In the Middle East, a former Bush administration official once told me, perception is reality. That is one reason why bad ideas have such staying power–it’s about a narrative, not results.
But when those bad ideas finally die, it serves us well to make sure they don’t take root again. So this seems an appropriate time to bury the idea of a settlement freeze as a condition for negotiations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all. Consider this an autopsy of one of the worst ideas ever introduced into the conflict.
“After consulting with the parties, we have determined that a moratorium extension will not at this time provide the best basis for resuming negotiations,” a White House official told Politico’s Laura Rozen.
But if the settlement moratorium has any positive effect on negotiations, why on earth give up on it? The answer is, quite obviously, the settlement freeze was always a drag on the peace process.
President Obama’s fans in the media like to portray him as a man of logic and thorough understanding, while claiming his opponents are anti-empiricist. Yet for nearly twenty years the Israelis and Palestinians negotiated without a settlement freeze. As soon as Obama pushed for one, the Palestinians backed away from the talks.
This would be, for an empirical president, evidence that his plan was backfiring and to reverse course. But Obama is not an empiricist; he is an ideologue. So he pushed for another settlement freeze, which had the same result.
Robert Malley, who advised Obama during the 2008 election until it was discovered he was in direct contact with Hamas, explained to the New York Times why Obama has dropped his call for a freeze:
“The most likely scenario is that this moratorium was going to buy them a short reprieve, and was then going to plunge them into the same crisis they were in before.”
Plunge them into the same crisis. Translation: Obama’s call for a settlement moratorium put the state of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on life support.
One reason this failed was inadvertently revealed by an aide to Abbas, who gave the following quote about Obama to the Christian Science Monitor:
“The one who couldn’t make Israel limit its settlement activities in order to conduct serious negotiations, how can he be able to make Israel accept a fair solution? This is the big question now.”
In other words, Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze as a precondition for talks, and his unprecedented pressure on Israel to stop building homes for Jews in Jerusalem, gave the Palestinian leadership the impression that Obama could and would impose a solution on the Israelis. Therefore, why negotiate at all?
And the mess Obama has made of the peace process has inspired a sense of hopelessness even among his supporters in the intellectual class. Recently, Foreign Policy released its list of Top 100 Global Thinkers. Number 96 was Yale’s Bruce Ackerman. Though Ackerman in September lauded Obama’s “centrism and constitutionalism,” when Foreign Policy asked him how Middle East peace could be achieved, he responded: “I see no solution on the horizon: Only tragedy awaits.”
Now that even Obama’s boosters in academia have resigned themselves to the mess the president has made in the Mideast, it’s worth reminding the supposed empiricists why the settlement freeze hurts the process–consistently.
First of all, the two sides should be willing to negotiate without preconditions, as Netanyahu has repeatedly offered to do. The settlement freeze is just about the worst possible precondition, because it essentially concedes territory to the Palestinians both without concessions from the Palestinians and before negotiations have a chance to build good faith.
What’s worse, the settlement freeze actually undercuts a pillar of a future deal that everyone agrees on–the fact that certain settlements will remain part of Israel in a final-status agreement in exchange for land swaps. If Israelis must–as Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have demanded–stop building within the borders of existing settlements that everyone agrees will be part of Israel no matter what, then the basic outlines of a future deal are completely meaningless, and everyone is back to square one.
Additionally, the photo that accompanied the New York Times story on Tuesday offers another reason the settlement freeze is bad policy. Here’s the photo caption: “Palestinian laborers worked on a new housing project at the Israeli settlement of Har Homa on the outskirts of east Jerusalem, near the West Bank town of Bethlehem.”
Not only would certain settlements remain in Israel, but construction within settlements provides jobs for struggling Palestinian workers. That’s why in January, Palestinian workers complained to the Christian Science Monitor that the demand for a settlement freeze was further impoverishing them. Here’s how the Monitor explained the issue:
In the long-term, the freeze is meant to help the stagnant Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said he wouldn’t agree to a resumption in peace talks without a building moratorium. But in the short-term, thousands of Palestinians who work in construction across the West Bank are feeling the pinch. They’re annoyed that no one seems to be paying attention to the impact on their lives of what they see as a pointless exercise.
This is why the autopsy of the settlement freeze shows it died of natural causes. It never made sense, it never helped, and even its strongest proponents agree its time is up.