The final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq this week raises the question of Baghdad's future role along Israel's eastern front. Historically, it is perhaps forgotten that Iraq was once a confrontation state. With remarkable consistency, Iraq, under various governments, dispatched one third of its ground order-of-battle against Israel by moving its forces across Jordan in 1948 and again in 1967, while joining the battles in the Golan Heights in 1973. In 1991, Saddam Hussein launched 39 missiles against Israel as well. However, Saddam's defeat in 1991 and his overthrow in 2003, removed the Iraqi factor from Israel's strategic calculations for twenty years. How does Israel have to take Iraq into account, now that the U.S. has pulled out?
Iraq's role in the future Middle East will be largely affected by Iran. With the rise of Shiite parties after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran has had many opportunities for influencing its political orientation. There are roughly eight Shiite groups in Iraq with ties to Iran, most of which received Iranian funding. This includes the al-Dawa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who left Iraq in 1979, and actually lived in Iran for eight years from 1982 through 1990. The Iranians gave al-Maliki's al- Dawa Party training. In fact, al- Dawa engaged in terrorist operations on behalf of Iran in Kuwait along with Lebanese Shiites. From 1990 until 2003, al-Maliki lived in Damascus and worked closely with Hezbollah. Since becoming prime minister he has had to carefully balance his ties to Tehran alongside a working relationship with Washington.
Iran was able to really
influence events in post-Saddam Iraq. Behind the scenes, it helped form
the coalition of Shiite parties that chose al-Maliki as their candidate
for prime minister in 2006. The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq,
General Ray Odierno, gave an interview to The Washington Post in October
2008, in which he disclosed that he had seen intelligence reports
indicating that Tehran had bribed Iraqi leaders in order to prevent the
completion of a new agreement between the U.S. and Iraq that would have
allowed U.S. forces to remain in Iraq. At that time, Iran pressed its
allies in Iraq to make sure that there would be a complete withdrawal of
U.S. forces from Iraq by December 2011. In a March 2009 U.S. cable that
was made public through WIKILEAKS, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
confessed to President Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan,
that he did not trust al-Maliki, whom he viewed as "an Iranian agent."
This was still an astounding statement for the Saudi monarch to make
about the new Iraqi leadership, Saudi antipathy to Shiism
notwithstanding.
Iran has other ways of influencing developments in Iraq. After 2003, Iran infiltrated thousands of Revolutionary Guards into Iraq who helped the Shiite militias. By 2007, with the "surge" of U.S. forces in Iraq under General David Petraeus, the U.S. directly threatened these Iranian forces, who feared any further escalation that might lead to a war with the U.S. This led to their withdrawal from Iraq. Nevertheless, Tehran continued to fund, train, and supply arms to various Iraqi Shiite forces, who were brought to bases in Iran.
Clearly, without the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, the Iranians will be able to infiltrate Iraq again and influence its internal stability. On December 7, the deputy head of operations for U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt.-Gen. Frank Helmick, admitted that there are still "security gaps" in the new Iraqi Army that Washington is leaving behind. This raises questions about whether Baghdad has the capabilities to face the Iranian challenge without U.S. help.
Iran has also been developing its relationships with Shiite religious institutions in Iraq, where the Shiite holy cities of Najaf, where the tomb of Ali, the first Shiite Imam, was built and Karbala, where the tomb of his son, Hussein, who was the second Imam is located. In Samarra, there is the burial place of the tenth and eleventh imams; it is also where the twelfth imam disappeared, according to Shiite tradition, until he returned as the Mahdi. Tens of thousands of Iranian pilgrims come to these holy sites every month. Like with the Iraqi political parties, Iran is making payments to Shiite leaders and institutions, although at present, the highest Iraqi Shiite leader, Ayatollah Sistani, opposed Iranian policy in Iraq in the past.
In short, Iran has strong strategic, economic, and religious interests that it will pursue in Iraq after the US withdrawal. Its main goal is to make sure that Iraq never again becomes a strong power, like in the era of Saddam Hussein, which can threaten Iranian security. To achieve this aim, Tehran will try to reduce Iraq to a satellite state that will support Iran's regional strategy in the Middle East. Already, Iran is demanding that al-Maliki back the embattled regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, rather than the Syrian opposition which Turkey is helping. Al-Maliki is backing the Iranian position.
The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is producing a strategic change in Israel's situation in the Middle East. From 1980 until 1988, Iranian expansionism was blocked by the Iran-Iraq War, with the exception of Lebanon, which Tehran exploited as a front against Israel and the West. From 1991 until the end of 2011, Iraq served as a strategic barrier to Iran, and since 2003, that barrier was reinforced by U.S. military power. Now it appears that the Iraqi barrier is being removed as it increasingly comes under Iranian influence.
