Tag Archive for: Middle East

The UAE–Israel deal isn’t about peace

The agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, although touted as a ‘peace’ deal, is no such thing. For one thing, the UAE and Israel were never at war. The UAE agreed to ‘full normalisation of relations’ with Israel in exchange for its ‘suspending’ annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank awarded to it by the US President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan. The agreement can be seen in part as an attempt to bolster Trump’s chances of re-election in November because he can sell it to the American public as his major foreign policy achievement.

For those familiar with the development of Israel–UAE relations over the past few years, the agreement is more like a coming-out party than a radical departure from the status quo. It may have symbolic importance but doesn’t add much to the substance of relations between the two countries. After all, Israel–UAE collaboration, especially in the security and technology sectors, has been an open secret for the past several years.

The UAE’s action opens the door for the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Israel and other Gulf Cooperation Council states. Oman and Bahrain, which have openly welcomed the deal, are likely to lead the way. Saudi Arabia may not follow the UAE’s lead immediately for fear that it could erode its credibility as the keeper of the two holiest Muslim shrines, but it is clearly headed in that direction. Given the UAE’s very close relations with Saudi Arabia, as witnessed in their joint military operations in Yemen and in support of Syrian rebels, it’s clear the deal would not have been done without Riyadh’s blessings.

The fundamental shift in Saudi policy on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been evident since the coming to power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In April 2019 he endorsed the pro-Israel Trump peace plan, declaring, ‘The Palestinians need to accept [Trump’s] proposal or stop complaining.’ This was a radical departure from the Arab League peace initiative of 2002 authored by Saudi Arabia. That plan had declared that the Arab countries were willing to normalise relations with Israel if it agreed to withdraw to its 1967 borders.

Both Israel and the UAE perceive themselves as principal beneficiaries of the deal. For Israel, this is the first agreement with an Arab state that doesn’t explicitly link it to a resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Both the Israel–Egypt and Israel–Jordan agreements had made this linkage, although in practice little pressure was exercised on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories. The Israel–UAE deal only mentions that, as a quid pro quo for the UAE’s agreement to normalise relations, Israel has merely agreed to ‘suspend’ its annexation of parts of the West Bank awarded to it by the Trump peace plan.

However, immediately after the agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that Israel’s suspension of annexation of the West Bank was a temporary measure. In any case, the US has insisted that the timing of the annexation must be subject to Washington’s concurrence, which it is withholding for the moment. Moreover, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s open opposition to the annexation plan has acted as a further deterrent for Netanyahu, especially since Biden has a good chance of winning the November election.

The temporary suspension of Israel’s annexation plan is a concession not to the UAE but one that has been forced on him temporarily by American policy and the contingencies of the American election. But, as Netanyahu’s pronouncements indicate, in the long run Israel is likely to have its cake and eat it too.

Abu Dhabi sees its open embrace of Israel as an insurance policy against presumed Iranian designs for dominance of the region. The UAE and most other members of the GCC now perceive Israel as their ‘protector’ against Iran because they are unsure if the United States, in its current retrenchment mode, will come to their aid in case of a showdown with Tehran. America’s reluctance to support Saudi Arabia in any material way when missile and drone attacks were launched on its oil facilities by Iranian-supported forces in September 2019 was a clear indication of Washington’s unwillingness to be drawn into conflict with Iran for the sake of its Gulf allies.

An additional reason that has prompted the UAE to court Israel is the deteriorating relations between the UAE and Turkey. Ankara has been Qatar’s primary supporter and supplier of essential goods, which has helped it defy the embargo the GCC imposed on it in 2017 for its close relations with Iran. Turkey also has a military base in Qatar and sent additional troops to the country when it was faced with the threat of an imminent showdown with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2017. Turkey and the UAE are also on opposite sides in the civil war raging in Libya. The deterioration in Israel’s relations with Turkey, which has ambitions of emerging as the leading Muslim state in the Middle East and spearheading the fight for the liberation of Jerusalem, provides further convergence of interests between the UAE/GCC and Israel, and the normalisation agreement is a product of that convergence as well.

Many analysts have argued that the Palestinians are the primary losers in this game. However, they have nothing more to lose as the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank amounts to de facto annexation. Most Palestinians have known for some time that none of the Arab states are interested in exerting themselves in changing the situation in the West Bank. This agreement should convince the remaining sceptics that the only option open to the Palestinians is to work towards the goal of establishing a single democratic state in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that guarantees equal rights for all its inhabitants.

How radicals conquered Iran’s government

Millions of Iranians have been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic and an economy strained by sanctions, but the political elite in Tehran have other priorities.

The power base of Iran’s theocratic velayat-e faqih regime—a labyrinth of elected and unelected institutions directed from above by religious experts—is in the middle of a seismic shift. Once the process is complete in around the middle of next year, the country’s governance system will essentially be a totalitarian military dictatorship run by a powerful ideological elite, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Over the past couple of years, an alliance forged between the IRGC and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has gradually assumed near total control of all branches of the regime.

The IRGC has always been a powerful political force in Iran. While most modern states have an army that is subordinate to the political class, the IRGC is a revolutionary army running a state. It is a huge enterprise—200,000 personnel, plus hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the Basij, a domestic paramilitary organisation in charge of suppressing internal dissent. The IRGC’s Quds Force trains and advises proxies that are engaged in terrorism and regime destablisation across the Middle East—such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis—as part of its mission to ‘export the revolution’. These activities led the US to list the IRGC as a terrorist entity in 2019.

