Barack Obama was said to have the in-tray from hell even before the conflict
between Hamas and Israel resulted in substantial loss of life in Gaza, as
the Israelis took revenge on the terrorist organisation for its recent
rocket attacks. If Obama harboured any idea of allowing the Arab-Israeli
conflict to fall down towards the bottom of his agenda as he dealt with the
economic slump or Iran or Afghanistan, he will by now have been disabused.
Able politicians do not fear inheriting what appears to be an impossibly
complex agenda: they relish it. A significant moment during the US
presidential campaign came when John McCain broke off electioneering to deal
with the credit crunch. Obama was quick to point out that a president needed
to be able to manage more than one challenge at a time. He will certainly
now be tested on that very point.
The presidential election draws the clearest possible line between the past
and the future: between what Obama will represent as all the failures of the
Bush administration and all the possibilities of his own incumbency.
Anything that he does to improve the situation at home or abroad will mark
the contrast between old and new ways of doing business.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas is, in a way, an attractive issue for
Obama and his team. It has been evident for decades that matters cannot be
resolved without the closest involvement of the United States. Yet George
Bush decided to hold aloof for most of his time in the White House, turning
to it only in his last months and setting out impossible deadlines for
progress. The issue was not ripe for settlement and Bush was an increasingly
lame duck. Even so, the resumption of the process has been useful.
Bush’s reluctance to get involved stemmed largely from his recollection of how
Bill Clinton had failed to reach a resolution despite investing a huge
amount of personal prestige and political capital in negotiations during the
final days of his presidency. Bush did not want to suffer a similar rebuff
although in the event he did, being forced to take up the issue too late, as
Clinton had, and hoping like his predecessor that a deal there could polish
a tarnished legacy.
The Clintons probably see it differently. They know that in those last days of
the administration they came achingly close to achieving a breakthrough. In
frenetic negotiations, Israel was induced to pile up concessions on the
table. It was an interesting strategy: to move away from the gradualistic
approach that had characterised earlier peace processes and instead to move
at one go to an overall settlement. Clinton’s disappointment must be all the
more poignant because having come close to agreement, the failure of the
talks led to a hardening of positions on both sides, the unleashing of the
inti-fada and the opening of an era of Israeli repression of the
Palestinians.
The conflict between the Palestinians and Israel is intriguing because for
some time most of the world has known how it should end and has agreed to a
solution. Most of the Arab world has now acquiesced in agreeing that there
must be an Israeli state and a Palestinian one existing side by side, that
the borders preceding the 1967 war provide the basis of the new boundaries
but that land will have to be traded around that template, and that
Jerusalem will require special arrangements to allow the Palestinians to
have their capital there and to allow freedom for all religious groups to
access their holy sites.
Of course, behind that outline lie many complications, but this conflict is
unusual in that the eventual peace deal is understood and accepted by much
of the world and most interested parties. It is not the destination but the
journey that is most problematic. Clinton attempted to arrive without
travelling and nearly succeeded. The problem was that Yasser Arafat lacked
the authority, the support and the imagination to be able to sell it to his
constituency.
Indeed, the issue has been dogged by weak leadership in America, in Israel and
among the Palestinians. Since Clinton left the White House the brightest
moment of hope came when Ariel Shar-on, an extraordinarily powerful Israeli
prime minister, unilaterally handed Gaza back to the Palestinians and even
sent the bulldozers to remove Israeli settlements on land seized in 1967.
His determination and energy were so great that when Likud, his party,
withdrew its support he abandoned it and created a new one, Kadima. What he
single-handedly might have achieved, had illness not struck him down, must
be one of the great “might-have-beens”.
Hamas does not accept the proposed solution and the situation has been
complicated still further by the split between Gaza, where Hamas won the
elections, and the West Bank where the Fatah party administration led by
Mah-moud Abbas would accept two states.
Obama and Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, are likely to take the view
that the election of Hamas has not been well handled by Israel or the United
States. The democratic world has not devised a way to deal with election
results that it does not like. The Palestinians of Gaza have been treated as
pariahs since they made their choice at the ballot box. That has solidified
their resistance and, of course, dislodged Israel and the West from the
moral high ground.
It is true that Hamas refuses to recognise Israel as once did those countries
in the region, such as Egypt, with which Israel has now enjoyed decades of
peaceful coexistence. In diplomacy you have to be imaginative and see that
your opponents are capable of changing their positions. Without that insight
we would still be in turmoil in Northern Ireland. The wise old men of
Israeli politics such as Shimon Peres used to say that the only way to
negotiate was to begin with the idea of peace, to want it more than anything
and to create in your imagination a peace that had somehow been achieved.
That way you created the will to overcome apparently insuperable obstacles.
Unfortunately, that thinking does not prevail at the moment. As the foreign
minister Tzipi Livni, under the Kadima banner, battles the former prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu, representing Likud, to lead Israel’s next
government after the elections in February, the campaign rhetoric is
unsurprisingly bellicose. In the West Bank, elections will be held next
month. Obama’s inauguration will coincide with further political upheaval in
the region.
What is clear is that neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton unquestioningly takes
Israel’s side in the way that the Bush administration did. Even Israelis
should welcome that. The hope of a more peaceful future that Obama has
engendered around the world arises because even the enemies of Israel, and
of the United States, believe he will be more evenhanded between Jew and
Muslim and between Christian and Muslim than any predecessor.
It could be that for once the Palestini-an-Israeli problem will receive the
full attention of an American presidency at the outset, at the moment of its
greatest prestige and when its mandate is strongest. Elections in Israel and
the West Bank complicate matters just now, but new mandates could also
enhance the authority of the leaders and improve the prospect for progress.
From what we have seen of Obama so far he will not be despondent to discover
that yet another crisis will demand his attention after January 20. The
conflict has simmered throughout the uneasy ceasefire, but the clamour from
the Palestinians in Gaza could not be ignored for much longer. The severity
of Israel’s response – typical of its actions during election campaigns –
places the issue on Obama’s desk and demands prompt action from him. In that
respect these exchanges of violence, although painfully familiar to us,
could prove unusually significant.