This will result in increasing Iranian pressure on Jordan to prevent it from becoming the front line for halting the spread of Iranian influence, which might, if not opposed, seek to encircle Saudi Arabia from the north and open a front with Israel to its east. Given this new reality, the U.S. and its allies must reinforce Jordan's ability to contend with the new challenges it will face from the east, as Iraq enters increasingly into the Iranian orbit. A new effort to support Jordan was evident this year when the Gulf states proposed making the Hashemite Kingdom a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Moreover, there are direct implications from the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq for Israel as well. Should Iran lose its special relationship with Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, it will undoubtedly seek to utilize Iraq as a platform for escalating conflict with Israel. The new situation emerging as a result makes the strategic logic of Israel retaining the Jordan Valley as its forward line of defense even more compelling, just as leading voices in the international community are unfortunately pressuring it to fully withdraw from the West Bank and accept the 1967 lines.
The U.N. reported last week that at least 2,900 people have been killed in the Syrian uprising since it began in March. While part of the international community has been focusing on the tremendous loss of life that the Syrian people have suffered, political analysts in the Arab world have also been examining the implications of the Syrian revolt for the balance of power in the Middle East, especially the future of Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon.
For example, in
mid-September, a long article in the Lebanese daily as-Safir considered
this very question by asking what will happen to Hezbollah. Four
scenarios are considered: First, the Syrian regime remains in power
without having to make any concessions to the West regarding its
relations with "the resistance" -- namely Hezbollah and Iran. In the
second scenario, the Syrian regime has to give up its past foreign
policy of support for Hezbollah and Iran in order to gain Western
support.
According to a third scenario, the Assad regime falls and is replaced by a pro-Western regime that cuts Syria off from Hezbollah and Iran. The author, who is Lebanese and clearly is sympathetic to Hezbollah, still believed in September that the first scenario is the most likely of the five.
But what if the analysis in as-Safir is wrong, and Iran is about to lose its strategic window to the Arab world and the eastern Mediterranean? If the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood becomes the dominant force in a post-Assad Syria, then Iran may face a significant setback, as well. True, the Muslim Brotherhood supported Hezbollah's war against Israel in 2006, and therefore looked warmly upon Shiite Iran. But now it has a Sunni Muslim alternative -- Erdogan's Turkey.
In fact, Turkey has been hosting meetings of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and systematically building its influence with the Syrian opposition, in general. Moreover, during their revolt, the Syrian people saw how the Assad regime relied on Iranian personnel and on Hezbollah to battle the demonstrators; there is a broad revulsion among Syrians of all political perspectives about maintaining Syrian-Iranian alliance in the future.
If the Iranians lose their Syrian bridgehead to the Arab world, do they have an alternative? There is a view that the Iranians are considering making Jordan a new center of influence in the Arab world. In the past, this would have been unthinkable, since the Jordanian population has historically been Sunni Muslim, except for a small Christian minority. In contrast, in Syria, the Alawi elite came to be recognized as Shiites back in the 1970's.
However, the demography of Jordan has begun to change as a result of the 2003 Iraq War. Nearly one million Iraqi refugees have entered Jordan in the last eight years including several hundred thousand Iraqi Shiites. Most Iraqi Shiites are loyal to their own religious leaders, like Ayatollah Sistani, and not to those of Iran. But Tehran can be expected to seek to exploit this population and make it a target for its propaganda and influence.
The Iranians often invest in Shiite shrines as a means of building positions of influence, especially those connected to the family of Ali, Muhammad's son-in law, who is regarded by Shiites as his rightful successor and as the first imam. In Damascus, the shrine of Ali's daughter, Zaynab, is a center for Shiite pilgrimage. These shrines are not only religious centers. According to U.S. court documents it was at the shrine of Zaynab where the head of Saudi Hezbollah, who came from the Saudi Shiite town of Qatif, recruited operatives for the Khobar Towers attack in 1996. Nineteen U.S. servicemen and 372 other people were wounded in the attack.
In Jordan, there is an Iranian-funded shrine for Ali's brother, Jafar, near Karak, about 150 kilometers south of Amman. Thousands of Iraqis and Iranian visit Shiite shrines that are in Jordan. They also revere and visit the tombs of the companions of Muhammad, who led Islam's earliest battles against the Byzantines. There have been reports that Iraqi Shiites have been purchasing properties near some of these shrines In 2006, the radical Iraqi Shiite leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, came to visit the Shiite shrines of Jordan.
Iran's Jordanian option does not yet have a military arm. Hezbollah does not have a presence in Jordan, though it has been active in neighboring Iraq, training the Shiite militias. Should Iraq become an Iranian satellite after the U.S. withdraws, the idea that Iran would be able to use Hezbollah from Iraq should not be ruled out. In the meantime, the Iranians have a strategic alliance with Hamas. And even if Turkey becomes the dominant external ally of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran will not let go of its branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas. Hamas in Jordan could become an important instrument for Iran for creating a military presence, in the future, which the Jordanian security forces will oppose, but face political constraints challenging completely.
In December 2004, King Abdullah of Jordan was the first Sunni Arab leader to publicly warn the West about "a Shiite crescent' emerging after the Iraq War, which Iran would exploit to spread its influence across the Arab world. With the whole Middle East in flux today, Israel will have to very carefully monitor these developments, especially if Iran seeks to move the focal point of its military influence from Israel's northern border to its eastern front.
The changing situation provides yet another reason why Israel must not be pushed into sacrificing vital security assets, like the Jordan Valley, which has been the front line of its defense for decades and will be critical in the future against the uncertainty it faces to its east in the years ahead.