Financially, the IRGC is a mega-conglomerate that owns a variety of industries amounting to around half of Iran’s economy. This includes the most prestigious military projects, especially the flagship nuclear-weapon and ballistic-missile development programs. Much of the IRGC’s enormous budget is off the books, as money flows to it through funds directly under the control of Khamenei, free from any public scrutiny.

Two main factors are driving the consolidation of the IRGC’s power: the supreme leader’s desire to secure his legacy and the IRGC’s access to the spoils of the Iranian economy. The 81-year-old Khamenei wants to ensure his ideology and his radical allies survive after his time in office. Exploiting the ruling ayatollahs’ fear of growing internal instability, the IRGC promises to brutally safeguard their ongoing rule in exchange for greater control over Iran’s resources.

Khamenei set out the ideological justification for his deal with the IRGC in a February 2019 speech  on the regime’s future trajectory, titled ‘The second Phase of the Revolution’. On the ground, the deal translates to the insertion of IRGC-affiliated ‘securocrats’ into key positions across the government by the supreme leader.

In return, the IRGC ensures that revolutionary Khomeinist policies are implemented and opposition at any level is crushed. Both sides benefit by preserving unfettered access to the immense wealth in Iran’s religious trusts.

The judiciary was the first institution conquered by this coalition, with the appointment in March 2019 of Ebrahim Raisi as chief justice. His affiliation with the IRGC originates from his time as head of one of the IRGC-related financial funds. An ideological zealot, Raisi continues to oversee the execution of dissidents, just as he did in the late 1980s. He is tipped as the leading candidate to replace Khamenei when he becomes incapacitated or passes away.

In the February 2020 election, the coalition consolidated its control over the legislative branch. The Guardianship Council—half of whose 12 members are nominated by Khamenei and the rest by the judiciary—exercised its authority and systematically disqualified from running anyone not aligned with the conservative ideological position set by Khamenei.

Only IRGC affiliates were allowed on the political playing field and, unsurprisingly, they now fill 200 of the 290 seats in the parliament. Spearheaded by the powerful speaker of the parliament, former top IRGC general and mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the IRGC securocrats hold key positions in the major committees and dominate the presidium, which is in charge of setting the parliament’s agenda.

Ensuring that a like-minded ally wins the presidential elections scheduled for next year would be the final step. The Guardianship Council is expected to veto candidates not approved by the Khamenei–IRGC coalition, erasing any remnants of the real or imagined ‘reformist’ or ‘centrist’ spirit affiliated with outgoing President Hassan Rouhani. Khamenei will only allow the next president to come from the ranks of the right-wing, fundamentalist osoulgarayan (principalist) camp.

An Iran controlled by the IRGC will likely pursue an even more aggressive interventionist foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. It would strive to remove hurdles slowing down its nuclear program and veto any nuclear negotiations, unless it gets major concessions from the West. Internally, an IRGC Iran is likely to be even more repressive and kleptocratic.

One should not assume, however, that such an Iran would be an irrational player. Khamenei and the IRGC have shown over the years that they never take their eyes off their goals and cleverly manoeuvre in agitating their rivals, while being careful not to cross red lines that would lead to all-out conflict. It’s unlikely that an IRGC-controlled Iran would follow the North Korean model—by kicking out UN inspectors, for example. Tehran is more likely to keep carefully building the elements of an indigenous nuclear weapons capability while only selectively cooperating with IAEA inspections.

Anyone devising an Iran policy needs to know that there is no longer any serious political competition in Tehran between ‘hardliners’ and ‘reformists’. Given the power shift to hardliners in Tehran and the scuttling of the JCPOA by the US, it may be time for Australia to reconsider its thinking on Iran.

Although several Western nations were critical of Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, restoring it now is most likely impossible. If Australia were to follow the US’s lead in designating the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, Canberra would be able expand its bilateral sanctions on Iran to include IRGC-related activities, institutions and personnel. Washington’s ‘maximum pressure’ strategy is one of the important ways to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and destabilising regional operations and provide the regime with a strong negative incentive to come back to the negotiating table.

Eliminating Israel’s bomb with a nuclear-weapon-free zone?

Nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZs) deepen and extend the scope of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and embed the non-nuclear-weapon status of NPT states parties in additional treaty-based arrangements. This is why several NPT review conferences have repeatedly affirmed support for existing NWFZs and encouraged the development of additional zones.

There are currently five zones: in Latin America, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central Asia. At a minimum, all NWFZs prohibit the acquisition, testing, stationing and use of nuclear weapons within the designated territory of the zone. They also include protocols for pledges by nuclear powers not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against members of the zone.

Israel has seemed more interested in implementing a military solution to its security challenges, including the threat of a preventive strike on Iran, than in exploring diplomatic options. But it’s simply not credible that Israel can keep its unacknowledged nuclear arsenal indefinitely, while every other regional state can be stopped from getting the bomb in perpetuity. The alternatives for Israeli security planners are regional denuclearisation or proliferation. The latter would entail the further risks of heightened tension and increased instability. Moreover, a nuclear-weapon capability is of no use to Israel in deterring or managing the threat of terrorism.

