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U.S. Foreign Policy and the Inter-Palestine Divide
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Edited Transcript of Remarks by Dr.
Nathan Brown
Transcript No. 322 (20 January 2010)
To view the
video of this briefing online, go
toTranscript No. 322 (20 January 2010)
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/8738/pid/3584
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
14 January 2010
Dr. Nathan Brown:
Thank you very much for having me over here. And thanks to all of you for showing up. I’m supposed to be talking about U.S. policy towards this Palestinian split but I’m going to take the first part of that topic and put it aside for a minute, the U.S. policy part, for a couple of reasons. First, I do live in the United States of America. I live very close to here. But sometimes what U.S. policy is, I find sometimes confusing. So I’d like to kind of postpone in dealing with it. But the other reason I’d like to put it aside for a minute is I think Washington discussions sometimes make a little bit of a mistake. They start right at the policy prescription and work backwards from the prescription to the reality. That’s good if you have 750 words for an Op/Ed piece but I’ve got more than 750 words so I’m going to spend the first part of them not at U.S. policy but looking instead at realities on the ground. So what I’m going to start doing today is ask “What is this split between the West Bank and Gaza?” Then I will take a look and see what the U.S. policy has been. Then I’ll take a look and see what will happen if U.S. policy does not change. And finally I’ll examine the question of whether there are alternatives that would be more advisable for the United States to adopt.
First, what is this split between the West Bank and Gaza? Well, in a sense it’s one that is too obvious to deny and its basic contours are extremely clear. It is routinely described as a split between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and Hamas in Gaza. I think that’s a misleading way, however, to conceive of the split because it misses some important things. It’s a terminology that’s routinely used here. It’s sometimes used by Palestinians as well. It’s even used sometimes by Hamas people whether they refer to the Authority as if it is something in Ramallah. But much more frequently, however, Hamas essentially says we’re the legitimate elected majority in the Palestinian parliament. The constitutionally legitimate cabinet is one headed by Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza. And the cabinet is not the cabinet for Gaza, although it only has effective control there, but in legitimate terms, in terms of internal Palestinian legitimacy, it is the Palestinian Authority. They have some legal legs to stand on there which I don’t think anyone cares about so much anymore. But what you miss if you miss that – if you conceive of it instead as sort of the Palestinian Authority versus Hamas – is the extent to which you write Hamas out of the equation, the fact that Hamas actually is a governing authority in Gaza right now. There are ministries, there are decrees, there are laws. There’s a political process that is now very, very deeply entrenched and will not go away very easily. You also miss that Hamas in a sense sees itself that way. You miss a little bit about Hamas’ self conception of properly representing governance in the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. You miss the fact, as well, that in sense this legal reality of a state that nobody cares about has essentially left the Palestinians with two lawless, unaccountable, undemocratic governments. I say lawless because both of them are operating without any regular constitutional foundation. And I say undemocratic, because although there were Palestinian elections and although Mahmoud Abbas can claim that he is the elected president by the majority of the Palestinian people, and Hamas could claim their own democratic legitimacy from the 2006 parliamentary elections, the prospect of new elections is simply not there under current political circumstances. Even this dispute is often misframed that Abu Mazen decreed elections and Hamas refused to implement the decree. There is some truth to that but if you dig a little bit deeper the conflict looks a little bit more severe. Abu Mazen did issue a decree that called for new elections for the presidency and the legislative council. But what is left out of most news accounts is the fact that he did so on the basis of an earlier decree law that essentially barred Hamas from running. It would be illegal for Hamas candidates to run under the Palestinian electoral law that Abu Mazen claims is a legitimate one. So to say that this is something that Hamas is blocking elections ignores the fact that Hamas is blocked from participating in those elections even if they wanted to participate in them.
