Edited Transcript of Remarks by Ambassador Philip Wilcox, Jr.
'For the Record' No. 283 (2 August 2007)

In the second lecture of the 2007 Palestine Center Summer Intern series, 'The Future of Arab-Israeli Peace: Challenges and Perceptions,' Ambassador Phillip Wilcox, Jr. provided a historical overview of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, peace process and analyzed the lead-up and breakdown of the Oslo Accords. In looking at the fragility of the current situation, Wilcox provided a number of suggestions and proposals for the future. Most importantly, Wilcox highlighted the role of the United States toward the region and argued that if there is ever to be a successful new peace process it's going to have to spell out ahead of time what the end goal is going to be. Otherwise, these two societies, both of which are deeply divided, are going to head off again in different directions.

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
13 July 2007


Ambassador Philip Wilcox, Jr.:

Thank you, Rob, and thank you all for coming.  Thank you, Samar, and the Palestine Center for organizing this event.  I'm usually on the receiving end in the audience here. So, it's a pleasure to be invited to talk to you all.  I understand that this series is basically run by interns, which is a credit to your management skills, Samar, but also it's a wonderful thing how many young Americans are willing to give their time to causes like the Middle East. 

I'm going to talk about the conflict, which you all know too well.  It's one I've been involved in personally for many years, both officially and unofficially, and we've been waiting for peace in this long-standing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians for a long time.  It's sort of like waiting for the Messiah, and I am, like all of you, growing impatient.  I am more interested in redemption here on earth.  I think we all have to work harder because it's getting worse, not withstanding decades of conflict. And there are a whole series of crises that we're facing today, and I'd like to address these.

Israel is facing a dark passage in its history, as are the Palestinians. And, indeed, American policy is facing a growing crisis.  Let's talk about Israel for a moment. There's a confrontation in Israel between the traditional idea of Zionism, a state where the Jews could live as normal people in peace and security, and a newer and virulent and dangerous element in Israeli society and politics that is more interested in land than in people.  It is responsible for the settlement movement and the settlement movement and Israel's continued domination of the Palestinians in the occupied territories is now at the very heart of the conflict.  It's a continuing disaster, needless to say, for the Palestinians, who have long sought peace, security, dignity, recognition and sovereignty in a state of their own. 

Today, for the Palestinians, this goal is more distant than ever.  And for the U.S., the long festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just a minor, regional conflict; it's a matter of U.S. national security.  We have failed to deal with this in a way that has protected American interests.  It is an issue, as you know, that has been laden with fear, propaganda, ideology and a lack of realism on all sides.  It has blocked effective and intelligent action. So, we urgently need a fresh start.

Now, addressing Israel.  The original goals of Israel, I think, have hardly been achieved.  It is not a normal state; it is in constant conflict with its neighbors.  In the beginning, Israel was accepted, warmly received by the international community.  There was a sense of debt because of the suffering of the Jewish people historically.  The world rallied when the state was established in 1948.  Thereafter, Israel accomplished very impressive things: it defeated Arab armies in four wars; it created a powerful army; and indeed it is a nuclear state.  It created a very strong alliance with the world's strongest nation, the United States.  That alliance was one reason for the evolution of thinking in the Arab world, which is no longer rejectionist, which recognizes Israel as a state in the Middle East and which has promised to make peace with it, if Israel will make peace and do right by the Palestinians. 

Those are substantial accomplishments.  The state of Israel has developed an extraordinarily prosperous economy; it has a per capita income which is equal to that of the United Kingdom.  Nevertheless, there is a crisis in the Zionist state, Israel's future is problematical unless it can address effectively the core problem, and that is its relations with its Palestinian neighbors.  Just as Israel experienced a triumph in 1948 defeating Arab armies, establishing a state for Jews as a refuge from the hundreds and hundreds of years of persecution'the Holocaust'the other historic victim that was lesser known at that time but is increasingly recognized is the Palestinians. 750,000 lost their homes and lands, driven out by the Israeli forces while fleeing for their lives.  From the very beginning, the new state of Israel was unwilling or unable to deal realistically with the Palestinian problem. 

An even more serious watershed came in 1967 when Israel won the Six Day war against the Arab states and occupied what we call the occupied territories'the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.  That was a moment in history that could've been different.  Israel had a choice between bargaining on the basis of Resolution 242, land for peace.  To be sure, the Arab states were still rejectionist at that time, but there was an opportunity that was lost.  The hard line element in Israel prevailed.  There was an argument'the liberals, the diplomats believed that it would be dangerous and unwise for Israel to try to dominate the Palestinians, to try to absorb that Arab land into Israel.  They believed that this would bring constant conflict, and of course, they were right.  Their appeals were rejected; the settler movement, which was a group of Jews who believed that God had given this land to the Jewish people. It was theirs, it was their birthright and they had a duty, a divine duty to redeem it, to settle it with Jews and in doing so they would bring forth the Jewish Messiah'a very, very powerful religious doctrine. 