Because ‘the logic of using force to secure a nuclear monopoly flies in the face of international norms’, Israel could consider trading its nuclear weapons for a stop to Iran’s development of a nuclear-weapon capability by agreeing to an NWFZ. Conversely, the confidence built among states through an NWFZ process can spill over into other areas of regional interactions. The experience of working together in negotiating a zonal arrangement, and then working together once the zone is operational, generates habits of cooperation and sustains mutual confidence, both of which are necessary conditions for resolving other regional security issues.

Can an NWFZ be used for nuclear disarmament of a non-NPT state?

When the NPT was extended indefinitely in 1995, the package deal included a resolution on the creation of a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The resolution required all regional states (including those outside the NPT) to sign, and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards to be applied to all nuclear facilities in the region. The 2010 NPT review conference—the last one that had an agreed final document—reiterated the importance of the 1995 resolution and requested the UN secretary-general and Russia, the UK and the US—co-sponsors of the 1995 resolution—to convene a conference in 2012 to that end.

Finnish diplomat Jaakko Laajava was appointed as the facilitator and Helsinki was named as the venue for the conference scheduled to begin on 17 December 2012. However, on 23 November Victoria Nuland of the US State Department said there would be no conference ‘because of present conditions in the Middle East and the fact that states in the region have not reached agreement on acceptable conditions for a conference’. The failure contributed to the collapse of the 2015 review conference.

Like the Red Queen in Through the looking-glass, the UN has to run very fast just to stay where it is. The adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons might be thought to have made another NWFZ redundant. Yet, by an 88 to 4 vote (75 abstentions), UN General Assembly decision 73/546 of 22 December 2018 called on the secretary-general to convene a conference at UN headquarters in 2019 to elaborate a legally binding treaty for establishing a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. Importantly, however, in paragraph a(iii), the document stipulated that all decisions of the conference ‘shall be taken by consensus by the States of the region’. The conference was held on 18–22 November 2019. Its political declaration affirmed ‘the intent and solemn commitment’ to pursue a treaty-based commitment, just like in 1995.

Not surprisingly, Israel is wary of the proposal’s origins in a document to which it did not subscribe, adopted by a conference to review and extend a treaty that it has not signed, whose core prohibition it has ignored. In a formal letter to the secretary-general (document A/72/340 (Part 1), 16 August 2017), Israel emphasised ‘the need for a direct and sustained dialogue between all regional States to address the broad range of security threats and challenges’. It’s difficult to see how negotiations can begin until all states explicitly accept the existence of Israel. No NWFZ has previously been established among states that refuse to recognise one another and do not engage in diplomatic relations and whose number includes some that are formally at war.

The bleak security and political environment in the conflict-riven Middle East is particularly inauspicious for the creation of an NWFZ. There is no regional organisation to initiate and guide negotiations, nor is there a regional dialogue process that can form the backdrop to negotiations. An NWFZ in regions of high conflict intensity may have to follow rather than cause the end of conflicts. Syria is convulsed in a civil war. Egypt has yet to sign the IAEA Additional Protocol and the Chemical Weapons Convention, or ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the African NWFZ. But it does strongly support a WMD-free zone in the Middle East.

Turkey is a NATO member. The possession and deployment of nuclear weapons are integral to NATO doctrine and command structure and US tactical nuclear weapons are based in Turkey. How can this be reconciled with Turkey’s membership of an NWFZ? Alternatively, how meaningful would a Middle Eastern NWFZ be without Turkey?

Most crucially, Israel is already a nuclear-armed state. This immediately raises an obvious but critical question. Is the expectation that Israel will sign a protocol as a nuclear-armed state, or that it must sign the treaty after first eliminating its nuclear weapons? The latter would be without precedent and transform the Middle East NWFZ treaty from a normal non-proliferation treaty into a unique disarmament treaty. An NWFZ is traditionally established as a confidence-building measure among states that have already forsworn the nuclear option. It is unlikely to be established as a disarmament measure, or even to constrain the future potential of states like Iran that retain the nuclear option in their national security calculus.

Secular Turkey at a crossroads

By reconverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque and holding celebratory prayers there for the cameras, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems keen to divert attention from the fact that his country is entering a new phase of acute political and financial turmoil.

The Hagia Sophia dates to the sixth century, and for almost a millennium was one of the Christian world’s most magnificent and well-known churches, carrying forward the traditions of both the Roman and the Byzantine empires. It was first converted into a mosque when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, but was then fashioned into a museum by modern Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Ataturk, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

Ataturk sought to create a secular Turkey that could flourish in the modern world. That required bridging historical divisions, which meant that the Hagia Sophia would be neither a church nor a mosque. As a museum, it would attract visitors from around the world, serving as both an embodiment of Turkish history and a symbol of forward-looking cosmopolitanism.

By overturning Ataturk’s founding vision in this respect, Erdogan is trying to signal a fundamental change in direction for the country. After all, it’s not as though Istanbul suffers from a scarcity of massive, magnificent, historically significant mosques. Those designed by the Ottoman master architect Sinan reside just nearby.

For more than a decade, Turkey was on track to adopt democratic reforms and align itself with the rest of Europe, even overhauling its constitution and beginning formal accession negotiations with the European Union in 2005. The country’s transformation at the time was both impressive and deeply inspiring to those of us watching from the outside.