Whoever thinks that U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 - the famous Partition Plan - from Nov. 29, 1947, is for historians of the Middle East alone, is not aware of the role that the 64-year-old resolution still plays to this very day. As Israel's ambassador to the U.N. in 1999, I had to deal with an effort by the PLO observer to revive the territorial map of Resolution 181 as a substitute for U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 from November 1967, which had served as the agreed basis of the peace process until then.
This Palestinian
initiative began on March 1, 1999, when the German ambassador to Israel,
who represented the European Union when Berlin held the EU's rotating
presidency, sent a surprising message in a "non-paper" to the Israeli
Foreign Ministry. He confirmed that the EU still was of the view that
Jerusalem - both east and west - should be a Corpus Separatum (an
internationalized separate entity).
This term comes right out of
Resolution 181, and apparently still influenced the diplomatic
doctrines of some European countries, who believe that at the end of the
day Jerusalem should become an internationalized city.
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The
German message was leaked to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. Within a few
days one the heads of the Palestinian negotiating team at the time,
Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), responded in the Palestinian Authority official
newspaper, al-Ayyam, saying that the European note "confirms that both
parts of Jerusalem - west and east - are occupied territory."
The Europeans had managed to harden the Palestinian position. Within a short time, the new Palestinian position was taken up in New York by the PLO Observer, Nasser al-Qidwa, who wrote an official letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which demanded that "Israel must still explain to the international community the measures it took illegally to extend its laws and regulations to the territory it occupied in the war of 1948, beyond the territory allocated to the Jewish State in resolution 181 (II). Such a situation has not been accepted by the international community." The areas to which the Palestinian representative was referring included what are today Israeli cities like Beersheba, Ashkelon, Nazareth, and others. They also included Jerusalem.
As with any formal letter to the secretary-general, the letter was distributed subsequently to the representative of every member state of the U.N. The hard-line stand that the Palestinians were now taking on the territorial issue before the entire international community was not the Palestinian representative's idea alone. At the time when he drafted and sent the letter, he was hosting the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat in New York. Arafat went to see Annan and spoke with him about Resolution 181. Upon exiting the secretary-general's office, he held a brief press conference in Arabic and made reference to Resolution 181 (we sent an Arabic-speaking diplomat to listen).
In order to prepare the Israeli response to this new Palestinian move, I needed instructions from the highest levels in the Foreign Ministry. I called Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon, who referred me to the address of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to the Knesset on Dec. 3, 1949, at the end of Israel's War of Independence. Ben-Gurion opposed the voices in the international community that were still calling for Jerusalem's internationalization: "...we can no longer regard the U.N. Resolution of 29th November as having any moral force. After the U.N. failed to implement is own resolution, we regard the resolution of the 29th November concerning Jerusalem to be null and void." I took Ben-Gurion's words and put them into a letter to Annan that was distributed to every U.N. member.
It is important to recall that U.N. General Assembly resolutions are only recommendations and do not bind member states under international law. Moreover, the Arab states had rejected Resolution 181 in its entirety, especially its call for establishing a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion understood the moral importance of Resolution 181 because of its recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a state. But he also recalled the failure of the U.N. to stop the aggression of the Arab states in 1948. Moreover, it was not the U.N. that legally created the Jewish state with Resolution 181, but rather Israel's own declaration of independence in 1948 a year later. So what then happened to the borders that Resolution 181 proposed, especially with respect to Jerusalem? Did the concessions that the Jewish leadership made in 1947 survive that period?
When leadership of the Jewish Agency accepted Resolution 181 in 1947, it was willing to acquiesce to its proposal for internationalizing Jerusalem for ten years as an interim measure. This was the price that it had to pay for gaining international support for Jewish independence. But the Jewish leadership at that time also knew that according to Resolution 181, there would be a referendum after the ten-year period, and given the Jewish majority in Jerusalem, the residents of the Corpus Separatum, could seek to be annexed to the Jewish state. In short, the Jewish people had not relinquished their rights to Jerusalem by accepting the Partition Plan.
In any case, the situation with Resolution 181 changed dramatically in 1948. When Jerusalem came under attack and was struck by the artillery of the Egyptian Army to the south of Jerusalem and by the Arab Legion to the northeast, Jewish representatives at the U.N. demanded in March 1948 that the Security Council intervene to halt the shelling of the Old City of Jerusalem, which was concentrated on the Jewish Quarter. Dozens of synagogues and Talmudic study halls were being systematically destroyed. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and even the Dome of the Rock were hit by the shells of the Arab artillery. Many of the details were presented to the U.N.
In the end the U.N. did not lift a finger to halt the attacks on Jerusalem and save the lives of 100,000 of Jewish residents who were under siege. The only force that came to save Jerusalem from this assault were the Jewish underground armies that became the Israel Defense Forces, after Israel's independence. These were the historical details that led Ben-Gurion to utterly reject the internationalization of Jerusalem, contained in Resolution 181, and move the governing institutions of the nascent State of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 1949.
