Standpoint..
July/August '13..
Western policy responses to the growing Middle Eastern turmoil in the last two years have ranged from delusion to paralysis. After prematurely welcoming democracy, Western powers have by and large disengaged. This is not without merits — the region's momentous historical changes are largely beyond the reach of Western influence.
Unfortunately, the West has still not come to terms with reality when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Despite decades of failed diplomatic efforts, Western leaders are still obsessed with finding a lasting solution, thus appearing oblivious to the daunting challenges such a goal faces in the increasingly ebullient regional environment.
Whether peace is attainable remains to be seen. In any case, it requires discarding the following six mistaken assumptions that have driven successive diplomatic efforts to complete failure.
(1) The contours of the solution are known — all we must do is try harder.
Wrong. Twenty years of diplomacy have failed to achieve peace between the two sides. That must mean that the gap is still too wide for a successful bridging compromise. It is all too easy to play the blame game in this context, ascribing failure to "extremists on both sides" — one of the most frequently uttered asinine phrases in Middle East commentaries. In fact, neither side is prepared to settle for what a bridging proposal would look like. In 2000 and 2008, two Israeli prime ministers signed up to a comprehensive solution to the conflict that entailed expansive concessions on Israel's part. A third proposal — the Geneva Initiative — pushed those terms even farther, with the support of Israel's dovish opposition at the time. None was enough for the Palestinian leadership. In a laboratory environment, the repetition of a failed experiment would demand a change of the ingredients and the conditions. In the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, Western diplomats have forgotten their science.
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I believe using the misnomer of "palestinian-israeli conflict" only perpetuates and reinforces the distortive thinking that this article by mr. ottolenghi is attempting to surmount. It is the "arab-israeli conflict"...as resolving issues with the palestinians will in no way ensure that any territory we cede to them won't come to be dominated by other arab adversaries and used as a base for attempting to destroy israel.
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