As President-Elect Barack Obama's team will soon learn firsthand, negotiating Arab-Israeli peace is a challenging endeavor. The conflict moves along multiple levels, involving extra-regional as well as regional players. Besides the Israelis and Palestinians, the actors range from Syria and Lebanon to Iran, Russia, Europe, the United Nations, and the greater Arab and Muslim world. Also important are the region's extraordinarily rich fossil fuel base and pressure from the American Jewish and evangelical Zionist communities.
It is out of this maelstrom that Aaron David Miller's The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace emerges. This courageous book is an insider's take on the difficulties, mistakes, and missteps in the Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts of the U.S. government after the Six-Day War in 1967. It focuses in particular on the small group of State Department officials intimately involved in the process during the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. Full of cogent analysis and good advice, The Much Too Promised Land is recommended reading for any official in the incoming administration involved in seeking to ameliorate the conflict.
Miller believes that the uncritical identification of the United States with certain Israeli policies has significantly eroded our influence and interests in the Middle East. The United States largely ignored the Arab-Israeli issue for most of the past eight years, and continued inattention will diminish our standing even more in this critically important part of the world. In arguing for a course correction, he details the biases that led the U.S. government and the negotiating team, of which he was a member, to "see things mainly from an Israeli perspective" and made it difficult to "challenge or second-guess" Israeli leaders.
Clouded Judgment
Indeed, at times, it seemed that American sympathy for the Israelis clouded judgment and decision-making. Miller reveals, for example, that the American side "never had a tough or honest conservation with the Israelis on settlement activity" in the occupied territories during Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's term. He reports that former President Bill Clinton told a reluctant Yasser Arafat that if Arafat agreed to the 2000 U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian Camp David summit he would not blame the Palestinian leader in the event of a failure. Yet, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak blamed Arafat for the summit's failure to produce an agreement, he was able to cajole "an already sympathetic Clinton" into doing the same. In retrospect, Miller concedes that blaming the Palestinians and facilitating Barak's campaign to delegitimize Arafat as a partner was both "immature and counterproductive."
Another significant problem was the structure of the U.S. peace effort. For Clinton's two terms the State Department team, led by veteran negotiator Dennis Ross, operated out of the Office of the Special Middle East Negotiator (SMEC), which reported directly to the secretary of State and the president. Previous administrations had adopted similar approaches. However, without "transparency, supervision, and balance," all of which, Miller says, appeared to be increasingly lacking, the operation's overall performance was less than optimal. Miller reports that SMEC "accorded subordinate or derivative roles" to the State Department bureau responsible for Near East affairs and to American diplomats in the field. The team didn’t consistently brief the bureau on their conversations with Israelis and Palestinians, and didn’t provide them an opportunity to critique the team's tactics and strategies. Insufficient records were kept —Israel's lead negotiator reacted with astonishment when he learned that no detailed account existed of the exchanges between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Taba and Annapolis
Although Miller is frank in telling us why he did not try harder to address the flaws in the operation of which he was a part, he leaves some things out. For instance, he hardly mentions the intensive January 2001 Israeli-Palestinian follow-on talks in Taba, Egypt. In those talks, according to Robert Malley, one of the other American negotiators, the Palestinians presented a map that showed about 3.1% of the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty, with an equivalent land-swap in areas abutting the West Bank and Gaza. Barak authorized a joint statement to the effect that the sides had never been closer to an agreement, and that it was their shared belief remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections. Ariel Sharon won those elections and again, Arafat was blamed for the failure to reach an agreement.
As a result, an already bad situation in Israel and the territories worsened markedly. This shortcoming notwithstanding, Miller makes a significant contribution to advancing understanding of the role of the United States in Middle East peacemaking and how it might be improved.
With the advent of the Bush administration in 2001, SMEC was dismantled. Miller's role was downgraded, and he left government in January 2003. He makes clear his dismay at the Bush administration's disengagement from the peace process. He argues that somehow Hamas will need to be integrated into the peace process, and that the United States should engage Syria and Iran "on the Arab-Israeli issue and other matters." Still, Miller credits Bush for breaking new ground early in his first term by committing the United States to a "viable independent Palestinian state" and for language on Palestinian self-determination "that no previous administration had ever used."
Miller also gives President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice credit for convening the November 2007 Annapolis Conference on the Middle East (which included the Syrians), suggesting that "the stage could be set for serious business." Writing in December 2007, Miller ends on a hopeful note, remarking that the Bush administration still had a chance to leave its successor a transformed situation on the ground and a serious negotiating process that just might produce an agreement.
Benjamin Tua, a retired Foreign Service Officer, served in Israel from 1982-1985. He currently is an independent analyst and a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor.
