Kosovo and Palestine: Why Different Standards?

In July 2000, President Clinton, at the insistence of Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak, invited President Arafat and Barak to Camp David. In less than two weeks of intensive negotiations, Clinton expected Arafat and Barak to arrive at a solution to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Incomplete progress was achieved at Camp David, but an agreement was not.
Follow-up negotiations resumed in the months ahead, and by January 2001 an agreement was reached, but as far as Clinton and Barak were concerned, it was too late. Clinton evacuated the White House, and Barak lost the elections in Israel. Ariel Sharon, who worked relentlessly to sabotage all peacemaking efforts between Israel and the PLO after Oslo, assumed office in Israel and the intifada against the Israeli occupation intensified. Much blood has been spilled since then, but two more nonofficial “peace” agreements between Israelis and Palestinians were worked out — the Geneva agreement between Yaser Abed Rabbo and Yossi Beilin, and another one between Sari Nussiebeh, currently head of Al-Quds University, and Ami Ayalon, a minister in the current Israeli government. Outlines, frameworks, and parameters, call them what you wish, for solving the conflict were reached between the sides after Oslo, but never formally or officially adopted or signed.
In November 2004 when President Arafat died, one very significant Palestinian era came to a close, and a new one arrived. Mahmoud Abbas, a veteran Palestinian leader, peacemaker and a fervent supporter of a negotiated peace settlement with Israel, was elected as the president of the Palestinian National Authority. He was also the chairman of the PLO. For almost two years President Abbas was “no peace partner” to Israel. But his consistent peace efforts finally produced some results when the international community, particularly the United States and Europe, pressed the new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to reconsider Israel’s position and resume negotiations with the PLO.
No less than nine trips made by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East led to last November’s Annapolis conference. In addition to Abbas, Olmert, and President George W. Bush, representatives of more than 90 countries attended the conference. There were high hopes that the conference would lead to the resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestinians. But hopes have faded and pessimism has taken its place.
Some, however, do not believe the situation is as bad as it appears, and put forward different interpretations of what is going on. They believe something substantial is being cooked in secrecy behind closed doors. More than twenty meetings between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators took place over the last few weeks, five summit meetings between Abbas and Olmert, and President George W. Bush made a visit to the region. Is it possible that nothing in this period was achieved? According to Israeli TV Channel 2 commentators, progress on different core issues was made, and “Olmert and Abbas are cooking the chicken and are hiding it in the freezer because the table is not ready for the meal. Ahmad Qurie and Mahmoud Abbas on one side, Olmert and Livni on the other side can’t reveal what has been achieved in the negotiations.”
However, to Palestinian ears, the above interpretation by Israeli commentators is deceiving, if not altogether false, because:
First, Israel is continuing to build Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
Second, using Shas’ threats to bolt the government as an excuse, Israel refuses to conduct negotiations on comprehensive core issues and endlessly stretches negotiations. This tactic is well known to Palestinians. They remember how Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, during the Madrid conference in 1991, threatened to stretch negotiations with the Palestinians for tens of years. Shamir’s threats are the realities of today.
Third, and this is the most important reason, our history with Israel’s compliance with signed agreements (such as the Oslo Accords, signed in the open with superpowers as witnesses) was never honored. How can an agreement negotiated in secret between the sides be honored by Israel at an unknown future date? The sad reality is that the meal Israeli commentators referred to is spoiled.
If, in July 2000, President Clinton thought an agreement between the sides could be reached in less than two weeks, and if parameters for a solution were negotiated and in place since January 2001, why is it necessary to wait until the end of 2008 to see if a solution can be found?
The only conclusion is that without real and serious international intervention to pressure Israel to come to its senses, and arrive at a just and comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinian people quickly, the whole situation will explode sooner or later, particularly if a serious military confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah takes place. The mutually exchanged threats between both sides are an indication of what is to be expected in the not too distant future. If the military conflagration erupts, any negotiations taking place now between Olmert and Abbas will be no more than an academic exercise leading to nowhere.
If the Western world is really serious about ending the conflict, and achieving a lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, and in the region, an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and a peace agreement should be realized in the next few months. If the EU and the United States can ensure Kosovo’s independence now, they can also ensure similar arrangements for an independent Palestine by this summer. A satisfactory conclusion to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will transform the area and strengthen the forces of moderation. This will also defeat the forces of extremism enhancing the prospects for peace in our region and the world.

