Daily Alert Archives

Toward a New Negotiating Paradigm

[Arab Reform Bulletin-Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] Mohammad Yaghi - Fatah rules the West Bank, but it can barely preserve itself in power despite enormous financial support from the international community. Hamas controls Gaza and enjoys support among many Palestinians in the diaspora. It relies on armed resistance and terrorism and says it would be willing to reach a long-term truce with Israel but that ultimately Palestinians must rule all of historic Palestine. Regardless of the U.S. position, this contention among Palestinians will continue; even if they reach an accord, it will not last. The days when the PLO, led by Fatah, could claim to represent all Palestinians are over. Now it lacks both the mandate to sign an accord with Israel and the capacity to implement one. Israel has made progress on security issues a precondition for compromise over permanent status issues. But eight years of violence since the failure of negotiations in 2000 makes it hard to believe the PLO will ever fulfill this condition. What has collapsed is not the principle of sharing the land, but the idea that the way to reach this goal is through bilateral negotiations between the PLO and Israel. Rather than continuing the process begun at Annapolis, the new U.S. administration needs to consider a two-track strategy. The first track would aim to empower moderate Palestinians to expand their base of support in order to pave the road for peace and to ensure that an agreement can be implemented. The second track should establish a new paradigm for negotiations in which the Arab countries together would negotiate with Israel to solve the Palestinian question as part of the wider conflict between Israel, on one side, and Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians, on the other. The idea would not be to convince the Arabs to drop their peace initiative of March 2002 or to press Israel to accept it, but rather to begin from the principles that both sides agreed to at the 1991 Madrid conference: land for peace and UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. Under this new approach, Arab countries would substitute for the weak and divided Palestinians. The writer is a columnist for the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam.
2008-11-14 01:00:00
Full Article