The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process is Dead. An Expert Explains Why
- The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process is Dead. An Expert Explains Why
by Alexia Underwood, https://www.vox.com/
“If your solution does not include self-determination for everyone, and basic civil, human, and political rights for everyone — it’s not a real process.”
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… Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — which the US attempted to broker for decades — has basically disappeared from view. Though President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is working on a peace plan, there’s been almost zero Palestinian input. And Israel’s recent election, which will almost certainly allow right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to maintain his grip on power after he promised to extend sovereignty over large portions of the West Bank, does not bode well for any future vision of peace that includes an independent Palestinian state.
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For these reasons and others, there’s a good chance that Kushner’s plan will be dead on arrival. America’s consistent attempts and failures to broker peace are striking — and a by Middle East scholar Khaled Elgindy argues that it’s due to a particular “blind spot” the US has toward the Palestinians.
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Elgindy served as an adviser to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank on peace negotiations in the 2000s and is currently a fellow in the Middle East center at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, DC.
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I reached out to him to talk about why the US has failed to broker peace, what role Trump has played in all of this, and how the issue of Israel and the Palestinians will continue to reverberate in the runup to the 2020 election. A transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below.
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Alexia Underwood: So let’s start by talking about the US’s “blind spot,” which is the title of your book. Explain what that means.
Khaled Elgindy: The blind spot refers to two areas of diplomacy that American policymakers traditionally have tended to downplay or ignore altogether: Israeli power and Palestinian politics.
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The United States has the tendency to treat the two parties as though they were somehow co-equal in power, when in reality, one party is occupying the other. Israel is an occupying power. So it’s not only a conflict, it’s also an occupation.
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We’ve seen various moments in history where that plays out very dramatically. For example, when the Israeli army was besieging Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s compound during the second intifada [Palestinian uprising] in 2002, that’s not something that you would see in other contexts. In the negotiations between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s leading up to the 1979 Peace Treaty between the two countries, Israeli tanks didn’t surround Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s headquarters, right?
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However, the United States tends to treat the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations like it did with those negotiations between Egypt and Israel, or the Northern Ireland negotiations: If we can just get the two leaders in the room to sit around the negotiating table, they can decide on the difficult compromises.
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