The borders proposed by Resolution 181, especially with respect to Jerusalem, were simply superseded by realities on the ground. Those borders simply were no longer relevant. Indeed, the terms of reference of all Arab-Israeli diplomacy changed accordingly, when the 1949 Armistice Agreements replaced the past references to Resolution 181. The point of departure of Arab-Israeli diplomacy changed yet again after the 1967 Six-Day War with U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which became the only agreed basis for Arab-Israeli agreements.
But these facts did not prevent the Palestinians from taking Resolution 181 out of the archives, even though they had rejected it along with the Arab states when it was adopted. In light of recent Palestinian statements about Resolution 181 beginning in the 1990s, it is especially important to look at the letter Mahmoud Abbas gave to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-.oon on Sept. 23 of this year, which requested that the U.N. accept a Palestinian state as a full member. Abbas notably based his request on Resolution 181 and didn't write a word about Resolution 242.
True, in the address he gave at the U.N. General Assembly that very same day, Abbas stated that the Palestinians were seeking a state in the territories that Israel had captured in the Six-Day War. But if his U.N. speech is taken together with the language of the letter that he submitted, it is clear that Abbas aspires to a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, without conceding his "rights" to the territories that he insists were allocated to the Palestinians under Resolution 181.
"There was an overall attack on Israel, the sense of being under siege was overwhelming. Europe always only gave the support of a broken reed, and now as well. The U.S., despite what often demonstrated weakness on its part, still remained the decisive anchor for supporting Israel's security, and for enduring a sweeping diplomatic attack."
These words were not stated by a frustrated minister in the current Israeli government, but rather were written a little less than ten years ago by Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in his memoirs (A Front Without the Rear, p. 308). At the time, the efforts of the Barak government to produce an agreement at Camp David and at subsequent negotiations went nowhere, and not because of the Israeli side. It was the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, who did not want to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and preferred the option of an armed intifada instead. Ben-Ami's statement was an admission that, despite all the concessions given to the Palestinians by his government, he still felt that if the peace process does not advance, then Israel is doomed to face increasing international isolation.
Today the specter of
Israeli isolation is being raised again. Newspaper columnists and
politicians are looking at the setbacks Israel has to deal with in its
relations with Egypt and Turkey. They are already counting the likely
votes at the U.N. General Assembly, where the Palestinians are expected
to present a draft resolution later this month upgrading their status at
the U.N. to that of a non-member state observer. The assumption being
worked into much media analysis is that if Israel only launched some
spectacular initiative in the peace process, then it could break out
from its isolation and reverse regional trends.
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But is this assumption really true? It has been well-established that the revolts across the Arab world, in general, and in Egypt, in particular, have nothing to do with Israel. In a major analysis in The New York Review of Books of what is called the "Arab Spring," Hussein Agha, an adviser to Palestinian leaders who is affiliated with Oxford University, and Rob Malley, a former official on President Clinton's National Security Council, conclude that the eruption we are witnessing was chiefly against the corrupt leaders of the Arab world: "Citizens were put off by how their rulers took over public goods as private possessions and made national decisions under foreign influence."
They characterize the Arab revolt of 2011 as a "popular rebuke to this waste."
Agha and Malley deal with the question of Israel and simply set it aside: "The least visible, curiously yet wisely, has been Israel. It knows how much its interests are in the balance but also how little it can do to protect them. Silence has been the more judicious choice." They back-handedly compliment Israeli policy during these months of revolutionary change. They essentially conclude that the Arab Spring is not an Israeli issue and it is a good thing that we kept out of it; in any case, they stress that it is beyond Israel's capacity to do much about it. Given their conclusion that the Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, will be the major beneficiaries of the Arab revolts, it is doubtful that there is an Israeli peace proposal that they would ever find acceptable.
What about the U.N.? Could Israel stop Palestinian action at the U.N. General Assembly by making new concessions to re-start negotiations, as some assert? The hard truth that no one admits is that during the last 18 years, while Israeli governments negotiated with the Palestinians, the PLO observer mission at the U.N. kept initiating anti-Israeli resolutions every year with the backing of the Arab group and the states of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Palestinians are not about to change.
There is a myth widely believed among many Israeli commentators that when the peace process moves forward, Israel's position at the U.N. improves. These changes have always been marginal and they last only for a short period of time. When Israel and the PLO signed the original Oslo Accords on Sept. 13, 1993, it took three months and one day until the anti-Israeli resolutions were resumed on December 14, 1993. Mahmoud Abbas does not want to let go of his diplomatic hammer at the U.N., just like Arafat.
In any case, it is a mistake to judge Israel's international standing by the history of U.N. voting patterns. There are states that are part of the U.N.'s automatic majority like Eritrea, Zimbabwe, or Yemen that are truly isolated in their bilateral relations with other countries. A more realistic measure of whether a country is isolated is whether world leaders visit or its leadership is welcomed in world capitals. Israel, which welcomes a third of the U.S. House of Representatives and most of Europe's top leaders cannot be called isolated. Regardless of how they vote at the U.N., many states also seek out intimate bilateral relations with Israel based on security and intelligence ties. India will inevitably vote against Israel at the U.N., but India views Israel as an important strategic ally.
