The Problem With Deadline Diplomacy

By Robert L. Pollock
The Wall Street Journal, 21 July 2000

“In 1993 Israel and the Palestinian Authority committed themselves to resolving their conflict by exclusively peaceful means. I very much hope that they can make progress during the coming talks at Camp David. But it would be hubris to expect a half-century old conflict to be resolved according to a specific timetable. Whatever happens, there will be no excuse for a return to violence.”

Those words, or something similar, are the advice a wise and responsible leader might have offered in advance of the latest Mideast summit. Instead, President Clinton chose a different path. Writing in Newsweek, he said: “If the parties do not seize this moment [emphasis added] to make more progress, there will be more hostility and more bitterness — perhaps even more violence.”

Veiled Threats

In other words, political expediency demands I get my way now. Expressing frustration through violence is acceptable behavior — at least I’m not going to categorically condemn it. Indeed, violence isn’t so much the choice of free moral agents as a law of nature that flows as predictably from certain circumstances as rivers flow to the sea.

This is the rhetoric of every thug who has ever wanted to make threats without taking responsibility for them. It’s also unnecessary, unless one is more interested in taking credit for peace than in actually having it some day.

So for all President Clinton’s insistence on the finality of this week’s “deadline” for Mideast peace, one can safely presume he has little interest in an agreement during the long weekend he’s about to spend in Okinawa. He wouldn’t be there for the photo op.

But don’t deadlines concentrate the mind, forcing the parties to find good compromises they would otherwise have little incentive to reach? More likely, they lead to rash decisions — decisions that invariably favor the party with longer time horizons. Ehud Barak is the fourth Israeli Prime Minister that Yasser Arafat has dealt with since the signing of the Oslo Accords, and the Barak government is falling apart. Believing his is a mandate to make “peace,” Mr. Barak is feeling incredible pressure to cut a deal – – any deal. He may well accede next week to many of Mr. Arafat’s demands on Jerusalem, including a Palestinian police force in the Old City — not prudent if you want to prevent the place from becoming another Hebron.

It’s no surprise that Mr. Arafat is a big fan of deadlines — the operative one being his threat to declare Palestinian statehood on Sept. 13, come what may. There’s no particular significance to that day, except that it’s the anniversary of his White House handshake with Yitzhak Rabin. Since he already has plenty of territory under his control to make a real nuisance of himself, and since the United Nations is apt to recognize his declaration, what has he to lose by such threats?

What’s disappointing is Mr. Clinton’s “deadlinitis,” redolent as it is of pure political calculation and scant regard for the quality of the deals he brokers.

With time to do it right, Israelis and Palestinians would be more likely to find a workable solution. The logic is as strong as ever. For the Palestinians, of course, it’s a perfectly legitimate desire to have some say in the way they are governed. And for a democracy like Israel — which wound up with the Palestinian territories through the freak accident of a defensive war — the role of occupier is both morally uncomfortable and a practical pain in the neck. Since demographics made annexing the West Bank unfeasible for Israel, some form of Palestinian self-government always seemed an inevitability.

But the slow development of local political autonomy, with the statehood question deferred for a generation or more, didn’t suit the politicos’ needs. So the Americans and Israelis rushed to recognize the washed up Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Mr. Arafat, as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. The view was repeatedly aired that Mr. Arafat’s illiberalism would actually speed things along by crushing the more radical Palestinian factions. In the end, however, it was the Israelis who bore the brunt. Mr. Arafat, who knew the Clinton administration had too much invested in him ever to call his bluffs, would unleash his backers and even his police force whenever the Israelis needed a kick in the pants. And the American president or secretary of state would soon rush in to settle matters, much like a parent might rush to judgment in a sibling dispute to preserve appearances before company arrives.

Had the Americans and Israelis been willing to ride out Mr. Arafat’s tantrums over the past seven years – – indeed, had the Americans not worked so hard to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, the one Israeli prime minister who was willing to ride them out — they might have found Mr. Arafat ready to make a final deal by now. But the Palestinian leader’s strategy of forcing concession after concession has worked well. He’d probably rather give up on Jerusalem than give up on all claims against Israel, at least as long as he’s confident he’s going to get help in pressuring for more.

Given time — unfortunately for Mr. Clinton, more time than he now has left in office — Mr. Arafat could probably be broken of this habit. But the proper course — telling the parties to go home and work it out among themselves — seems both contrary to Mr. Clinton’s immediate interests and alien to his mentality.

Millenarian Eye

What’s lacking most in this and other Clinton peace processes may simply be a sense of historical perspective. To Mr. Clinton’s millenarian eye, every disagreement seems merely a misunderstanding, every dispute (even over the exact same piece of land) amenable to a resolution that has no losers. Nowhere in his mind, it seems, does it register that peace often requires losers, or at least massive concessions. Nor does he seem to understand that a long-lasting peace — with stable governments, stable borders and minimal internal conflict — is more of a historical anomaly than its opposite. In Western Europe, such a state of affairs is barely 50 years old.

There is, despite the missteps, still hope for the Israelis and Palestinians. Both parties have an interest in a settlement. But we’re likely talking at least a generation before normal coexistence is really possible, perhaps nearly as long before the Palestinians are prepared to renounce all further claims against Israel. The result of Mr. Clinton’s constant interventions — which unfairly raise hopes and tacitly excuse the very violence he claims to abhor — has probably been to retard that day. False deadlines don’t help break real deadlocks.

Robert L. Pollock is assistant editorial features editor of the Journal.