The political reality, not the legal reality, the political reality is a little bit more complex. That is that neither side is really ready for elections. Both of them use them as a propaganda club to beat the other side. But in a sense, the reality again of these two deeply entrenched governments, is that both of them are convinced that they have more to gain by just sitting tight than by marching forward towards some sort of new elections or some sort of national unity or that sort of thing. Neither one of them wants to be seen as responsible for this divide, a divide that is deeply unpopular among Palestinians. Both of them prefer the bird in the hand – for the Ramallah government, that’s the West Bank, and for Hamas, that is Gaza – than the two in the bush, which would be some kind of pieces of a reunified Palestinian Authority. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. In a sense, both sides are deeply entrenched and have sources to continue their viability as governments for the foreseeable future. What the West Bank Palestinian Authority has of course is a great degree of international legitimacy and international financial support as well. What the Gaza Palestinian Authority has is deeply rooted institutions in Gaza and some minimally viable fiscal basis as well. The Hamas dominated Palestinian Authority in Gaza recently issued its budget for this year and, if I remember correctly, they claimed a deficit of 90 percent. Only 10 percent of the revenue for that budget came from tax collection. Ninety percent comes from overseas friends. They’re able to get that money in. The tunnel economy which keeps Gaza fed during this period is also one that allows Hamas to enhance its fiscal position. That is to say one weird thing about the closure in Gaza it means that anything that goes in or out is approved by Hamas and taxed by Hamas. So in a weird way it is more fiscally deeply entrenched as a result of the closure on Gaza than would be if the border were completely open.
This split is extremely bad. As far as I can tell, there are two things that prevent the split from being total. Number one, is in a sense something vague and amorphous: Palestinian identity. If you talk to Palestinians in the West Bank, they will talk about Gaza sometimes, and they will admit this often, almost as if it’s another country. That’s true on a social and sometimes a personal level but it’s not true on a political level. The split as I said is deeply unpopular among Palestinians and there’s a strong break on both governments that prevents them from doing anything that would be seen as sealing this. That’s the first thing that keeps them together. The second is extremely prosaic. There’s one other institutional link that keeps holds together and that is the Tawjihi, the examination that Palestinian school children have to take as they’re finishing high school. That is one place—there may be other places, I just haven’t found them—where the two bureaucracies, the ministry of education in Ramallah and the ministry of education in Gaza, actually cooperate, speak to each other, shuttle papers back and forth and that sort of thing. There’s still one unified curriculum for Palestinian Authority schools. The Palestinian Authority ministry of education in Ramallah smuggles in by CD or on disks to Gaza. And the Tawjihi is commonly drawn up and commonly graded.
So except for that vague symbolic level and a very prosaic level, however, the split is deeply entrenched. There are, of course attempts to bridge it. There have been attempts that have been taken that have been taking place over the years in various locations from Israeli prisons to international conferences. The effort right now by Egypt seems to be the only viable one. But to call it viable is probably a little bit polite. The document that was leaked was one that the Egyptians insist be signed as-is was one that papered over differences rather than resolve them and seemed to spend much more of its attention thanking the Egyptians for the mediating role rather than actually resolving the dispute between them. That mediation has been brought to dead end. One again, there’s sort of another party involved – the Egyptians – that I think has an interest in being seen as working to mediate this divide but not necessarily any real interest in resolving it.
I think things could change. That is to say that the Palestinian Authority could be put back together only if the incentives for these governments changed. The Ramallah government is critically dependant on international backing in all kinds of diplomatic and financial ways. An international attitude by those people who are giving the backing and the money in support of Palestinian unity would change the Ramallah government’s tune very quickly. The Palestinian Authority half in Gaza is probably a little bit harder nut to crack internationally, but they make no bones about the fact that their number one priority is lifting the siege in Gaza, that is, some opening – especially of the Egyptian border and an agreement that incorporated within it – some lessening of border restrictions. The Egyptians obviously seem to be moving in the opposite direction. If that were put on the table the Gaza government’s calculus might change a little bit. Absent some change in international incentive or absent of some domestic game changer, like a [Gilad] Shalit deal, which I think would kind of throw a monkey wrench into this, this split is going to continue. So that’s the split in Palestinian terms.
Now, I’ve been talking and mentioning American policy only in the most polite and oblique terms as sort of the international context. Now let me bring that in directly. What has U.S. policy been towards this split? Here, I’m going to drop all diplomacy. I think that essentially it was to promote the split and to maintain it. I don’t think anybody would actually put it quite that way. You go back to the pre-June 2007 period in which there was first a Hamas government and then a national unity government. The United States was very clearly placing its thumb on the scale of insuring that this government not work and that the national unity government not work. The odd thing about this is that there was very little that was secret about this policy. The exact details, what policy instruments the United States was using, was not always completely clear. But even this training of Palestinian security forces under presidential command was a matter of public record. So that when this famous Vanity Fair article that revealed that the United States was going to actively promote a coup came out, what it contributed was lurid prose and a few details and leaked memos, but basically nothing else that wasn’t a more pugnacious version of what had been declared to our policy up to that point.