In summary, there is a mistaken conventional wisdom that it is within Israel's power to alter fundamental political trends across the Middle East. Unfortunately, there are many tectonic shifts that are occurring underground in the region that Israel cannot influence. Resuming a dialogue with the Palestinians has a value in its own right, but any new peace talks will not stop Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan or stabilize Egypt. Israel faces difficult challenges in the year ahead. But it should not revert to worn-out diplomatic theories that did not work in the 1990s and will not help it today.
]]>Several months after Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 Six Day War, the U.N. Security Council defined the territorial terms of a future peace settlement in Resolution 242, which over the decades became the cornerstone for all Arab-Israeli diplomacy. At the time, the Soviets had tried to brand Israel as the aggressor in the war and force on it a full withdrawal, but Resolution 242 made clear that Israel was not expected to withdraw from all the territories that came into its possession, meaning that Israel was not required to withdraw from 100 percent of the West Bank.
Given this background, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made clear in his last Knesset address in October 1995 that Israel would never withdraw to the 1967 lines. He stressed that Israel would have to retain control of the Jordan Valley, the great eastern, geographic barrier which provided for its security for decades since the Six Day War. He didn't say a word about land swaps. For neither Resolution 242 nor any subsequent signed agreements with the Palestinians stipulated that Israel would have to pay for any West Bank land it would retain by handing over its own sovereign land in exchange.
So where did the idea of land swaps come from? During the mid-1990s there were multiple backchannel efforts to see if it was possible to reach a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinians argued that when Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt, it agreed to withdraw from 100 percent of the Sinai Peninsula. So they asked how could PLO chairman Yasser Arafat be given less than what Egyptian president Anwar Sadat received.
As a result, Israeli academics involved in these backchannel talks accepted the principle that the Palestinians would obtain 100 percent of the territory, just like the Egyptians, despite the language of Resolution 242, and they proposed giving Israeli land to the Palestinians as compensation for any West Bank land retained by Israel. This idea appeared in the 1995 Beilin-Abu Mazen paper, which was neither signed nor embraced by the Israeli or the Palestinian leaderships. Indeed, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) subsequently denied in May 1999 that any agreement of this sort existed.
There is a huge difference between Egypt and the Palestinians. Egypt was the first Arab state to make peace, and in recognition of that fact, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave Sadat all of Sinai. Moreover, the Israeli-Egyptian border had been a recognized international boundary since the time of the Ottoman Empire. The pre-1967 Israeli boundary with the West Bank was not a real international boundary; it was only an armistice line demarcating where Arab armies had been stopped when they invaded the nascent state of Israel in 1948.
In July 2000 at the Camp David Summit, the Clinton administration raised the land swap idea that had been proposed by Israeli academics, but neither Camp David nor the subsequent negotiating effort at Taba succeeded. Israel's foreign minister at the time, Shlomo Ben-Ami, admitted in an interview in Haaretz on September 14, 2001: "I'm not sure that the whole idea of a land swap is feasible." In short, when the idea was actually tested in high-stakes negotiations, the land swap idea proved to be far more difficult to implement as the basis for a final agreement.
After the collapse of the Camp David talks, President Clinton tried to summarize Israeli and Palestinian positions and put forward a U.S. proposal that still featured the land swap. But to his credit, Clinton also stipulated: "These are my ideas. If they are not accepted, they are off the table, they go with me when I leave office." The Clinton team informed the incoming Bush administration about this point. Notably, land swaps were not part of the 2003 Roadmap for Peace or in the April 14, 2004 letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
It was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who resurrected the land swap idea in 2008 as part of newly proposed Israeli concessions that went even further than Israel's positions at Camp David and Taba. It came up in these years in other Israeli-Palestinian contacts, as well. But Mahmoud Abbas was only willing to talk about a land swap based on 1.9 percent of the territory, which related to the size of the areas of Jewish settlement, but which did not even touch on Israel's security needs. So the land swap idea still proved to be unworkable.
Writing in Haaretz on May 29, 2011, Prof. Gideon Biger, from Tel Aviv University's department of geography, warned that Israel cannot agree to a land swap greater than the equivalent of 2.5 percent of the territories since Israel does not have vast areas of empty land which can be transferred. Any land swap of greater size would involve areas of vital Israeli civilian and military infrastructure.
Furthermore, in the summaries of the past negotiations with Prime Minister Olmert, the Palestinians noted that they would be demanding land swaps of "comparable value" - meaning, they would not accept some remote sand dunes in exchange for high quality land near the center of Israel. In short, given the limitations on the quantity and quality of territory that Israel could conceivably offer, the land swap idea was emerging as impractical.
In Jerusalem, the old pre-1967 armistice line placed the Western Wall, the Mount of Olives, and the Old City as a whole on the Arab side of the border. From 1948 to 1967, Jews were denied access to their holy sites; some 55 synagogues and study halls were systematically destroyed, while the Old City was ethnically cleansed of all its Jewish residents. If land swaps have to be "mutually agreed" does that give the Palestinians a veto over Israeli claims beyond the 1967 line in the Old City, like the Western Wall?
