One of the major questions facing the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority as they begin negotiations this week is their willingness to push their supporters beyond their comfort level, which will be necessary to reach an agreement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started this process by addressing his Likud Party before leaving for Washington. He said that he is not looking to expand his governing coalition. Instead, he seeks to utilize the approach of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who surprised both the Israelis and the Arabs with his willingness to withdraw from all of Sinai without insisting on keeping Israeli settlements there. Netanyahu spoke of achieving peace but did not mention settlements. He may be hinting at a peace initiative that is closer to something acceptable to the Palestinians.
Meanwhile Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak pressed the European community to help the United States by playing an active role. The French and the Egyptians are proposing that the upcoming Mediterranean Conference serve as a peace forum rather than focus on improving trade relations between Europe and North Africa.
And Hamas has limited itself to predictions that the talks will fail but has shown no sign of taking military actions against Israel, which would actively undermine the negotiations.
These are three indications that serious talks are the real intention of the parties.
There was a tendency in previous talks for the parties to begin at the point where the prior negotiations concluded. That should be avoided this time. Because the most contentious issues remained on the table, it is not surprising that negotiators would start by referring back to the last point of commonality. In effect, the parties were rehashing the unresolved arguments they had failed to agree upon previously. Launching from the last point of agreement effectively meant embarking on the path that the parties could not previously traverse. This path became a rut from which the parties were unable to extract themselves.
I strongly urge President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. George Mitchell to resist this temptation and instead prod the leaders of the new talks to begin by negotiating something that was not discussed in the previous negotiations. They should try to get an agreement about the definition of “security” for both sides and put an end to the notion that “security” relates only to Israel and “borders” only to the Palestinians. Both concepts pertain to both sides.
Netanyahu would be able to move forward much more comfortably if he is seen as taking an original path to an agreement. This could mean an agreement that begins with a statement of principles about the security of the Israeli people and the State of Israel, and about the security of the Palestinian people and the emerging State of Palestine. Since security is so intimately interwoven with the definition of the boundaries of the two states and the supervision and monitoring of those boundaries, beginning with security will lead directly to negotiations about critical final status issues and waste no time.
For Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a beginning that defines Palestinian security as equal in importance to Israeli security would be an important step forward, as it would have to include, among other things, Israeli commitments about refraining from military incursions into Palestinian territory and strict limitations on Israeli incarceration of additional Palestinian prisoners.
Another common practice in previous negotiations was for the third party — the mediator — to engage its most senior person at the last stage of negotiations. This practice must be reversed. It is at the beginning of negotiations that the mediator has the maximum leverage, because he or she has just demonstrated the ability to overcome the long impasse in which there were no negotiations. The mediator — in this case, the president of the United States — should exploit this moment of maximum leverage by making a dramatic proposal or initiative that breaks new ground right away and gets the parties out of the rut.
President Obama has set up an excellent occasion and venue for such a breakthrough step by inviting the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to have dinner with him together with Egypt’s President Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan on the evening before the negotiations begin. An attention-grabbing advance at that occasion would enable the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to demonstrate to their negotiators that they are ready for serious business. The negotiators will then come together not only with a new point of agreement, which would become public, but also with the example of their leaders already breaking previous taboos with new openness.
The three early indications that the parties intend serious talks and the adoption by Obama, Clinton and Mitchell of the two points of departure from previous practice would offer the peoples of the region signs that this negotiation is the real thing and not a replay of the previous stalemated games.
Stephen P. Cohen is the author of “Beyond America’s Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) and president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development.
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