.S. President or the main players involved got cold feet is not clear, but the various leaks ahead of the speech provide a skeleton of the likely Obama plan.

If the leaks are to be believed, then President Obama is likely to call for the formation of a demilitarized Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital, joint Palestinian and Jordanian custody of Jerusalem's Muslim holy sites, Israeli custody of Jewish holy sites and the internationalization of Jerusalem's old city in some form or another. Some leaks indicated Obama would call for a Jordanian force to oversee implementation of the agreement, but this could not be confirmed.

Obama will also call for a series of territorial exchanges on a one-to-one basis such that the future Palestinian state will occupy 22% of the territory currently under Israeli control (the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel), with the exception of the Golan Heights.

Where, exactly, this 22% of territory will be, is left intentionally undefined in the Obama plan to allow wriggle room for the accommodation of large Jewish communities that have been built in the West Bank.

Obama is believed to support a limited "right of return" for Palestinians to return to homes and villages they left or were forced to leave during the 1948 and 1967 wars, while the remaining vast majority of Palestinian refugees are to be reintegrated into the future Palestinian state or other Arab nations. Wherever they settle, Palestinian refugees who lost their property will be compensated and issued with a Palestinian passport allowing them to return to the future Palestinian state.

What is not clear is timing.

European officials told the London based Al-Hayat over the weekend that Obama will call for an agreement within two years. Previous leaks have indicated that Obama will call for the formation of a Palestinian state within four years.

What is clear is that Obama supports 'trust-building measures', and for months has been engaged in a somewhat floundering attempt to get Israel to agree to freeze all settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Should Israel do so, Obama believes, Arab states will reciprocate with steps towards normalization with Israel, such as setting up trade offices and allowing Israeli commercial planes to fly over Arab states' airspace.

Israeli officials are officially mum on the Obama plan, but privately express optimism that Obama will succeed in suppressing Palestinian calls for a 'right of return' to Israel.

"There's a lot of speculation about all these points but we haven't really heard a lot of the details," a senior official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry told The Media Line on the condition of anonymity. "The main piece is that it seems the right of return is finally going to be taken off the table, we'll take things off the table as well, but beyond that I don't expect any big surprises as everything has already been tried in the past."

Dr Eldad Pardo of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem's Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace argued it would be naive to expect Obama to present anything new.

"Territorial exchange was on the table before, it's nothing new," he told The Media Line. "All in all it's the same American policy. The difference between Obama and the second Bush administration is mainly a matter of style."

"The problem with this conflict is not the technicalities," he stressed. "Even things that are considered major problems like water are technical problems for which there are many smart people to solve. The sticking point is what the Palestinian strategy will be in the long run. Will they stick to the staged strategy of the PLO, to take every bit of territory they can get and keep going, or is this the end game? Israel is less worried about the technicalities of an agreement than whether it will continue to have problems even after a peace agreement."

Dr. Ronen Hoffman, of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, said that while the principals of Obama's plan mirrored all previous initiatives, his approach was quite different.

"On the one hand we are dealing with more of the same," he told The Media Line. "The principals of the potential resolution of the conflict are very clear and the same as what we had in the past: an Israeli withdrawal more or less to the 1967 borders, some kind of political division of Jerusalem and no right of return for Palestinians. Maybe there are some cosmetic changes such as an exchange of territories here and there, but I don't see any major change in the principles. It's more or less what Barak and Clinton offered Arafat back in 2000."

"What is different is that Obama is looking for a multilateral agreement, rather than a bilateral agreement," Dr Hoffman said. "I don't think he trusts Israel and the Palestinians to be able to hold to a bilateral agreement so he wants as many parties as possible to be invested in preventing the agreement from falling apart."

"Israel prefers negotiating separately with each actor and tends to see multilateral negotiations as threatening to the national interest," he added. "But over time, Israel has come to feel more comfortable with the idea of getting other Arab parties involved in the final status agreements, as most of the Arab regimes at the moment seem much more pragmatic than the Hamas/Palestinian leadership."

Ghassan Khatib, director of the Palestinian government’s media center, agreed that Obama was unlikely to present anything new, arguing that as such, he was unconvinced the American president would even present a plan.