Hardly mainstream Judaism. Indeed, a deviation of Judaism whose principal teaching is justice, peace, and respect for people, not for rocks and for land.  The settlers teamed up with the military, and like many militaries, the Israeli Defense Forces liked the idea of having additional land as buffers against renewed invasions from the Arab states from the East.  So this combination of forces prevailed, and that was the beginning of this fateful settlement movement.  A dangerous era of territorial aggrandizement, settlement, a kind of colonialism after the age of colonialism elsewhere in the world had passed'a plan to dominate the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem.  For many in the Israeli leadership, they saw this as Israel's destiny.  To be sure, there were still critics who opposed it, but it happened and it continues to happen to this day.  The reasons are complex.  It was not easy to find Arab interlocutors to negotiate with at the time.  The Israelis'a product of historic weakness, historic insecurity'felt insecure.  They falsely believed that more land, more power would protect them.  Their goal, the goal of the leadership, over these many years has been to subordinate and defeat and to marginalize the Palestinians.  This is an utterly unrealistic goal.  No nation can dominate and control a large community and succeed in this enterprise.  The Palestinians, as you know, have a much higher birthrate, and they will exceed the Israeli Jews in numbers soon if they have not already done so.  This is not a realistic, wise agenda. Yet, it goes on.  It presents a grave threat, not only to the Palestinians but also to the state of Israel.

The state of Israel like many young states after '48 developed a whole series of myths, super-patriotic myths, which ascribed all virtue to themselves and all evil to their adversaries.  They preached a narrative of Jewish and Israeli victimization.  They attributed all of the wrongs to the Arabs.  They denied any responsibility for the scattering, the dispersion, the 1948 war, which forced the departure of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.  Notwithstanding the fact that today many Israeli historians are re-telling the history of Israel and telling it in a far more honest and realistic way, these myths continue to prevail'they are very strong.  You've all heard the slogans that have been used historically by Israeli leaders and politicians: that Palestine was a 'land without people for a people without land' that 'there was no legitimate Palestinian collective' that there were 'dozens of other Arab states, why couldn't the Palestinians go and live in those states instead of trying to claim part of this tiny land in Palestine.'  You've all heard the canard that the Palestinians 'never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.'  Of course, the Palestinians missed many opportunities and so did the Israelis. Needless to say, so did the Americans.  The many Israeli politicians continued to preach that the goal of the Arab states and of the Palestinians is to destroy Israel, that Israel has no possibility of compromising with them.  Notwithstanding the fact that in the 1980s the Palestinians accepted two states; they recognized Israel and they were willing to negotiate for peace.  Today, the Arab League collectively has offered to make peace with Israel if Israel will evacuate the occupied territories. 

The Israelis also argue, as some of our leaders do, that the essential problem is terrorism, and that terrorism prevents a resolution of the conflict.  Terrorism is an unacceptable political weapon, but it happens.  Terrorism is a symptom of the underlying problem of occupation, settlement and repression.  The cult of the land'the notion that the Israelis have a divine right to keep the land and to settle it remains strong among the settlers.  The idea that by establishing sufficient facts on the ground'settlements, roads and infrastructure will create an irreversible situation in which a Palestinian state could never emerge is still very much alive, unfortunately.  Today, there are some well over 130 settlements in the West Bank, there are some 240,000 Israeli settlers living there and there are 200,000 Israelis who are occupying settlements in East Jerusalem.  The settlement movement has been an amazing success from the point of view of the settlers.  And today, you can see how settlements have been placed in strategic locations throughout the West Bank in a way that would prevent the coalescence of the land into a contiguous, viable, unified Palestinian state. That was the objective of course. 

The Israelis, over the years, have also believed that military force is ultimately the basis of their security.  They have devalued negotiations and compromise. That's very much a part of their national culture and ethos.  Even in negotiations, they see negotiations as a kind of battlefield in which they are going to win and their adversaries will lose.  They see this struggle as a kind of zero-sum context, not as a context in which both sides can win through compromise and meeting their respective, mutual needs.  The Oslo process and its failure was seen as yet another example of Palestinian perfidy, that the Israelis had made a generous offer, which was rejected in favor of violence and a continued campaign to destroy the state of Israel.  That message is very deeply seated among the Israeli public. Indeed, it was popularized by [former U.S.] President [Bill] Clinton and his aides, much of our media and is widely believed in the United States.

