One presidential administration after another has attempted to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but none has succeeded. To the contrary, argues Michael Mandelbaum—all the U.S. has accomplished is to worsen the situation and undermine its own credibility:
The orthodox approach to the peace process has harmed American interests by wasting the most valuable commodity the American government possesses: the time of its senior officials. It has done harm as well by diverting attention from the real cause of the conflict—the Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of Israel—thereby reducing the already small chance of ending it. Worst of all, the peace process has actually obstructed a settlement of the conflict by supporting—unintentionally—the current Palestinian strategy for eliminating the Jewish state. . . .
In recent years, . . . the Palestinians and their allies have adopted a . . . strategy [of] delegitimization. They have sought to portray Israel as a neocolonial power that practices the kind of discrimination that characterized apartheid-era South Africa. . . .
This strategy will also fail, not least because the charges it levels are false. Nonetheless, the peace process has given the champions of the strategy of delegitimization reason to believe that it can work. The Palestinian authorities, led first by Yasir Arafat and now by Mahmoud Abbas, have managed to ensure the failure of all negotiations with Israel by their intransigence while at the same time avoiding responsibility for that failure. Successive American administrations have refrained from telling the world—clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly—precisely why the peace process has never succeeded. The Obama administration has in fact blamed Israel.
By failing to rebut the false narrative about the fate of the peace process and, even worse, by occasionally propagating it, the American government has reinforced the strategy of delegitimization and made the faint chances of settling the conflict even fainter.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/peace-process-obstacle-peace/