Malley Stumbles Upon the Truth: Peace Isn’t Possible

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions
11 August 09

Former Clinton administration staffer Robert Malley’s chief claim to fame is being the sole non-Palestinian observer of the fateful July 2000 Camp David Summit who did not put the blame for that conclave’s disastrous failure squarely on the shoulders of Yasser Arafat. At Camp David, Arafat turned down an astounding offer for a Palestinian state in nearly all the West Bank, Gaza, and part of Jerusalem that was put forward by then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak with the encouragement of President Clinton. Malley pioneered the practice of dismissing this offer as insignificant and rationalizing Arafat’s refusal to take yes for an answer, as well as his decision to answer that peace deal with a terrorist war of attrition, known as the second intifada.

Malley’s version of the Camp David debacle ran contrary to the facts, but it has gradually gained ground, especially on the Left. By discrediting the Israeli proposal and thereby absolving the Palestinians of blame for Arafat’s unwillingness to make peace, Malley helped set the stage for a decade of anti-Israel vituperation.

Malley, who was listed for a time as an unofficial adviser to the Obama presidential campaign, is at it again today in an op-ed in the New York Times, co-authored with Hussein Agha.

Malley and Agha dispute the idea that a two-state solution to the conflict will solve anything. They start out by drawing a false analogy between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech accepting the concept of a Palestinian state and comments by Hamas terrorist head Khaled Meshal that he might accept a truce that would push the Israelis back to the 1967 borders. Though the Hamas statement was clearly a snare intended only for Western ears (a practice introduced by Arafat), Malley and Agha give President Obama credit for a partial opening to Hamas in his Cairo speech. The two authors also mock Netanyahu’s demands that the peace with a Palestinian state be genuine and include recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, a firm commitment to nonviolence, and no “right of return” for the descendants of 1948 refugees.

But they do stumble upon a key truth about the entire peace process—they understand that what the Palestinians want isn’t merely sovereignty in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Jews want a Jewish state and are willing to let the Palestinians have their own state too in order to live in peace. The problem is that the core of Palestinian national identity is a desire not for a Palestinian state but for eradicating the Jewish one, which they view as illegitimate no matter where the borders are drawn. Agha and Malley write:

Even fewer Palestinians take issue with the categorical rebuff of [a Jewish state], as the recent Fatah congress in Bethlehem confirmed. In their eyes, to accept Israel as a Jewish state would legitimize the Zionist enterprise that brought about their tragedy. It would render the Palestinian national struggle at best meaningless, at worst criminal.

Yet instead of urging Palestinians to give up goals incompatible with peace, the authors merely say that the next step for peace processors is to go back to 1948 and revisit the issues of that era—i.e., whether there should be a Jewish state at all. While still viewing an Israeli pullback to the 1967 lines as the inescapable starting point of a peace process, their conclusion is that once that milestone is accomplished, the goal of peace would be “how to define the state of Israel.” Thus, in their view, what Israel will be negotiating in the future is not the borders of its state or whether a Palestinian state will have the capability to attack it, but whether or not it will exist at all.

Though many will dismiss this piece as extremist fare, Malley has a history of being the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to anti-Israel polemics. Though the authors couch their article in terms that allow them to pose as peace advocates, what Agha and Malley are attempting to do is legitimize the theme that peace depends on the end of the Jewish state even within the 1949 armistice lines.

While rejecting the authors’ anti-Zionist goal, the so-called peace camp ought to think seriously about what drives the Palestinians’ sense of their own identity. What Malley and Agha have done is illustrate the utter implausibility of any attempt to make peace under the current circumstances. If giving up the destruction of the Jewish state as a goal is not a realistic concession to hope for from the Palestinians, what point is there in pushing Israel to make concessions to them? That is a question that Mr. Malley’s former client, who now sits in the White House, ought to be asking himself.

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