The meeting in Washington on 18 May will be like no other encounter for many years between an Israeli prime minister and a US president. For all the signs are that this American leader really is determined to bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end, based on the international consensus of two viable states and a comprehensive regional peace. It’s just his luck that his Israeli interlocutor is the first prime minister for several years who does not even feign a rhetorical commitment to this vision. Instead, he wants an ‘economic peace’, as nebulous a concept as is imaginable. To the Palestinians and most of the rest of the world, it looks like just the latest delaying device.
Meanwhile, the Jordanian King Abdullah is telling us that it’s now or never: we have a year or two to make peace, or there will be war. The choice might sound dramatic, but his warning is not without foundation. Enthusiasm for two states among both Palestinians and Israelis – for quite different reasons – has markedly declined in recent years. Yet if the option were imminently on offer, there is little doubt that the vast majority of both peoples would eagerly seize the opportunity.
There is suddenly a cautious optimism in the air for one reason only – the providential election of the charismatic President Obama, a natural leader who is held in high regard both in the Arab world and among Israelis, and who garnered 78 per cent of the American Jewish vote. If he fails to make decisive, irreversible progress in ending the conflict within his first term, he is unlikely to get another chance. Indeed, there is unlikely to be another chance. The high-level disenchantment on both sides of this conflict has been suspended to give Obama a unique opportunity. If he takes it, there will be huge celebrations. If he fluffs it, the conflict will go perpetual and become irresolvable.
When the Israeli prime minister arrives in his office, the US president would be well-advised to keep his counsel and avoid laying down the law.. Rather, he should turn the tables and throw the ball into the Israeli leader’s court by advising him that he and his government – as well as all the other principal parties – have a maximum of six months to tender their realistic visions of the endgame to the Quartet. It’s time to call all bluffs.
Once the deadline has expired, the Quartet would start to formulate its own definitive plan, anchored in the aforementioned international consensus, to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and settle the wider Arab-Israeli issues. Parties that fail to meet the deadline would forfeit the chance of directly influencing the international plan.
As with the first stage, this move need not take more than six months. The parameters of a final settlement have been known for many years, so the planning time may be spent on addressing the thorny details of implementation and on studying alternative ways of resolving more minor but still important problems.
One of the common weaknesses of previous plans was a lack of an effective enforcement mechanism. In this case, powerful inducements for each party should be integral to the plan to entice them to meet their customized schedule of interim targets. If one party delivers its targets on time and the other fails to do so, the first would be rewarded and the second penalized. The wriggle room should be minimized and the parties no longer afforded the opportunity to hide behind each other, as in the past.
Attempts to revive sham negotiations between the reluctant parties or to build trust between an occupying authority and an occupied people are a waste of effort. Swift, robust international action is now the only way of ending this conflict and preventing the toxins of this quintessentially twentieth century quarrel spilling over and poisoning an already heavily challenged twenty-first century.