"I strongly believe that there isn’t going to be a plan," he told The Media Line. "It doesn’t make sense that the American government would put a plan forward because it would defeat the purpose. The Americans are trying to invite the parties for negotiations, and that contradicts the idea of putting a plan on the negotiating table."

"They cannot come up with anything new," he stressed. "They can’t for example suggest any language regarding refugees because in this case they would be taking sides and this contradicts their role as sponsors for a negotiation process."

"I believe, however, that the Americans are going to propose a process," he said. "The principles won’t be new, because if they come with anything new, they will provoke one of the sides, so they will come up with general principles and guidelines already accepted by the two sides and then they will suggest a process."

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

..................

[mkmensinger]

I rather expect a seven year treaty.

[Pearls Before Swine]

His plan:

“Keep stuff calm so it blows up on a Republican President’s watch.”

[Cicero]

What, Exactly, is His Plan?

Bow down to Allah, and submit.

[himno hero]

He wants to make Israel a neighborhood under a palestainian control.

[OneWingedShark]

>I rather expect a seven year treaty.

You beat me to it.

[bergmeid]

Exactly. And you know it WILL happen.

[Eleutheria5]

Like Groucho Marx once sang, “whatever it is, I’m against it.”

[MestaMachine]

He had a plan, but Netanyahu didn’t play his game. he thought he could bully and threaten Israel into complete capitulation by threatening to take his toys and go home. Israel told him to take his toys and shove them where the sun don’t shine.
He tried the big stick. Israel chopped it into toothpicks.
obama is impotent. Anywhere and everywhere.

[stevem]

Arab Peace Initiative

Yes, indeed, another oxymoron...akin to 'liberal intellectual' and 'UN peacekeepers.'

[kromike]

The jOker's "Plan" is to hold his trademark bland Presidential blather-speeches on Israeli TV until they surrender.

God, even the most hardened Israeli soldier would be whimpering inside of 5 minutes.

[ketsu]

He had a plan, but Netanyahu didn’t play his game. he thought he could bully and threaten Israel into complete capitulation by threatening to take his toys and go home. Israel told him to take his toys and shove them where the sun don’t shine. He tried the big stick. Israel chopped it into toothpicks. obama is impotent. Anywhere and everywhere.

I misjudged Obama. Obama *does* have the power to make Israel capitulate. However, Obama doesn't have the political will to implement *any* of his policies. That's not a bad thing by any means, just very surprising.

[MestaMachine]

obama ain’t in charge. That should be pretty obvious by now.

[The Comedian]

It has been almost a year since U.S. President Barack Obama was elected

...and put us at least 2 trillion dollars in the hole, and the year isn't even up yet.

I still can't believe Barack Hussein Obama, or whatever his name is, is actually the President of the United States of America. It makes me physically ill to even type those words. I still don't think I've even spoken the phrase out loud to this day. Hopefully I never will, until I can prefix it with "former" or "dethroned" or "impeached".

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.

[SunkenCiv]

• Palestinians 'seriously considering' one-state
• Carter: Palestinians Want to Absorb Israel in One State
• Despite U.S. rift, Israel OKs West Bank building

[SJackson]

He had a plan, but Netanyahu didn’t play his game. he thought he could bully and threaten Israel into complete capitulation by threatening to take his toys and go home. Israel told him to take his toys and shove them where the sun don’t shine.

Yes, that "spine of steel" Biden complimented is made of clay. No harm for the US when it comes to Israel, but the same lack of courage may well harm us as he "talks" to our enemies.

[SJackson]

I still can't believe Barack Hussein Obama, or whatever his name is, is actually the President of the United States of America. It makes me physically ill to even type those words.

Take is slow.

First, type

President Carter

five times

President Carter

President Carter

President Carter

President Carter

President Carter

Now, try President Hussein.

President Hussein

President Hussein

President Hussein

President Hussein

President Hussein

Just add the rest of his name, and you'll be able to do it.

Pressydent Barack Hussein Obama!

[M Kehoe]

Good work on all the treads you provide.

I know 0bama's peace plan. It's simple, just like all devout muslims (lower case on purpose), to push the Jews into the sea.

0bama's only problems are Netenyahu and the IDF.

5.56mm

[M Kehoe]

Ok, it's threads, not treads. Sheesh.

5.56mm