Back Channel Negotiation: Secrecy in the Middle East Peace Process

1. Analyzing the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process

1 1 Analyzing the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process A nation that cannot be trusted to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive exchanges . . . will be crippled in negotiations. —Henry Kissinger1 Secrecy has long been a tool used by diplomats and politicians in their negotiations with adversaries. Perplexingly, secret negotiations can and often do take place in parallel with open and acknowledged “front channel” negotiations. Front channel negotiators meet with their counterparts and are often subject to intense scrutiny by the public, political parties, and media. However, different negotiators are sometimes sent to negotiate with their counterparts, but their encounters are kept secret from the front channel negotiators, the media, political and other actors, as well as the public. I term these secret encounters “back channel negotiation” (BCN). In this book, I explore the back channel negotiations of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not really a very old conflict, dating back only to the early 1900s, when the British Army wrested Palestine from the crumbling Ottoman Empire and committed itself to prepare Palestine for Arab selfrule under a “mandate” from the League of Nations, while also promising to create a Jewish national home in the same country. The solutions to this conflict are not particularly elusive or mysterious. On the contrary, various facets of a solution have been well known and debated among the interested parties at least since 1967 when Israel took over the remaining Palestinian territories that were then under Jordanian and Egyptian control (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively). And yet it is a conflict that has proven highly resistant to all attempts to resolve it; diplomats and scholars term this intractability.2 In 2 Back Channel Negotiation this book, we confront the painful irony that some methods for peacemaking have had the unintended consequence of inflaming the conflict and sustaining its intractability. High-profile mediators from the United Nations to the United States have tried and failed to resolve it for the past five and one-half decades. For the Palestinians , the open wound of this conflict has meant displacement and dispossession of what today has grown to approximately 4 million refugees, loss of land and property, and generations prevented from having normal lives in the land of their origins. In the West Bank and Gaza, people have endured a violent military occupation. For the Israelis, the conflict has meant a constant, nagging insecurity about attacks on civilians and the fear that conflict will reignite beyond its borders to wider wars with neighboring countries such as Iran, Syria, and Iraq, or even into a “civilizational” war pitting Islam against Judaism. The PalestinianIsraeli conflict, despite its relative scale, has become the paradigm of conflicts considered to be intractable. For the United States and others, the continuation of this conflict has meant tense relations with Arab countries and, worse still, with populations who identify with Islam and have begun to see the conflict through a religious prism. For Arab states, the conflict has been used to justify undemocratic rule at home and a foreign policy hostile to Israel (and by extension, to the United States). To date, only two states—Egypt and Jordan—have a formal peace with Israel, and both concluded that peace at least partly on the misplaced hope that a resolution of the Palestinian question would follow. The definitive resolution of this conflict would bring numerous benefits on global as well as regional levels, not to mention the direct benefits of peace so long sought by Palestinians and Israelis. The contemporary Palestinian-Israeli peace process is part of broader effort to bring about Arab-Israeli peace. The Palestinian-Israeli dimension of this concerns the political status of the territory and Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank (an area lying to the west of the Jordan River) and the Gaza Strip (a Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean coastal plain), and the conditions under which Israel will accept any change in their political status. Historical narratives of the conflict are far more common than analyses of the negotiations, and such narratives are beyond the scope of this book.3 My intention with this book is to thoughtfully strengthen efforts to make a just peace rather than simply to criticize the efforts of peacemakers. The study of Analyzing the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process 3 peacemaking is far less developed than the study of war, and there is still much to learn about...