The land swap question points to a deeper dilemma in U.S.-Israel relations. What is the standing of ideas from failed negotiations in the past that appear in the diplomatic record? President Obama told AIPAC on May 22 that the 1967 lines with land swaps "has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations." Just because an idea was discussed in the past, does that make it part of the diplomatic agenda in the future, even if the idea was never part of any legally binding, signed agreements?
In October 1986, President Ronald Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, and made a radical proposal that both superpowers eliminate all of their ballistic missiles, in order to focus their energies on developing missile defenses alone. The idea didn't work, Reagan's proposal was not accepted, and the arms control negotiations took a totally different direction. But what if today Russian president Dmitry Medvedev asked President Obama to implement Reagan's proposals? Would the U.S. have any obligation to diplomatic ideas that did not lead to a finalized treaty?
Fortunately, there are other points in President Obama's recent remarks about Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that can take the parties away from the 1967 lines and assuage the Israeli side. At AIPAC, the president spoke about "the new demographic realities on the ground" which appears to take into account the large settlement blocs that Israel will eventually incorporate. Using the language of Resolution 242, Obama referred to "secure and recognized borders," and importantly added: "Israel must be able to defend itself--by itself--against any threat."
However, for Israelis, mentioning the 1967 lines without these qualifications brings back memories of an Israel that was 8 miles wide, and a time when its vulnerability turned it into a repeated target of hegemonial powers of the Middle East, that made its destruction their principle cause. Sure, Israel won the Six Day War from the 1967 lines, but it had to resort to a preemptive strike as four armies converged on its borders. No Israeli would like to live with such a short fuse again. The alternative to the 1967 lines are defensible borders, which must emerge if a viable peace is to be reached.
Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
It's no secret that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas plans to lobby the U.N. General Assembly this September for a resolution that will predetermine the results of any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on borders. He made clear in a New York Times op-ed this week that he will insist that member states recognize a Palestinian state on 1967 lines, meaning Israel's boundaries before the Six Day War.
Unfortunately, even President Barack Obama appears to have been influenced by this thinking. He asserted in a speech Thursday that Israel's future borders with a Palestinian state "should be based on the 1967 lines," a position he tried to offset by offering "mutually agreed land swaps." Mr. Abbas has said many times that any land swaps would be minuscule.
Remember that before the Six Day War, those lines in the West Bank only demarcated where five Arab armies were halted in their invasion of the nascent state of Israel 19 years earlier. Legally, they formed only an armistice line, not a recognized international border. No Palestinian state ever existed that could have claimed these prewar lines. Jordan occupied the West Bank after the Arab invasion, but its claim to sovereignty was not recognized by any U.N. members except Pakistan and the U.K. As Jordan's U.N. ambassador said before the war, the old armistice lines "did not fix boundaries." Thus the central thrust of Arab-Israeli diplomacy for more than 40 years was that Israel must negotiate an agreed border with its Arab neighbors.
The cornerstone of all postwar diplomacy was U.N. Security Council
Resolution 242, passed in November 1967. It did not demand that Israel
pull back completely to the pre-1967 lines. Its withdrawal clause only
called on Israel to withdraw "from territories," not from all
territories. Britain's foreign secretary at the time, George Brown,
later underlined the distinction: "The proposal said 'Israel will
withdraw from territories that were occupied,' and not from 'the'
territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the
territories."
Prior to the Six Day War, Jerusalem had been sliced in two, and the Jewish people were denied access to the Old City and its holy sites. Jerusalem's Christian population also faced limitations. As America's ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, would explain, Resolution 242 did not preclude Israel's reunification of Jerusalem. In fact, Resolution 242 became the only agreed basis of all Arab-Israeli peace agreements, from the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace to the 1993 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
How were Israel's legal rights to new boundaries justified? A good
explanation came from Judge Stephen Schwebel, who would later be an
adviser to the State Department and then president of the International
Court of Justice in The Hague. Writing in the American Journal of
International Law in 1970, he noted that Israel's title to West Bank
territory--in the event that it sought alterations in the pre-Six Day War
lines--emanated from the fact that it had acted in lawful exercise of
its right to self-defense. It was not the aggressor.
The flexibility for creating new borders was preserved for decades. Indeed, the 1993 Oslo Agreements, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, did not stipulate that the final borders between Israel and the Palestinians would be the 1967 lines. Borders were to be a subject for future negotiations. An April 2004 U.S. letter to Israel, backed by a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress, stipulated that Israel was not expected to fully withdraw, but rather was entitled to "defensible borders." U.S. secretaries of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher reiterated the same point in past letters of assurance.
If the borders between Israel and the Palestinians need to be negotiated, then what are the implications of a U.N. General Assembly resolution that states up front that those borders must be the 1967 lines? Some commentators assert that all Mr. Abbas wants to do is strengthen his hand in future negotiations with Israel, and that this does not contradict a negotiated peace. But is that really true? Why should Mr. Abbas ever negotiate with Israel if he can rely on the automatic majority of Third World countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back his positions on other points that are in dispute, like the future of Jerusalem, the refugee question, and security?