But those hopeful days are gone. Instead of modernising and moving closer to the rest of Europe, Turkey under Erdogan has been sinking into the mire of the Middle East. This fundamental change has many causes and cannot be placed at the feet of one man. The country’s official dialogue on the Kurdish question has collapsed, and in the summer of 2016, segments of the military, part of the secretive Gulen movement, attempted to stage a coup.

The Gulenists were once a key ally to Erdogan and their attempted power grab tilted the country in a decidedly more authoritarian direction. Erdogan quickly started centralising government functions and consolidating his own power with a widespread purge of the state and society, followed by a constitutional amendment establishing a presidential political system. Complicating matters further, the civil war that has been raging in Syria since 2011 increasingly spilled over the border, dragging Turkey into the conflict in numerous destructive ways.

But, for all its faults and recent disappointments, Turkey is still a country where elections matter, and Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has gradually suffered a loss of popular support. In last year’s municipal elections, the party lost control of all the country’s major cities. And respected political leaders whom Erdogan once could count as allies—including former president Abdullah Gul, former deputy prime minister Ali Babacan, and former prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu—have all abandoned him and set up new political parties to challenge the AKP.

With his support eroding, it’s unlikely that Erdogan could survive another election, even with the aid of the AKP’s current coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party. Shoring up the religiously conservative nationalist base with gambits like Hagia Sophia’s reconversion is unlikely to help much. Nor are further incursions into Syria or adventures in Libya, all of which have a limited shelf life for bolstering popular support. Urban and younger voters have left, or are leaving, the AKP in droves.

The upshot is that a political break has become inevitable. That could mean a smooth transition to a less centralised governance arrangement and a return to the path of modernisation and alignment with Europe, which is what Turkey’s friends should be rooting for. But, now that Erdogan knows his regime’s days are numbered, Turkey could also be heading for a more dramatic and disturbing scenario. One cannot rule out the possibility that Erdogan simply refuses to accept an unfavourable verdict by the electorate.

In addition to growing political tensions, Turkey has a brewing economic crisis, owing to rising fiscal and external deficits, which are being sustained with massive amounts of credit from state-owned banks. The debt burden was already a big problem before the Covid-19 pandemic, and is sure to become worse now. A recent US$15 billion loan from Turkey’s sometime-ally Qatar will help for a while. But the current situation cannot—and therefore will not—last.

In addition to these immediate sources of instability, the EU accession process remains in a deep freeze, and Turkey’s relations with the United States have become increasingly strained as the two countries stumble from one diplomatic crisis to the next. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Turkish society is ready for a change, and a major, dramatic shift would not be unprecedented in the country’s modern history.

Turkey is still a society with immense human potential. And no one can ignore its geopolitical importance, given its position straddling Europe, Asia and the Middle East. For now, it’s obvious that the country is heading for a political and financial bust-up. Against the backdrop of recent years, that is essentially good news. Sooner or later, something will set Turkey’s politics on a better course.

Lebanon’s ingrained instability

The famous Lebanese American writer, poet and visual artist Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) once reflectively wrote about his country of birth: ‘You have your Lebanon and its dilemma. I have my Lebanon and its beauty.’ While Lebanon remains a scenic and historical country, its current dilemmas would have deeply troubled Gibran.

Lebanon is in freefall politically, financially and economically. Its social and cultural vitality is in decline and its people are up in arms about where their homeland is heading. Its multi-faceted society wants serious reforms, but its state has proved to be divided, inept and bankrupt.

This is in contrast to the Lebanon which was once the envy of the Arab world as a stable economic powerhouse and beacon of liberty, where the rich and dissidents from the Arab world could find comfort in the 1950s and 1960s. Even after its devastation by the civil war of 1975–1990, fuelled by religious divisions and neighbourly interventions, Lebanon was able to bounce back and regain some of its vitality. Yet, it is today in a crisis that threatens its viability as an effectively functioning state.

Contrary to Gibran’s nostalgic description, Lebanon has had a mosaic and fragile existence ever since its emergence, along with that of Syria, as an independent state from the ashes of the French mandate that ended in 1943. While composed of various ethno-religious groups, it has functioned very much at the behest of intergroup elite consensus and under pressure from its neighbours. It consolidated as a state primarily on the grounds of a power-sharing agreement between its two main Christian and Muslim groups, based on a 1932 census that declared Christians to be the largest segment of the population, followed by Muslims, Druze and other minorities.

The arrangement spawned a political system that became known as consociational democracy, providing for proportional representation in the power structure. Initially, the system worked quite well, enabling Lebanon to develop as a fairly stable, vibrant and innovative country in the region for the next two decades. Meanwhile, Beirut managed to remain aloof from the Arab–Israeli conflict, to walk a tightrope in its relations with predatory Syria, and to avoid pursuing policies that could seriously endanger Lebanon’s mixed pro-Western and pro-Muslim Arab national identity. But this situation could not last for too long.

The consociational system lacked the necessary inner strength to weather the growing pressure from the Arab–Israeli conflict. When in fierce fighting the Jordanian army forced the Palestine Liberation Organization to move from Amman to Beirut in 1971, Lebanon became a pawn for competing regional actors (Syria and Israel, in particular), who backed different groups in the country for conflicting interests. The interplay between internal divisions and external interventions shifted Lebanon towards a devastating civil war.

