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"Middle East peace efforts: lessons from healthcare reform" by Amjad Atallah
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Amjad Atallah
was published in the Los Angeles
Times
on 12 March 2010. To view
this article online, please go to http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-atallah12-2010mar12,0,3747061.story.
"Middle East peace efforts: lessons from
healthcare reform"
By Amjad
Atallah
It took a year of trying
for President Obama to persuade Israelis and
Palestinians to enter into "proximity talks" to
resolve issues standing in the way of a final
peace plan. But as we learned from the stunning
announcement this week -- during Vice President
Joe Biden's visit to the region -- that Israel
had approved 112 new settlement units in the
West Bank and 1,600 new settlement units in
East Jerusalem, there is a lot that can go
wrong.
Assuming the Israeli announcement
doesn't derail the process before it gets
underway, the Obama administration will need to
move decisively. And in doing so, it should
keep in mind three valuable lessons from the
fight for healthcare reform.
The first
is the importance of maintaining ownership. The
administration made clear that getting
affordable healthcare to all Americans was a
top priority. But it then farmed out the
details to legislators, who spent a year making
a hash of things.
Similarly, James L.
Jones, Obama's national security advisor, has
made it clear that the Israeli-Arab conflict is
a top priority for U.S. national security
interests in the Middle East. And it should be.
Nothing would help us more in every theater of
operations than a U.S.-engineered resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In
contrast to that assessment, however, other
U.S. officials -- including Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton -- have said that
although the United States wants an agreement,
"we can't want this more than the parties."
But, in fact, the U.S. may want an agreement
more than this particular Israeli
government.
Israel's Likud leadership
may have agreed to resume talks, but their
actions seem designed to ensure failure. In
addition to approving new settlements, Israeli
officials have signaled that they want to
reopen issues that have already been resolved
in previous talks -- such as where borders
should be drawn -- rather than taking up where
things last broke off, as called for by
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
and Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel's Kadima
party.
This is oddly similar to the
Republican demand that Congress go back to the
beginning on healthcare in the wake of Scott
Brown's election to the Senate. Revisiting
issues that have already been settled is not
part of an honest attempt to reach an
agreement, but rather an effort to run out the
clock on this president.
The
administration must lay down the parameters for
talks and then drive the parties to discuss
areas of greatest agreement. If the parties
can't ultimately agree on all issues, the
United States should marshal international
support for proposals that can be endorsed by
the U.N. Security Council.
A second
pertinent lesson from the healthcare process is
the need to act quickly. Healthcare reform
efforts have dragged on so long that opponents
have had time to mount one hyperbolic attack
after another. Similarly, a long negotiation
process on Middle East peace would allow
spoilers to mount attacks that could doom an
agreement.
The Arab League, which
provided Abbas the cover he needed to agree to
the peace talks, has threatened to pull its
support for the process in the wake of Israel's
settlement announcement. Assuming the league
does stay engaged, it has called for a
four-month deadline for concluding the talks,
which would mean they would end shortly before
Israel terminates its self-proclaimed
moratorium on settlement construction. Although
the moratorium is rife with exceptions -- as
this week's announcement showed -- Palestinians
assume Israel will launch into an even greater
frenzy of construction on Palestinian land in
September.
This gives the United States
precious little time to get to an agreement.
But the good news is that many difficult issues
have already been negotiated. The indispensable
ingredient now is American political will to
see the process concluded with a measure of
real justice for Palestinians and security for
Israelis.
The
Bosnian-Croatian-Yugoslavian talks lasted years
while the international community playacted at
being an "honest broker." When the United
States finally took charge, ramming through an
agreement -- even an imperfect one -- peace was
achieved.
A final lesson of healthcare
is the need to sell the public on the process.
Obama has finally taken to the "bully pulpit"
to explain to Americans why the healthcare
reform bill needs to be passed now -- even if
it is imperfect.
Israeli-Arab peace is
an over-riding American national security
objective, but it is also a hot-button issue
domestically. Those who think Israel's borders
are set by divine fiat probably can't be won
over. But they are not the majority, and those
who are worried about Israel's security can be
convinced of the need to move forward. The
majority of American Jews (including the 78%
who voted for Obama), and the majority of
American Muslims, American Christians and
American Arabs all agree with the president's
reading of this conflict. But the president
needs to energize them to be his support
network as he presses for an
agreement.
This conflict remains an
impediment to America's interests in the Middle
East. We have no choice but to engage fully in
ending it.
Amjad
Atallah is director of the Middle East Task
Force at the New America Foundation and served
as a legal advisor to the Palestinian
negotiating team from
2000-03.
The
views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not necessarily
reflect
those of The Jerusalem Fund.
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