Peace Time

Last fall, I was booked on a television program called Digital Age, in which I was asked to reflect on a moment in history--the Paris peace talks that ended the First World War and the treaty that was signed at Versailles--and how this process might have changed with today's modern methods of communications.
I gave a lot of thought to this, and my broad conclusion was that indeed everything would have changed: the aspirations, the process, the outcome and, above all, the consequences, both for that time and today, nearly a century later.
Time, or at least timing, is everything, especially when it comes to wars and revolutions or the diplomatic dances that put an end to them. There have been a host of peace conferences since 1919. But few lasted as long as the Paris debates, and none have had such catastrophic consequences throughout the world.
Take the Balkans as one key example. What took six months (actually longer, but the heads of state were billeted in Paris for just six months) to assemble in 1919--creation of that violent, dysfunctional state known as Yugoslavia--was undone in less than three weeks in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 at a modern-day peace conference brokered by the extraordinary diplomat-banker Richard Holbrooke.
In 1919, communication and transportation were primitive, at least by today's standards. No one had yet flown across the Atlantic in an airplane; they went by ship, and a week or more was needed for the journey. Intercontinental telephones were chancy and barely audible, so cables were the preferred method of communication, and they often took hours, even days to code and transmit.
There was, of course, no Internet. Detailed research often involved consulting an early edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Instead of blogs, participants kept diaries, typed or scrawled at the end of very long days of negotiations, then most often simply dropped into dusty archives where they were promptly forgotten.
But of paramount importance was the matter of executive or political time. Woodrow Wilson was the first American president to ever travel outside the North American continent during his presidency. And he stayed away for six months, apart from one brief fence-mending trip to Washington. No president before or since has ever dared to spend that much time outside the U.S. Indeed, today a six-day presidential swing is considered an eternity. It took that much time and more for Wilson to simply travel from Washington to Paris one way on the SS George Washington.
For the Dayton Peace Accords, the various concerned parties jetted into Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Holbrooke, together with Secretary of State Warren Christopher, European Union Special Representative Carl Bildt and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, as well as Gen. Wesley Clark, sat down the various parties--Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian President Franjo Tudman and Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic--around a table and put their heads together.
Of course, jet-propelled shuttle diplomacy and flurries of e-mails helped smooth the path to these final talks. Still, there was no need for lengthy consultations a half a world away with time-consuming cables and messages, or long stretches in the cabins of an ocean liner. If there was a question, the answer was a quick, secure phone call away. And once assembled, everyone stayed put until the job was finished.
These differences changed dramatically the very nature of the two agreements that resulted: the Treaty of Versailles and the Dayton Accords. First and foremost, the U.S. failed to ratify the earlier treaty at all, while the Dayton Accords were signed and approved by all parties just three weeks later.
A good part of the failure of Versailles was Democrat Wilson's intransigence in the face of determined opposition from a Republican-led Congress. But much of that opposition stemmed from Wilson's failure to involve the Republican leadership in the negotiating process. Not a single member of Congress made the seven-month time commitment to come to Paris to participate in the deliberations. And Wilson's communications with Congress during the talks were minimal to nonexistent.
Of course, Wilson's European counterparts--especially British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau--had little of the same time/communications problems that faced Wilson. For Clemenceau, his parliament (which he had in his hip pocket) was just up the block from the Quai d'Orsay, where the treaty was being negotiated. For Lloyd George, a trip back to London was a two-day round-trip affair, and there were many British legislators who flitted in and out of Paris in the course of the six months it took to conclude a treaty.
But many other delegations--particularly the key Asian nations of Japan and Korea, as well as the more isolated nations of Europe (Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia in the Balkans; Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania in Eastern Europe)--were forced to delegate extraordinary authority to their diplomats on the scene. This, of course, left room for military forces back home to embark on adventures to claim bits and pieces of territory that the diplomats were then forced to ratify as faits accomplis.
Certainly there was plenty of military activity in the former Yugoslavia during the 1995 Dayton conference. But in the three weeks it took to broker an accord, it was impossible for either side to seize an important military advantage. Within days, NATO forces were airlifted in as peacekeepers, separating the warring parties in a truce that remains largely intact to the present, and has survived the creation of seven new nations.
In short, the statesmen and diplomats who descended on Paris in 1919 to redraw the map of the world did so under rules vastly different from those that exist today. Today we are paying the price for the challenges they faced. The borders and nations that were cobbled together from a host of ethnic groups, all forced to live together within common borders (Kurds, Shiites, Sunnnis in Iraq; Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians and Montenegrins in Yugoslavia) created the kinds of volatile, barely stable nations that have caused so much bloodshed and heartache today, decades after their ill-informed creation.
One by one, they are being undone. Next up, Iraq. And then? Maybe finally the long-unwinding of Versailles will be over.