The promise of Oslo seemed great in 1993. But it failed, and there are reasons for its failure that we need to understand today if we are ever to engage in a new initiative to bring peace.  The fact is that Oslo was structurally loaded against an equitable peace.  The Palestinians were asked and indeed made commitments up front without any reciprocal undertakings.  During the Oslo years, as negotiations went forward, the settlement populations of the West Bank grew by 100 percent, 100,000 to 200,000, today it's 240,000.  The Palestinians, indeed, share the blame. They promised to work to halt all violence'they did not.  The essential bargain was violated on both sides, and there was not a strong third party intermediary to intervene and keep the parties on track.  The United States was there, but we were not there in a leadership role. We simply passed messages back and forth for much of the time. 

The Oslo process also failed because it didn't define what the destination was supposed to be.  It was just a process of talking in the hopes that this would bring about compromise, mutual confidence and peace.  Neither side had committed themselves to a specific end game.  If there is ever to be a successful new peace process, it's going to have to spell out ahead of time what the end goal is going to be. Otherwise, these two societies, both of which are deeply divided, are going to head off again in different directions.  That's exactly what happened in Oslo.  The Israelis believed, foolishly, that they could continue to dominate the Palestinians, that they could provide them with some kind of limited autonomy and continue their settlement projects.  The Palestinians assumed that they were going to get 22 percent of their former homeland and a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza and a capital in East Jerusalem. So, before we begin this process again in a serious way, we should remember that.  A process alone is doomed to fail.  The offer, the so-called generous offer that the Israelis made at Camp David in 2000 was indeed generous from their perspective. It offered more land than they had ever offered the Palestinians, and it even offered some modest compromise in Jerusalem.  But from the Palestinian view, it was hardly generous. Indeed, it was an invitation to surrender because it would have divided the West Bank into three scarcely collected, connected enclaves, only a foothold in Jerusalem. It would not have formed the basis for a viable Palestinian state. 

Well, Oslo is dead now. The whole framework has been shattered.  Israel has chosen an approach of unilateralism rather than negotiations.  [Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon's disengagement plan, in which he withdrew 8,000 settlers from settlements in Gaza, was seen as a step forward that would continue with similar withdrawals in the West Bank.  It didn't happen, and indeed, in retrospect, it is increasingly well understood that Sharon's plan was only a step toward further consolidation of Israeli control in the West Bank.  Sharon's plan which persists, even though Sharon is gone, to dominate and control the Palestinians, to prevent them from achieving a sovereign, contiguous, wholesome, genuine state of their own to preserve the majority of the settlements.  That project has been advanced by the Israeli leadership through the building of a massive separation barrier, which cuts deeply into the Palestinian territories.  The separation barrier was designed primarily by the Israeli Defense Forces, and the goal is to fragment and isolate the Palestinian population centers and surround them with Israeli settlements and Israeli roads. 

In its current route, it deeply cuts into Palestinian territories and deeply subdivides that landmass into separate Palestinian enclaves, which could not be the basis for a viable state.  Worse yet, the settlements, the wall and the roads are three or four main components of control.  The fourth is a vast series of checkpoints, which prevent Palestinians from traveling freely throughout the West Bank or, in many cases, even traveling very far from their own towns and villages.  Again, the object is control, isolation and fragmentation.

I was in the West Bank a month ago.  I visited friends in Nablus, a major city in the northwest West Bank.  These were prominent businessmen whom I'd known for many years.  They had not been to Jerusalem in seven years because they couldn't go.  When I served in Jerusalem, these same people would come to my home for dinners in the evening and then drive back to Nablus.  So, this extraordinary apparatus for control, separation and fragmentation has been very successful in pursuing the Israeli goal of control and prevention of a genuine, viable Palestinian state.

Well, there is another element to Israeli policy today, and that is that there can be no negotiations to resolve these problems, that they can only be addressed unilaterally because there is no Palestinian partner.  We heard that refrain for many years because of the violence that followed the break-down of the Camp David summit. The Sharon government and its successors have developed the concept that the Palestinians are not serious because they continue to pursue violence. Therefore, there can be no compromise, no negotiations, and the cessation of violence has been established as a condition preceding to any negotiations. Yet, at the same time, the Israeli Defense Forces, using violence, have established very tight control throughout the West Bank'no settlement expansion or road building can take place without the support of the IDF.  Israel continues unilaterally to pursue Palestinian militants and suspected terrorists to assassinate them.  There's no willingness on the part of Israel to reciprocate for a corresponding Palestinian commitment to end the violence.  The 'no partnership' claim, in my view, is a pretext and excuse for avoiding the need to negotiate on these critical issues of border settlements, sovereignty, roads, checkpoints and Jerusalem so that Israel can pursue its own aims unilaterally.

