President Donald Trump has finally unveiled his 180-page vision for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which came as a sweet balm to Washington think-tankers and Middle East opinion writers, who had been slumbering like Rip Van Winkle, waiting for a chance to rise and display their dilapidated peace-processing expertise. As if no time had passed between 1995, or 1999, or 2004, or 2007, and the present, they got right busy determining whether the president’s vision was indeed realistic and viable, and whether it measured up to the accumulated history of American peace processing, and whether it was “fair” or “just” to the Palestinians, and whether it might just “bring both sides back to the table,” and on, and on, and on.
After all, the parameters for a “final settlement” between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs have long been clear: The so-called Clinton Parameters—named after former President Bill Clinton, Hillary’s husband, who had the good fortune of serving his two terms during the short, sunny period between the end of the Cold War (1946-1989) and the beginning of the decadeslong Global War on Terror (2001-the present). The Clinton Parameters were the summa of President Clinton’s approach to foreign policy, which, in the absence of any larger dragons to slay, sought to perform important good deeds like making peace between the British and the IRA in Northern Ireland, and Israel and the PLO in the Middle East.
All we needed to achieve peace in the Middle East, the wise peace processors of the Clinton years told us, was the courage to finesse a few small remaining areas of disagreement, which required having the right leadership in Israel and Palestine. They also required trust and confidence-building measures, including a freeze on Israeli settlement activity. Those were the days, my friend. The days of wine and roses, and of heroes like Robert Malley.
Yet, despite the parameters being so simple, obvious, and apparently easy to achieve, the peace process shockingly never went anywhere. Instead, it degenerated into the violence of the second intifada, which wasn’t led by Yasser Arafat; except, of course, that it was. After Arafat died in 2004, elections were duly held among the Palestinians, who elected Hamas, which chose rockets over suicide bombers after the Israelis left Gaza—a move that was supposed to bring about peace, but of course did nothing of the kind. Bill Clinton blamed Arafat. Malley and the New York Review of Books blamed Israel for not conceding enough fast enough to the Palestinians at Camp David, and for passing the baklava from left to right instead of from right to left.
Nearly a decade later, Condoleezza Rice tried her hand at “bringing peace,” and came up empty; a decade after that, so did John Kerry. Apparently, the box containing “peace” was empty…