Concurrently, the system lacked the necessary mechanism for accommodating demographic changes. Lebanon’s largely dispossessed Shias multiplied faster than other segments of the population, but that shift couldn’t be reflected in the power structure satisfactorily. In the wake of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s success in transforming Iran into a Shia version of an Islamic republic in 1979, with an anti-Israeli and anti-US posture, the Lebanese Shias found a source of inspiration and assistance to set up their own Hezbollah organisation. Hezbollah rapidly grew to be a formidable political and paramilitary force in Lebanon, playing a critical role in the civil war, and challenging Israel and its supporters in a common cause with Tehran.

Although the civil war finally ended with the Taif Agreement of 1989 (under the auspices of Saudi Arabia), it essentially restored the consociational system without immunising it against the very variables that had caused its breakdown.

The same elites who had fought one another remained in charge of running the country, largely with an eye on extracting political and economic advantages for themselves rather than forging structural reforms to serve the common good and create national unity.

The Syrian conflict (including its refugee burden on Lebanon), and Israeli–Hezbollah and Iranian–Israeli animosity, as well as Iranian–Saudi rivalry, have contributed to Lebanon’s woes. Any political event, ranging from appointing a president or prime minister to regulating the power of Hezbollah, has required not only inter-elite consensus, but also outside actors’ endorsements. Poor governability, administrative dysfunction, corruption, embezzlement, nepotism and economic mismanagement have piled up to become the order of the day.

A new cross-religious and cross-ethnic generation of Lebanese has lately engaged in sustained protests for reform of the state and society. But despite promises made by the elites, nothing meaningful has transpired. The recently appointed technocrat Prime Minister Hassan Diab is facing an uphill battle in instituting reforms that could bail Lebanon out of its crisis on the one hand, and maintain the support of the powerful elites and their foreign backers on the other.

Lebanon’s problems are structural in a conflict-ridden region. To revitalise the country, not only do the country’s elites have to come together and respond effectively to public demands for fundamental change, but also outside actors need to halt their interferences that have fed Lebanon’s domestic fragility for so long. While not underestimating the ingenuity of the Lebanese people, it’s fair to say they have a hard road ahead.

A doomed Israeli–Palestinian peace

Twenty years ago this month, US President Bill Clinton invited Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to a peace summit at Camp David, in a bold effort to resolve one of the longest-running conflicts of modern times. Though no agreement was reached, the summit, in which I participated, wasn’t a failure: the framework it produced became the foundation upon which Clinton built his ‘peace parameters’—the most equitable and realistic rendition of a two-state solution ever created. Why did nothing come of them?

Under the so-called Clinton parameters, a large swath of Israeli settlements would be dismantled, in order to create a Palestinian state encompassing 100% of the Gaza Strip and 97% of the West Bank. Territories would be transferred from Israel, in exchange for the land the Palestinians conceded in the West Bank.

The Palestinian state would include the Arab sections of Jerusalem, which would serve as its capital, while the Jewish sections of the city would become Israel’s capital. That split would give the Palestinians sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (which Jews call the Temple Mount), though Israelis would retain control over the Western Wall and its surrounding area.

A corridor would be created between Palestinian lands—Clinton called it a ‘permanent safe passage’—making the new state contiguous. Finally, Palestinian refugees would be able to choose to return without restrictions to the new state of Palestine, to return to the state of Israel with restrictions (as part of a family-reunification scheme), to resettle in a third country, and/or to receive financial compensation, funded by the international community.

Israeli negotiators wanted to translate the parameters into an official settlement. That would have been a deal significantly better for the Palestinians than the one on offer at the Camp David summit. In fact, the improvement in terms vindicates Arafat’s decision to reject Barak’s proposals at Camp David.

But the Palestinians also resisted the parameters, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to constrain future negotiations. During a last-ditch attempt to clinch an agreement in Taba, Egypt, Abu Ala, the chief Palestinian negotiator, admitted to us that Arafat was no longer interested in the offer. That was a devastating mistake, the consequences of which Palestinians suffer every day.

Arafat’s decision can be explained less by a particular demand or concession than by the overarching, delusional and self-defeating worldview to which many Palestinians cling. As the late Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in a 2001 article, the Palestinians suffer from ‘an innate refusal to surrender to the logic of things, a belief that a mysterious higher power will always come to their rescue, as if the laws of history did not apply to them’.

In a 2002 letter, one of Arafat’s former ministers, Nabil Amr, condemned this approach. ‘There is something other than conspiracy that has made the whole world either stand against us or incapable of helping us. Because we have a just cause does not mean we are entitled to do what we want.’

Throughout history, repressed nations have achieved liberation not because they had the right—human, legal or divine—or because they held the moral high ground. Rather, they succeeded through a combination of wisdom, mettle and restraint. Their emancipation rested on their ability to balance force and diplomacy, tenacity and compromise.

Energised by the scale of the Palestinian tragedy and the indulgence of the international community, Arafat never accepted that. Instead, he sought a deal that he knew was politically impossible for his Israeli interlocutors. This compulsive indifference to the political and strategic context destroyed the Palestinians’ chances of securing a realistic, fair and viable peace agreement—and not only in that moment. In fact, it may have doomed the Palestinian cause altogether.

‘How many times’, Amr continued in his letter, ‘did we accept, reject, and then accept? Our timing in saying yes or no was never good. How many times were we asked to do something that we could do but we did not do it? When this something became impossible, we begged the world to re-propose it to us.’ Amr seemed to recognise that the world would reach its limit, and the proposals would stop coming. Two decades after the Camp David summit, that is exactly what has happened.

