The Obama Presidency

POINT/COUNTERPOINT

Mitchell: Honest Broker

Mitchell: Wrong Diplomat

Washington/JTA

Philadelphia/JTA

1.1 opefully, George
Mitchell's tenure
as special envoy to
the Middle East will turn out
to be a case of déjà vu, as in
Northern Ireland.
For a time it appeared
that Israelis and Palestinians
would end their conflict
before Irish Catholics and
Protestants. In 1993, Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin and
PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo
Agreement on the White House lawn.
But Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by
an Israeli terrorist and, just as the killer
intended, Oslo died shortly after its
Israeli sponsor.
After Rabin's murder, neither Israelis
nor Palestinians fully observed the agree-
ment, although it still succeeded in dra-
matically reducing the violence.
Like Oslo, Northern Ireland's Good
Friday Agreement hit snag after snag,
with both sides caught violating its
terms. But none of the major players on
either side were assassinated, as Rabin
was, and each setback was followed by
intensive efforts to resuscitate the agree-
ment. This marks a striking difference
with the Israeli-Palestinian peace pro-
cess.
Israelis and Palestinians invariably use
acts of violence as a pretext to stop nego-
tiating, never seeming to grasp — or not
caring — that by doing so, they were giv-
ing the terrorists on both sides a veto on
the peace process.
The gaps that divided Irish Catholics
and Protestants were every bit as wide as
those dividing Israelis and Palestinians.
So why did the Good Friday Agreement
succeed while Oslo collapsed?
Perhaps the most significant reason
was the perseverance of one critical out-
sider: George Mitchell. Mitchell became
involved when British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, who had invested heavily in
the success of the Irish negotiations,
asked President Bill Clinton for help in
bridging differences between the two
sides.
Mitchell stated that "peace never just
happens; it is made, issue by issue, point
by point." But, he warned, "in order to
get negotiations launched, precondi-
tions ought to be kept to an absolute
minimum ... Confidence needs to be
built before more ambitious steps can be
taken. Front-loading a negotiation with
demanding conditions all but assures

A18

January 29 • 2009

that negotiations will not get
under way, much less succeeE
Mitchell also wrote that he
believed there should be a
price paid by whichever side
dodges commitments it has
made to the other side or to
the mediator — for example,
the United States.
For the past eight years,
neither the Israelis nor
Palestinians have lived up to
the commitments they made.
Although the Bush admin-
istration had no hesitation pointing to
Palestinian noncompliance, it almost
never called on Israel to live up to its
commitments (think of the oft-promised
settlements freeze).
Moreover, U.S. envoys to the region

T

he Zionist
Organization
of America
is concerned about
President Obama's
choice of George
Mitchell as Mideast
envoy.
As Jackson Diehl of
the Washington Post
said, "The Mitchell Plan
of 2001 was a flop. Why
try the Mitchell approach again?"
First, Mitchell's record shows
that he incorrectly believes that the
Palestinians and Israelis are equally at
fault for the lack of progress. He even
believed this when Yasser Arafat head-

At Issue

On Jan. 22, George Mitchell was named U.S. Special Envoy
for Middle East Peace, working under President Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mitchell, 75, is
a former U.S. senator from Maine who served as Senate
Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995. Was he the right choice
for special envoy?

— including Secretaries of State Colin
Powell and Condoleezza Rice — never
had full presidential backing for their
efforts and were undermined repeatedly
by Elliot Abrams and other White House
neoconservatives.
As a result, the United States lost its
credibility as an honest broker and, as
President Bush's term ended, the conflict
was infinitely further from resolution
than it was when Bill Clinton left the
White House.
That is about to change. Mitchell's
appointment is the proof.
President Obama would not have
appointed George Mitchell unless he
intended to push the process to a suc-
cessful conclusion.
As for Mitchell, it is safe to assume
that he would not have taken the job if
he did not know that Barack Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would
fully back his efforts without regard to
the supposed political constraints on dis-
interested mediation.
As for Barack Obama, he promised to
begin the serious pursuit of an Israeli-
Palestinian agreement during his first year
in office. He's well ahead of schedule._

M.J. Rosenberg is the director of the Israel
Policy Forum's Washington office.

Ilk

George Mitchell

ed the Palestinian Authority.
Mitchell has called on "both Israel
and the Palestinian Authority ... to
halt the violence to "protect human
rights," to "condemn and discourage
incitement," to show "restraint" and to
protect holy places." The Palestinians
have refused to pursue these actions,
not the Israelis.
Mitchell ignores the fact that the
Israelis have made major concessions
while the Palestinians have made virtu-
ally none. The Israelis have given up
all of Gaza and half of the West Bank,
and the rest of the world gave the
Palestinians billions of dollars in aid.
Yet the Palestinians have fulfilled none
of their signed agreements to arrest
terrorists; end incitement to hatred and
violence against Israel in their schools,
media and speeches.
They also have refused to accept
Israel as a Jewish state, evidenced by
their new Palestinian emblem showing
all of Israel covered with an Arab head-
dress next to a rifle.
Second, Mitchell demands that Israel
not allow even "natural growth" within
the Jewish communities in the West
Bank. This was not part of any agree-
ment ever signed by Israel. And why
reward the Palestinians for their vio-

((

lence and intransigence? Does
Mitchell want Jews in the West
Bank to stop having children,
or at least not allow grown
children to live in the same
town as their parents?
It is a racist notion that Jews
cannot live in the West Bank
but Palestinians can. How is it
that Arabs make up 15 percent
of Israel's population, but the
Arabs won't permit even less
than 10 percent of the popula-
tion in the West Bank to be

Jews?
Third, Mitchell misunderstands
the true goals of the Palestinians.
In December, at a conference of the
Institute for National Security Studies,
he said, "The Palestinians overriding
objective is an independent state' If
this were true, why did the Palestinians
reject the offer of statehood by Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000?
Instead they launched a terror war
against Israel.
In making this statement, Mitchell
ignores polls that show 58 percent of
Palestinians reject statehood alongside
Israel and 70 percent of Palestinians
support a one-state solution.
Fourth, and even worse, Mitchell
explains away Palestinian terrorism by
stating that "a cessation of Palestinian-
Israeli violence will be particularly
hard to sustain unless Israel freezes all
settlement activity."
Still worse, he accepts explicitly the
idea that Palestinian Authority action in
fighting terrorism is largely conditional
on further negotiations and the relaxing
of Israeli security measures rather than
being binding on international obliga-
tions under the Oslo Accords.
Mitchell seems unaware that the real
issue is not settlements or Jerusalem or
statehood but the Palestinians' refusal
to accept Israel's right to exist as a
Jewish state, and that Israeli conces-
sions are not taken as positive signs by
the Palestinians but as an indication
that Israel is weak and ready to cave in
to more demands.
Mitchell's diplomacy cannot work
until he realizes that the answer is not
more one-sided concessions but mak-
ing clear that unless the Palestinians
transform their culture, policies, goals
and actions, they will receive no more
concessions or U.S. funding. ❑

Morton A. Klein is the national president of
the Zionist Organization of America.