Mr. Abbas's unilateral move at the U.N. represents a massive violation of a core commitment in the Oslo Agreements in which both Israelis and Palestinians undertook that "neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of Permanent Status negotiations." Palestinian spokesmen counter that Israeli settlements violated this clause. Yet former Prime Minister Rabin was very specific while negotiating Oslo in preserving the rights of Israeli citizens to build their homes in these disputed areas, by insisting that the settlements would be one of the subjects of final status negotiations between the parties.
By turning to the U.N., Mr. Abbas wants to use the international community to change the legal status of the territories. Why should Israel rely on Mr. Abbas in the future after what is plainly a material breach of this core obligation?
The truth is that Mr. Abbas has chosen a unilateralist course instead of negotiations. For that reason he has no problem tying his fate to Hamas, the radical organization that is the antithesis of peace. Its infamous 1988 Charter calls for Israel's complete destruction and sees Islam in an historic battle with the Jewish people. In 2006, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, the Hamas leader who attended the recent Cairo reconciliation ceremony with Mr. Abbas's Fatah movement, stated openly that Hamas was still committed to its 1988 Charter, noting, "the movement [would] not change a single word." Hamas's jihadist orientation was reconfirmed when Ismail Haniyeh, its prime minister in Gaza, condemned the U.S. for eliminating Osama bin Laden.
All Israeli prime ministers have spoken about negotiations as a vehicle for ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. There would be an end of claims. However, Mr. Abbas has now revealed his intention of using the U.N. for perpetuating the conflict. As he wrote this week: "Palestine's admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one."
Mr. Abbas clearly is not prepared to make a historic compromise. By running to the U.N. and to Hamas, he is evading the hard choices he has to make, and he is leaving any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict far more difficult for future generations.
Mr. Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Whether the idea of linking new Israeli concessions to military aid came from the White House or from Barak himself, it represents a diplomatic strategy that has been relied on for several decades by the US and Israel, but there are serious reasons for concluding that it is no longer relevant. Even if for the sake of argument, the wider moral questions that arise from this approach are ignored, according to which financial considerations become predominant when Israel considers making a concession of parts of its national homeland, removing its citizens from their homes, there are serious problems continuing this policy. And even if the damage to Israel's image that this strategy creates is also set aside, it simply no longer works, given today's political realties.
The original idea of Israel trading land for American aid was born in an entirely different era: the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, and especially after Israel was requested to withdraw from the Giddi and Mitla Passes in 1975. The US understood the asymmetry of what was being requested from Israel: it had to give up tangible territorial assets, that could not be recovered except by an act of war, while the Egyptian side was making a political commitment that could easily be reversed. The US injected itself as a factor in Israel's calculations by offering the tangible elements that were missing from what the Arabs were providing.
Prior to 1973, US aid to Israel (loans and grants) averaged about $800 million per year. It briefly went up in 1974 because of the Yom Kippur War, but then came down again. In 1975, under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, because Israel was willing to make a second withdrawal from Sinai, the US increased aid by 200 percent and it reached $3.4 billion. The US also gave the Israeli Air Force new technology: the F-15 and F-16 would replace the old Phantoms and Skyhawks. An Israeli defense minister could ask himself what was more important: territorial assets in Sinai or funding for new fighter aircraft. This inaugurated a new diplomatic paradigm--not just land for peace, but land for cash. After Israel signed the 1978 Camp David Agreements committing it to leave the rest of Sinai, US aid shot up again. The old diplomatic formula continued to be applied.
Already in the mid-1990's, it appeared that the idea of obtaining more US aid for giving up land had reached its limits. During the debate over a possible withdrawal from the Golan Heights, many Israeli commentators said that Israel would need an additional $5 billion. There were thoughts that Israel would obtain early-warning aircraft like AWACS or cruise missiles. Akiva Eldar of Haaretz asked Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, what he thought about a new aid package. McConnell was frank and said "I'm interested in the US helping to secure peace in the Middle East, and I'm ready to support certain aid, but $5 billion is out of the question." Today, McConnell is the Republican minority leader in the US Senate.
The Republican members of Congress were not alone. Right after the Oslo Agreements were signed in 1993, Senator Patrick Leahy, who was a Democrat from Vermont, also added to the debate about expanding aid for Israel. He gave an interview on the NPR network saying "The American taxpayer cannot spend more money in the Middle East." Today, with new members of Congress demanding that Obama cut federal spending and the inflated federal deficit, the idea of giving more aid to Israel is really far fetched.
Despite these statements, Israeli governments still had expectations that new funds would come from new concessions. In response to such a request, President Clinton offered Israel hundreds of millions of additional aid for its withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000. The funds never arrived; Congress did not automatically approve. Then again in 2005, during its talks with the Bush administration over Gaza Disengagement, the Sharon government sought an additional $ 2.25 billion in grants and loans, but the request turned out to be an unfulfilled wish.There are times when new strategic dangers to Israel have appeared, and the US has generously responded with emergency aid, like when Iraqi missiles struck Tel Aviv in 1991. These kinds of scenarios could happen in the future. But additional aid should not be tied to the peace process as an automatic entitlement.