Today, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict barely registers on the regional, let alone global, agenda. US President Donald Trump’s administration put forward its own peace plan, but it is heavily tilted towards the Israelis. The rest of the world barely responded.

As for Israel, there are virtually no forces for peace to be found among its leadership. On the contrary, Israel has abandoned any semblance of empathy or compassion for the Palestinian plight. Instead, emboldened by his rogue alliance with Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now pursuing, more aggressively than ever, his hypernationalistic dream of effectively annexing Palestinian lands, by unilaterally ‘applying sovereignty’ over them.

Palestinians in these areas—including up to 30% of the West Bank—would be left stateless or, at best, ‘politically undefined’. As Hannah Arendt wrote, it is ‘only with stateless people’ that one can do as one pleases—though, of course, she had the Jews in mind.

The Clinton administration did not fail to clinch peace 20 years ago only because of Arafat’s intransigence. The US negotiators viewed an agreement as a sentimental cause, rather than a security imperative. This came through in the talks, weakening their position. Now, as Netanyahu entrenches an apartheid state, Palestinians don’t even have sentimentality going for them. And anyone who thinks that Russia, with its growing regional clout, can supplant America as a peacemaker should think again.

The two-state solution is dead and buried. Whatever ‘solution’ may be found in the future will emerge not from an orderly peace process but from chaos, the precise nature of which is impossible to predict. It could be unilateral annexation. It could be a sudden violent Israeli disengagement from parts of the West Bank. Or it could be direct conflict. This is the iron law of unintended consequences at work.

Netanyahu’s annexation conundrum

‘To annex or not to annex’ sums up the dilemma facing the Israeli prime minister. US President Donald Trump’s Middle East ‘peace plan’ has given Benjamin Netanyahu the green light to annex around 30% of the West Bank, including the strategically important Jordan Valley. It came as a boon both for the settlers’ lobby and for Netanyahu personally.

The plan legitimised Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and was a step towards eliminating the two-state option. It was also a timely gift for Netanyahu, who has been fighting for his political life. The plan added to his image among Israelis as being principally responsible for persuading Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and endorse the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights.

If Netanyahu succeeds in annexing even a part of the West Bank to Israel it will consolidate his right-wing base and make it impossible for a challenger to emerge within his Likud party. The publicity around annexation has also helped to divert public attention from the corruption charges for which he is on trial. Finally, annexation will cement his place in history as the person responsible for fulfilling Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s dream of a greater Israel extending across both sides of the Jordan River.

With these considerations in mind, Netanyahu had set 1 July as the date to announce the annexation of at least a portion of the territories assigned to Israel by the Trump plan. He was in a hurry to do so before the US presidential election in November; while Joe Biden is a fervent supporter of Israel, he has expressed opposition to the annexation plan.

However, Netanyahu appears to have run into obstacles that have forced him to delay the announcement. First, he’d counted on Israel’s burgeoning economic and technological relations with the Gulf states to mute their criticism, and he was surprised that their reaction was more severe than he expected.

The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, delivered an explicit warning in an Israeli newspaper:

A unilateral and deliberate act, annexation is the illegal seizure of Palestinian land. It defies the Arab—and indeed the international—consensus on the Palestinian right to self-determination. It will ignite violence and rouse extremists. It will send shockwaves around the region, especially in Jordan, whose stability—often taken for granted—benefits the entire region, particularly Israel.

He went on to declare that Israeli leaders had promoted excited talk about normalisation of relations with the UAE and other Arab states, but Israeli plans for annexation and talk of normalisation were a contradiction.

The Jordanian reaction has been even more severe. It has threatened to abrogate or downgrade its 1994 peace treaty with Israel if the annexation goes ahead. In an interview with Der Spiegel, King Abdullah warned that if Israel annexes settlement blocs, not only could it cause an increase in regional extremism, it could lead to a clash with the kingdom. He pointedly didn’t rule out the possibility that Jordan would annul the peace treaty with Israel. Abdullah is worried that such an action will destabilise his regime by radicalising the Jordanian population, more than half of whom are of Palestinian origin. That could cost him his throne.

International reaction has been equally harsh. ‘We are at a watershed moment’, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a virtual meeting of the Security Council. He went on to say, ‘If implemented, annexation would constitute a most serious violation of international law, grievously harm the prospect of a two-State solution and undercut the possibilities of a renewal of negotiations. I call on the Israeli Government to abandon its annexation plans.’

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a longstanding friend of Israel, has warned that annexation will be contrary to Israel’s long-term interests. In an opinion piece published in a leading Israeli daily, he wrote, ‘I profoundly hope that annexation does not go ahead. If it does, the UK will not recognise any changes to the 1967 lines, except those agreed between both parties.’

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian also warned Netanyahu not to annex any part of the West Bank because it would be in violation of international law and could have unforeseen consequences.

While Netanyahu may ignore international reaction and downplay the Arab opposition as a sop to domestic opinion, he cannot move without explicit US endorsement. That approval has obviously not been forthcoming. The US administration has sent a special envoy to Israel to consult with both Netanyahu and alternate prime minister Benny Gantz.

