With a brisk history of American policy toward the Jewish state, Michael Doran highlights the failure of those who have seen a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict as paramount to U.S. interests, and the success of those who have instead made a clear-eyed assessment of Middle Eastern geopolitics. Too often, writes Doran, “Israel’s conflict with the Arabs has functioned as a screen onto which outsiders project their own psychodramas”: a skewed perspective that led to the failed Oslo Accords and to the misguided condemnations of American moves like the relocation of the embassy to Jerusalem. (Free registration required.)
In retrospect, the ultimate failure of the Oslo process should not have been surprising. The successes of the peace process have come not from Jimmy Carter’s dreams [of bringing peace to the Middle East] but from [Henry Kissinger’s] Realpolitik. Egypt made a private side deal with Israel in the 1970s, and Jordan did so in the 1990s. Both were hardheaded, [pragmatic] transactions: Egypt made peace to get back the Sinai and a place within the American system, and Jordan did it to keep its place in that system and to insulate itself from the vicissitudes of the peace process. Both sought to extricate themselves from the Palestinian problem, not to solve it.
For 70 years now, many American (and European) policymakers have seen it as their mission to stabilize the Middle East by constraining Israel’s power and getting the country to give back at the negotiating table what it has taken on the battlefield. Over the decades, however, Israel has grown ever stronger and more able to resist such impositions. It has become a modern industrial power center, with a thriving economy and a fearsome military backed by nuclear weapons—even as the Palestinians have remained impoverished wards of the international community, with threats of terror their chief negotiating tool.
Whatever they loudly proclaimed, the Arab states had little interest in the Palestinians. . . . Most Arab states moved on long ago. . . . So, now, has the Trump administration. And for that, it has been excoriated.
Read more on Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/israel/2019-10-15/dream-palace-americans