Since June 2007, since the West Bank and Gaza split, American policy has been West Bank first, as Yousef was reporting at the beginning, essentially, figuring that the divergence in policy performance between the West Bank and the Gaza governments would solve the problem. That allowing some kind of level of security improvements, economic development and/or diplomatic process and the mix of those varies a little bit on the West Bank, and squeezing Gaza hard would make Palestinians come to their senses. That had essentially been American policy. Some of the mechanics of how this was supposed to happen, that is to say that if a Palestinian in Gaza thinks, “Gosh, this government is really bad in Gaza. Let’s get rid of it.” How are they supposed to do this? I think that question was postponed. “Well, tomorrow will be another day.” There’ll be something that’ll make it clear or they’ll be elections and Hamas would be forced to run on a record of poor policy performance forgetting that the split made elections impossible. A new round of elections would not be possible unless there were some West Bank and Gaza reconciliation.
American policy, I think, has some pieces missing under the [George W.] Bush administration. Towards the end of the Bush administration when the Egyptians did get involved in this mediation effort, both promoting a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel and also the mediation effort between Hamas and Fateh, the United States was a little bit more polite or less dismissive of these efforts. But, once again, there was no real support for Palestinian reconciliation. The kind that would be necessary, the argument that I just made, is that without international support, it’s not going to happen. [U.S. President Barack] Obama comes in and essentially what you see is a softer version of the same policy. You see behind the scenes pressure to let up on some of the restrictions on movement of goods into Gaza, especially food, but only in limited ways. And in fact, if anything, a support for harsher restrictions or for more enforcement of the restrictions especially on the Egyptian-Gaza border in ways to ensure that screws really get put on Hamas. If I read the signals correctly, and I may not, advising the Israelis about the possible negative political repercussions of certain permutations of a Shalit deal. That is to say that a deal between Israel and Shalit would have all sorts of domestic Palestinian political repercussions: from the legal (all of a sudden Hamas deputies come out and Hamas a quorum in the legislative council again) to the symbolic (Hamas was able to get it’s prisoners out) to the really embarrassing for Fateh (Hamas may get some prisoners out whereas Fateh negotiators always let Hamas prisoners rot) and this sort of thing. So there are all these possible political implications of it, which again if I read the signals correctly, the United States has been trying to put on the table to ensure that their factored into any deal or lack of deal.
How will things continue? Or how will things end if American policy doesn’t change? Well the glib answer is that they’ll end with another war. But that’s not a good answer because I don’t think a war will end things. Another war is possible. There’s certainly increasing talk of it, that is to say another Israeli -Gaza military conflict confrontation. I don’t think that’s inevitable at any specific point but I think every day that this problem goes on it probably becomes slightly more likely, but it wouldn’t resolve anything. The simple fact is that Hamas was a movement that was born under Israeli occupation. I cannot imagine a form of Israeli reoccupation of Gaza, a sustained military reoccupation of Gaza. Second, I can’t imagine that they could do in 2010 what they were not able to do in the 1980’s and the 1990’s. And so it doesn’t resolve things for Israel if the goal is to throw Hamas out of power. That is a likely outcome but not a likely resolution.
Two sorts of happy endings that people like to talk about I think are unlikely, as I said. One kind of happy outcome would be elections. But as has been made clear, elections are not going to happen until there’s Palestinian reconciliation. That is to say elections happen after resolution of the split not before resolution of the split. The second happy outcome that I think this administration is sort of banking on is some kind of diplomatic process, some kind of peace agreement. This administration is made up of intelligent people and they see the obstacles as much as anybody else. But perhaps the hope is of some kind of diplomatic breakthrough that at least would make a negotiated diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute politically thinkable in a way that it is not now, that that might rejigger the domestic Palestinian scene. I don’t see that happening. I do not know whether a two-state solution is possible anymore but I know it’s not possible now. I think it would take an incredible about to convince Palestinians, and probably Israelis as well, that it is possible. So to put all of the diplomatic eggs in one basket in this kind of grand negotiations basket—well if the Obama administration really wants negotiations or resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, if that’s what they really want, they will probably get them. And that’s probably all they’ll get. So again, an outcome that is not a resolution.