On 30 June, Netanyahu said he had met with Trump’s envoy Avi Berkowitz and US Ambassador David Friedman, ‘and spoke to them about sovereignty. It’s an issue we’re working on’. He thus effectively postponed any decision on annexation.

Even more important, he knows that he has to carry his coalition partner Gantz with him or face a major political crisis that may lead to the fall of his government. Gantz made clear to Trump’s envoys that 1 July ‘is not a sacred date’. He also declared that decisions unrelated to the coronavirus pandemic must wait.

Faced with his coalition partner’s foot-dragging, American indecision and unexpectedly harsh denunciation from Arab and other international sources, Netanyahu has apparently decided to delay a decision on the annexation issue. However, this doesn’t mean he has given up on the idea that he believes will determine his place in Israeli history.

Netanyahu again?

Israel’s third electoral showdown in a year was not kind to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even though his right-wing bloc of ultra-Orthodox and nationalist parties won more seats in parliament than the centre-left bloc headed by former army chief Benny Gantz, he still lacks the parliamentary majority required to form a government. This result does not bode well for Israeli democracy.

Israel may well be trapped in limbo for months to come. Netanyahu’s 58-seat bloc is a cohesive and coherent alliance, unlike the 55-seat opposition bloc. Comprising Gantz’s Blue and White coalition, the Labor–Meretz Alignment, and the Joint List alliance of Arab-majority political parties, the latter could hardly serve as the basis for a new government, even if it held a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

The Gantz-led bloc could nonetheless still prevent Netanyahu from forming a government, especially if Avigdor Lieberman—the leader of Israel Our Home party, which won seven seats—sticks to his pledge never to join the Likud-led coalition. But one wonders whether a self-proclaimed enemy of the Arab-Israeli ‘fifth column’, who has advocated transferring Israel’s Arab citizens to a Palestinian state, would ever side with an opposition that includes the Arab Joint List.

Whatever the outcome, the vote has sent a sobering message about the state of Israeli democracy. With Netanyahu facing trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the fact that he has even come close to winning a record fifth term in office is deeply troubling. And yet, in some ways, it is the natural upshot of Netanyahu’s nearly 15 years of systematically subverting Israel’s democracy.

Israeli politics are notoriously red in tooth and claw. And yet Netanyahu’s most recent electoral campaign may have been one of the dirtiest in the country’s history. He shamelessly smeared Gantz and the liberal media, flagrantly propagating fake news, malicious leaks and unsubstantiated rumours. He unapologetically pitted Jews and Arabs against each other. And he lambasted the law-enforcement officials whom he himself had appointed, claiming that their efforts to hold him accountable for his crimes amount to an ‘attempted coup’.

Now Netanyahu will probably use his slight edge in parliament to claim that any attempt by the judiciary to prevent him from forming a new government defies the ‘will of the people’. And which people are those? Not the ‘liberal elites’ who are largely responsible for Israel’s spectacular innovation-led economic growth. Netanyahu’s ‘people’ are those who feel unrepresented and neglected.

For a leader who has been in power for more than a decade, this is quite an achievement. After all, it was under Netanyahu that Israel’s transportation, education and healthcare systems have deteriorated.

But Netanyahu has proved to be a master of exploiting ethnic nationalism. More interested in ‘Jewish values’ than democratic niceties, Israel’s ‘neglected’ voters—including two out of three Jewish voters—embraced his campaign’s anti-Arab rhetoric and condemnation of the liberal elites’ laicism. They appreciated his well-defined and unapologetic approach to subduing the Palestinians, whose land he plans to annex by unilaterally implementing the deeply biased peace plan recently unveiled by US President Donald Trump’s administration.

In fact, Netanyahu has always stood proudly on the twin pillars of his platform: unrelenting opposition to Iran and obliteration of the Palestinian national movement. Most Israelis support both objectives.

Meanwhile, the ideologically amorphous opposition bloc has provided little clarity on its own approach to these issues. Though Gantz has opposed unilateral annexation of Palestinian territories, he has committed to annexing the Jordan Valley region of the occupied West Bank. Moreover, his Blue and White party has called Trump’s plan ‘entirely consistent with the principles of state and security’ that the party espouses.

It is the centre-left bloc’s weakness, even more than Netanyahu’s cynical political manipulation, that shaped the latest election results. Rather than offering a credible alternative to Netanyahu’s ambitions, the bloc based its entire campaign on the indicted prime minister’s challenges to the rule of law—an issue about which Netanyahu’s constituents simply don’t care.

For most Jewish voters, a vote for Netanyahu was a vote not for an indicted politician, but for a strong leader with a clear vision. Even the townships surrounding Gaza—which Netanyahu had failed to protect from periodic missile attacks by Hamas—preferred Netanyahu over Blue and White, which is led by three former army chiefs.

If Netanyahu manages to form a government, he will probably feel that he has carte blanche to continue pushing Israel towards autocracy. Among the first orders of business will probably be bringing the judicial system to heel, much like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Poland’s right-wing populist government have done in recent years.

There remains one political force in Israel that does still seek to uphold the cause of peace and justice: the Joint List. Israeli Arabs—galvanised by Trump’s proposal to transfer the citizenship of 300,000 of them to the Palestinian state—flocked to the polls, making the Joint List the only party on the left to make electoral gains. (It now holds 15 seats in parliament, up from 13.)