The 'no partner' excuse has become reinforced by the election of Hamas in February 2006 and the creation of a Hamas-led Palestinian government in the Palestinian Authority.  The West has rejected the outcome of that election, has boycotted Hamas, has refused to deal with it, has cut off economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority using the same claim that until a Palestinian government with no Hamas characteristics whatsoever emerges, there is no partner for peace.  Now, this situation has changed a bit, and I'll turn to that later.  The conditions that we have imposed and which the Israelis expect for Hamas to resume negotiations is for Hamas to recognize Israel, to renounce violence and to accept all previous agreements.  These are realistic and reasonable requests.  Indeed, Hamas should do these things.  Yet, there is no reciprocal undertaking from Israel to renounce violence, to recognize a Palestinian state or to abide by previous agreements.  The Israelis, as is the case with the Palestinians, have violated most previous agreements themselves. So, there's no sense of reciprocity or balance. 

Now, why, indeed, is Israel pursuing a policy, which on the face of it is unrealistic and cannot be achieved and is a recipe for chronic violence and ultimately for a defeat of Israel's own basic goals of living with its neighbors in peace as a normal state in the Middle East?  That's a tough question, and I don't think anybody has a complete answer. But I think it has a lot to do with the insecurity of the Jewish people, of their historic fears. It's a kind of pathology, I think, of a people that have suffered weakness or powerlessness and persecution and that has affected their attitude toward their neighbors, their attitude toward this conflict.  It expresses itself in an exaggerated sense the use of military force, of power, deep suspicion and mistrust of its neighbors and a sense of national paranoia. 

Let's think about the consequences of this if it continues.  If it continues, it is hard to see that Israel's democracy will survive.  Some people say that there is already a de-facto one state in Israel and Palestine.  If that situation persists, a soon to be majority of the people living there will be powerless; they will be subject to the minority, the Israelis.  That is not a recipe for a flourishing democracy.  Moreover, the need to invest huge resources and military force, the very process of dispossessing a neighboring people with all of the violence and injustice that that entails is a deeply corrupting experience and it will and indeed is, at this time, weakening the fabric of Israeli society, democracy and the rule of law.  Israel will be safe; Israel will fulfill its founding fathers dreams of peace and security in a Jewish democratic state only if it liberates the Palestinians, if it allows the Palestinians to establish a sovereign state of their own, living at peace with Israel, only if the holy city of Jerusalem becomes not only the capital of Israel but also the capital of Palestine.  The interests of the Palestinians and the Israelis, then, are really interdependent.  What is important, basically, to both of them cannot be achieved unless the others' needs are also fulfilled, and there's hope in that equation.

Let's turn to the Palestinians.  They're a mirror image, in many ways, of the Israelis.  They too want peace and sovereignty in a state of their own.  They have a powerful sense of nationalism and identity.  They too are victims of a tragic history.  Their history was a history of domination and control'first by the Turks, then by the British and now by the Israelis.  They suffered dispossession and dispersion, as did the Jewish people in Europe.  They too developed a set of national myths that are not always honest and true.  They too have seen themselves as the exclusive victim.  There's a huge argument, an endless argument about who is really at fault'where does the balance of blame lie?  I think that's a futile argument.  I think we need to stop it.  The point is that there are two societies of human beings, to be sure, badly led, who deserve more and who deserve better.  Instead of arguing endlessly over who is right and who is wrong, let's acknowledge that both of the leaderships of these societies have done terrible things to each other.  That there is no way to say the balance of blame lies on one side or the other'that is not a fruitful way to bring about peace. 

History is tragic, and it's always been tragic.  There is no such thing as true justice.  True justice for the Palestinians would be the return of their entire homeland to them, from which they were driven in 1948.  True justice for the Jews would be to bring back to earth all of those who perished in the Holocaust, all of those who suffered throughout Jewish history.  So, there isn't any true justice, but there is a way to solve this problem'by dividing the land into two states.  That is a way that can fulfill the basic needs of both people.  That's the challenge.  The Palestinians have been severely disadvantaged throughout history.  They have never had a patron, a sponsor, whereas the Jews had first the U.K. and now the U.S.  It's never been an equal playing field. Even the Arab states have exploited and manipulated the Palestinians, but the Palestinians themselves also have to recognize some kind of accountability.  They did not recognize the weight and force of Zionism; they thought it was just another form of grasping European colonialism.  Like the Israelis, they have focused almost exclusively on their own suffering, and they have not recognized the historic origins of Zionism'the suffering of the Jews.  They've also suffered from weak leadership at many stages of their history.  They have not shown the kind of pragmatism and realism that would've helped them along the way.  I'm not saying that this would have rescued them, but they too could've done better.  They too could've shown more introspection, more realism and more pragmatism. 

[Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat, I think, will be acclaimed by history for recognizing the need for peace and recognizing that the only realistic way to get there was to divide the land, to accept a state in 22 percent of Israel.  But Yasser Arafat's legacy will be checkered forever by his poor governance, by his corruption, by the inept way that he handled his leadership in those brief years of the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s'also for his lack of skillful negotiations.  So, Arafat was a far from perfect leader.  I think, perhaps worst of all, in assessing blame to the Palestinians is their lack of understanding of the traumatic psychic effects of terrorism and how that played into the hands of the Israeli leadership, who used that to make their case and to reinforce the mythology that Palestinians basically were people who hated Jews, who wanted to kill them, who wanted to drive them out.  One can understand, of course, why terrorism evolves and erupts in conflicts like this.  It often has, but it has not been an effective weapon for the Palestinians. It has hurt them deeply and prolonged the conflict.

Palestinians also have not achieved political unity.  It's not unusual amongst subject people not to develop sophisticated self-government or political unity. It's quite common, in fact, but it's a big problem for the Palestinians, and it's an even bigger problem today as we watch this growing impasse between Hamas and Fateh.  It's very, very problematic, the willingness of the President, Mahmoud Abbas, to confront Hamas, to accept the urgings of the U.S. and Israel, to boycott Hamas, to not to try to restore some kind of unity government'it is probably going to fail and yet that seems to be the current policy of the Palestinian Authority leadership.  What the Palestinians need is to unify themselves. They need to present a united front if they're going to be able to resume negotiations with Israel.  The U.S. and Israel and the international community, of course, should stop this project in which we have been engaged in, to divide the Palestinians rather than unite them.  So, we bear part of the blame for this, but the Palestinians have played into our plot, and it is hurting them deeply.  Indeed, if the Palestinians cannot unite, their future is even darker.

Now, let's turn briefly to the United States.  We bear a large part of the blame.  We do have an alliance with the state of Israel.  That alliance could be used effectively and creatively and it has not been.  It is an alliance in which we defer, regularly, to Israeli policy rather than asserting American policies.  We have not used our massive influence, our intimate relationship with Israel to move it toward wiser policies, to encourage it to make peace.  We have not coupled that alliance with Israel with the kind of respectful commitment to Palestinians, who are the other party to the conflict.  At times, over the years, we have intervened successfully.  We did in the Eisenhower era'we obliged the Israelis to withdraw from Sinai. [Former U.S.] President [Jimmy] Carter did noble work in fostering the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.  [Former U.S. President] George Bush, Sr. and [former U.S. Secretary of State] Jim Baker worked very hard to bring about the first break-through in Israeli-Palestinian recognition and the beginnings of negotiations in Madrid.  Even at Oslo, toward the end at least, Bill Clinton put down some American ideas about a solution for the first time in history.  But by and large, Clinton's role was passive and highly partial.  Indeed, Aaron Miller, the deputy negotiator, acknowledged that throughout much of the Oslo period, the American approach was to serve as Israel's lawyer.  I think that was a rather brutal but a very honest description of how we saw our role. 

That's not the role that we need to play.  We need to be committed to both sides. We need to embrace both sides, and we have to be a genuine mediator if we are going to help them out of this tragic mess.  The Bush administration has rejected that role.  Their first principle was ABC''Anything But Clinton''and they tried to back away from the conflict.  Episodically, they rhetorically committed themselves to a Palestinian state, they opposed the wall, they opposed settlements, but this was mostly rhetoric. And by and large, it has been a downhill path toward deference, if not embrace, of Israeli unilateral policies, highly partial policies, which has not succeeded.  There have been voices in the administration that have tried to reverse this. [U.S. Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice has talked about creating a political horizon.  From what I can see, she has received no support from the White House.  We have traditionally opposed settlements, but there has been nothing tangible behind this objection to settlements, to the wall, to the checkpoints, to the deep, deep decline in the Palestinian economy and growing hardship there.  We have used the 'no partner' theory; our policy has been largely passive and acquiescent.  Now, we are promoting the split between