In a way, I think our current policy posture reminds me in some uncomfortable ways of American policy towards Iraq after the Kuwait war. If you remember, sanctions were placed on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. After Iraq was forced to withdraw from Kuwait those sanctions were not lifted. And they were not lifted on the argument that Iraq was not fully into compliance with UN resolutions. What no administration that I ever remember ever saying was if Iraq ever did come into compliance the sanctions would be lifted. The U.S. government, after some dithering by the middle of the Clinton administration, had embarked on a foreign policy of regime change in Iraq and the sanctions were sort of a part of that. If you’re going down that road it doesn’t make any sense to lift sanctions. We got ourselves into an unworkable position, especially as the sanctions began to disintegrate towards the end of the decade. You even take 9/11 out of it and American policy is in a little bit of cul-de-sac over Iraq. Sanctions are always ratcheted up. You never hear talk of ratcheting down sanctions. Once you go down the road of essentially saying only essential food stuffs and medicine and material that has absolutely no military uses whatsoever can go in and out of Gaza—and on the list of military materials are things like concrete and paper—if you go down that road what you’re essentially doing is deliberately engineering economic collapse in Gaza and that has been done. Then stepping in with enough food and medicine to make sure nobody starves—there may be malnutrition, but nobody’s going to starve—and no political way to dig your way out. That’s, I think, where our policy is right now; essentially a cul-de-sac where we can find no alternative to the policy, and I should also add, a policy that has no real cost to the United States, and therefore is one that will probably continue until it completely breaks down. The Obama administration when it came in looked at the possibility of reviving this policy in some way for about 30 seconds and essentially has decided to stick with it on the assumption that the reason why you didn’t get an agreement in the past was the Bush administration was stupid and didn’t pursue it seriously and didn’t pursue it in the right ways. The Bush administration may have been stupid and may not have pursued it in the right ways, but it seems to be in 2010 the option of going back to the period and doing what the Bush administration should have done earlier is just not a viable option. But that’s where our policy is.
Are there alternatives? Well, this is where I’m supposed to get constructive, and I can’t really. Yes, there are alternatives but they’re all riskier and I don’t advance them with any great degree of enthusiasm. A year ago I wrote that the Bush administration had squandered the previous ceasefire. A year ago, in the midst of the Gaza conflict, you had a year- long ceasefire between Israel and Gaza and the Bush administration squandered this on meaningless diplomacy. The Obama administration has essentially done the same thing. It’s been a year of largely quiet between Israel and Gaza and that has been squandered on figuring out what the policy is and implementing the policy that I think is based on diplomatic realities that are no longer extent. The alternative that I would offer would be one that starts not with the Arab-Israeli or Palestinian-Israeli conflict that we would like to see, but one that actually exists right now and that works on making that more livable and more viable. It’s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that exists right now and one with a Palestinian split, one in which Hamas is deeply entrenched in Gaza and in which interestingly Hamas now has something to lose. They have a stake, which they didn’t have if you go back to the 1990’s. They are a governing authority in Gaza and would like to maintain that. Not necessarily forever, but the interesting thing is, on a couple of occasions I’ve had the opportunity to ask a people sort of close to or in the movement, “Okay, you don’t want Gaza forever. What’s your long-term plan?" The answer that I got was my favorite was, “Well, American power won’t always be what it will be. China’s a rising power and God will provide.” A great answer for an Islamist movement. The dependence on God and the dependence on China—I don’t know how those two factor in together. But behind that is not so much a strategy as a mentality. And the mentality is something like this, “Again, tomorrow is another day. God will provide. What we can see right now is making our current predicament more workable.” If you look at this from the perspective of Hamas, and you look at where they are in 2010 and you compare this to where they were when they founded the movement, they look like they’re doing pretty well. So yes, there are all sorts of problems but overall this is not a steady upward curve for the movement, but this mentality is one that has served them well. Fixing perhaps on a distant dream but making very practical day-to-day decisions. Those practical day-to-day decisions again go right back to making Gaza work. Starting policy on that basis, on coming up with some sort of workable arrangements not simply for the governments involved but for the people involved, and then perhaps taking a little bit of this attitude of figuring that an investment in stability is one that can be built on at a later date. This isn’t a very powerful argument to make but I think it’s the only viable one that I can think of. So in essence, it’s an argument for deferring conflict, ending diplomacy for now. It’s an argument for working on making viable arrangements and it’s an argument for sucking Hamas into a political and diplomatic process in the hope that at some later point they’ll be a little bit easier for the international system and for their adversaries to digest. Thank you.
Dr. Nathan Brown is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.