Blue and White lacked the political courage to defy Zionist parties’ prohibition of cooperation with the Joint List. Yet the Zionist left, too, lacks a convincing message and is fading into irrelevance as a result. It won only seven seats in this election—a four-seat loss. This leaves the Joint List as the only true opposition to Netanyahu’s policies of annexation, racist discrimination and sheer power politics.

This is the true, historic message of this election. If a battle for Israel’s soul is unfolding today, it is between Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and the Arab Joint List, not the Jewish left or the centrist Blue and White. Liberal Zionists will be able to stem the rising tide of unbridled nationalism only through an unapologetic alliance with Israeli Arabs.

The Trumping of international law and democratic institutions

The important institutions of constitutional democracy and international law have recently suffered serious damage. The long-term prospects for peace and stability have been undercut as a result.

The US Senate’s failure to fulfil its constitutional role of constraining a monarchical president weakens the credibility of the US as a promoter of democracy and the rule of law. The US has been brought closer into alignment with the new gang of illiberal autocrats.

In the past, presidents used the potency of the American liberal democratic ideal to rally like-minded nations and to rein in and chasten the world’s miscreants. The liberty and justice rhetoric appealed to and generated hope among peoples suffering under autocracy and oppression. The ideal inspired and could be leveraged for influence. While US society was never perfect, American leaders always claimed to be progressively moving towards its ideal and that was the basis of US claims for world leadership.

Perhaps this tarnished reputation won’t persist beyond the Trump presidency, or maybe the failure of the democratic institutions will shape perceptions for a long time. In the short term, licence has now been given to Trump to exercise the enormous political, military, economic and financial might of the US however he sees fit, with little fear of effective oversight by or accountability to Congress.

This could be a geopolitical inflexion point that will shape the international environment for at least the next five years and probably well beyond. Nascent democracies and peoples struggling against corrupt and autocratic regimes will find less moral support or inspiration from America. The prospects for liberal democracy, multilateralism and international cooperation now seem even dimmer.

The other blow to peace and stability was delivered by Trump’s Middle East peace plan. An undisguised gift to Israel, the plan is clearly unacceptable to the other Middle East states, the Europeans and the Palestinians. Its provocative character may be a harbinger of a new direction for the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The contempt it shows towards normative international law is a major concern.

Consensus on international law and the UN Security Council’s central role are important. Reflecting on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the UN Charter, members expressed concern about the current level of adherence to its authority. In a statement, the council’s president reminded the world, ‘The Security Council reaffirms its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security under the charter of the United Nations, and in this context, underscores the need for all States and international and regional organizations and others to have respect for the Charter.’ A desperate plea.

In theory, the Security Council is the most powerful organisation in the history of the international system. The five permanent members account for the bulk of the globe’s military spending, and their political and economic influence is unsurpassed.  For the world’s most powerful states to be united in a single political–legal structure is unique. The council has not always lived up to expectations; it was particularly fractious during the Cold War and is regularly ignored now. However, it remains an important body.

The Security Council was created as a formal organisation by chapter V of the UN Charter, and its roles and the extent and limits of its authority are contained in chapters VI, VII, VIII and XII. The council sits at the centre of international laws of war. Its decisions are binding on UN member states.

Trump’s ‘peace to prosperity’ proposal crowns his administration’s serial disdain for international law, already evident in its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Apart from a blatant rewriting of the history of the conflict and whitewashing of the role of Israel, and excusing Israel’s abnegation of its responsibilities under the Geneva Convention, the plan offers a self-serving misrepresentation of Security Council resolution 242 of 1967. The main tenets of the peace plan’s proposals stand in contradiction to both the Security Council and established international law.

More significantly, despite the force of resolution 252 of 1968, for example, which reaffirmed that the acquisition of territory ‘by military conquest is inadmissible’ and that measures and actions ‘which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid’, the peace plan does both those things. In principle, the land grab of the West Bank and the Jordan River Valley validates aggression. As does the specious argument that ‘withdrawing from territory captured in a defensive war is a historical rarity’, and therefore Israel has ‘valid legal and historical claims’ because the West Bank is ‘part of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people’.

It was precisely to prevent the recurrence of annexation of land through war for any reason and the refusal to withdraw that the Security Council was established. Such acts historically have been disruptive of peace and stability. Without an enforced norm to prevent forceful annexation there are no grounds on which to criticise Russia in Crimea.

Our current international legal framework and institutions bear the deep lessons drawn from the failure of the League of Nations and the causes of World War II. The great hope after the war was that peace and stability could be maintained through the UN and by the Security Council and the application of international law.

The US has generally, but not always altruistically, used its leadership position to exert moral suasion over the international system. As America’s leadership declines, it seems to also be abandoning the hope of settling international conflicts justly, peaceably and within the legal norms.

International law is a fragile thing. When it falls into disuse lawlessness between states becomes more likely. The prospects for peace and stability are now being seriously weakened.

Policy, Guns and Money: Covid-19, Islamic law and the Middle East

This episode features three great conversations. First, Brendan Nicholson speaks with Ahmed Al-Dawoody, legal adviser for Islamic law and jurisprudence at the International Committee of the Red Cross. Following that, Fergus Ryan and Elise Thomas of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre discuss censorship and state media relating to novel coronavirus Covid-19. Finally, ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings talks about recent events in the Middle East with Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based international fellow of the Washington Institute and guest of the Australian/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.