There is a more fundamental point here than the question of the current mood in Congress. There are many alternative models that can be chosen for planning how Israel should defend itself in the future. Some of these conceptions rely on Israeli territorial assets, like the Jordan Valley, while others look to technology as a substitute for territory. Before the Israeli government adopts a new plan that will be more reliant on technological alternatives to territory that are to be supplied by the US, three questions must always be answered. Is the substitute that is being considered truly effective? What is its actual cost? And what are the chances that Israel can obtain funding for advanced technologies being proposed? The Israeli government must remember that the US of 2011 is not the same as the US of 1975.
]]>No one knows how long the internal instability in the Middle East will last, but according to the US Department of Energy, its share of the world's total oil supply is expected to actually increase in the years ahead.
Simply, the world is using up the reserves of non- Middle East oil more quickly. Moreover, of the trillion barrels of proven reserves still left, according to the CIA roughly 800 billion barrels are to be found in the Middle East and North Africa, especially in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq.
The implications for Israel of the West's growing dependence on Middle Eastern oil are troubling, for obvious reasons. Yet there are two new developments in our energy sector that could well offset these trends and eventually alter our standing in the world, especially with respect to Europe.
First, the gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean, which began to produce commercial quantities of natural gas in 2004, are generally well-known. The Tamar field, which should begin production in 2013, is expected to supply all of Israel's domestic requirements for at least 20 years. The Economist suggested in November 2010 that the recently discovered Leviathan field, which has twice the gas of Tamar, could be completely devoted to exports.
All the undersea gas fields together have about 25 trillion cubic feet of gas, but the potential for further discoveries is considerably greater, given that the US Geological Survey estimates that there are 122 trillion cubic feet of gas in the whole Levant Basin, most of which is within Israel's jurisdiction.
After the Leviathan discovery these numbers could go up further. Perhaps for that reason, Greece has been talking to Israel about creating a transportation hub for distributing gas throughout Europe from the Eastern Mediterranean that will come from undersea pipelines.
What is less well-known, but even more dramatic, is the work being done on this country's oil shale. The British-based World Energy Council reported in November 2010 that Israel had oil shale from which it is possible to extract the equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil. Yet these numbers are currently undergoing a major revision internationally.
A new assessment was released late last year by Dr. Yuval Bartov, chief geologist for Israel Energy Initiatives, at the yearly symposium of the prestigious Colorado School of Mines. He presented data that our oil shale reserves are actually the equivalent of 250 billion barrels (that compares with 260 billion barrels in the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia).
Independent oil industry analysts have been carefully looking at the shale, and have not refuted these findings. As a consequence of these new estimates, we may emerge as the third largest deposit of oil shale, after the US and China.
OIL SHALE mining used to be a dirty business that used up tremendous amounts of water and energy.
Yet new technologies, being developed for Israeli shale, seek to separate the oil from the shale rock 300 meters underground; these techniques actually produce water, rather than use it up.
The technology will be tested in a pilot project followed by a demonstration stage. It will be critical to demonstrate that the underground separation of oil from shale is environmentally sound before going to full-scale production. The present goal is to produce commercial quantities of shale oil by the end of the decade.
This particular project has global significance.
For if Israel develops a unique method for separating oil from shale deep underground, that has none of the negative ecological side-effects of earlier oil shale efforts, that technology can be made available to the whole world, changing the entire global oil market. The effect of the spread of this technology would be to shift the center of gravity of world oil away from Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf to more stable states that have no history of backing terrorism or radical Islamic causes. (In the Arab world, Jordan and Morocco have the most significant oil shale deposits.)
WHEN WILL the West begin to treat Israel as a powerful energy giant and not as a weak client state that must be pressured? In the case of the Saudis, when the US realized the true extent of their oil reserves, after America's reserves in Texas and Oklahoma were depleted by World War II, it sought to upgrade its military and diplomatic ties with the Saudi kingdom even before its production capacity was fully exploited. The US-Saudi connection grew as massive infrastructure investments for moving Saudi oil to Western markets were made, like the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPLINE).
More capital was needed for the Saudi oil project. US companies, like Standard Oil of New Jersey (today, Exxon) and Standard Oil of New York (Mobil), joined Texaco and Standard Oil of California, the original holder of the Saudi oil concession, and created the ARAMCO consortium in the late 1940s. ARAMCO executives came to be regular guests at the State Department, where they could present the Saudi perspective.
In time, Saudi Arabia's status grew as its future position in world oil came to be appreciated.
In the case of Israel, updated international reports verifying the true dimensions of both its undersea gas and oil shale should be forthcoming in the next year.
Many more international companies are likely to take an interest in its energy sector at that time. Moreover, the full exploitation of these energy resources will require massive infrastructure investment for pipelines, liquefied natural gas plants and new oil exporting outlets in the Mediterranean and Red Sea.
Israel is uniquely situated by its geographical position and is able to direct its energy exports to either Europe or China and India. It may not have the capital to build this export capacity, but the involvement of foreign investors in these projects will give European and American banks new interests in developments.
Western policies will not change overnight. Nonetheless, Israel needs to tell the full story of its newly emerging role in the world energy sector if it wants to begin to alter the way it has been handled internationally.
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