The End of the Middle East Peace Process

The Failure of US Diplomacy

Samer Bakkour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000595970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Nahostpolitik

Presenting the Middle East peace process as an extension of US foreign policy, this book argues that ongoing interventions justified in the name of 'peace' sustain and reproduce hegemonic power.

With an interdisciplinary approach, this book questions the conceptualisation and general understanding of the peace process. The author reinterprets regional conflict as an opportunity for the US through which it seeks to achieve regional dominance and control. Engaging with the different stages and components of the peace process, he considers economic, military and political factors which both changed over time and remained constant. This book covers the US role of mediation in the region during the Cold War, the history and present state of US-Israel relations, Syria's reputation as an opponent of 'peace' compared with its participation in peace negotiations, and the Palestinian-Israel conflict with attention to US involvement.

The End of the Middle East Peace Process will primarily be of interest to those hoping to gain an improved understanding of key issues, concepts and themes relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict and US intervention in the Middle East. It will also be of value to those with an interest in the practicalities of peacebuilding.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268819-1

Introduction

On 6 December 2017, Donald Trump, in the dubious company of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, and assorted regional and international political luminaries, recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and committed to moving the U.S. embassy to the city. With an abrupt movement, he stripped away the fabrications, illusions, and pretences that had previously sustained, and which were effectively synonymous with, the Peace Process.¹

Media commentators invariably decried this as the ‘end’ of the Peace Process, as the point when the sanctified path originally trodden by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin was abruptly paved over. They less frequently observed that the Peace Process had not existed for some time, or that Trump was in fact simply applying a decision taken in the mid-1990s by the U.S. Congress.

Indeed, it could quite clearly be objected that ‘peace’ was never a realistic proposition, as prominent critics of the Peace Process like Edward Said had anticipated in advance: for them, it had little to do with ‘peace’ and failed to meet the minimum preconditions for the resolution of the conflict and the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. However, a genuine Peace Process was quite clearly still needed: in the period 1950–2020, the Middle East experienced war and huge political and social upheaval, including internal repression, state collapse, and inter-state conflict. In the years after 1948, there were five Arab–Israeli wars, two Gulf wars and various internal (largely inter-Arab) conflicts.

In the post-Second World War era, external actors used bilateral initiatives, conferences, and summits to promote peace in the region. The U.S. was the main actor in this regard, although the Soviet Union, United Nations, and Arab League also intervened at different points in time. Although ‘peace’ initiatives occurred after the 1948 establishment of Israel, the concept of a Peace Process was only meaningful after the 1973 War, as this was the point when Arab states realised they could not destroy Israel through military means. The U.S., for its part, realised that a hostile state’s domination of the region could increase oil prices, produce a WMD ‘arms race’ and destabilise pro-Western Gulf regimes. This could then jeopardise the interests and security of key U.S. allies, such as Israel, Egypt, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, and even European partners in NATO.

‘Peace’ was therefore an extension of the U.S. desire to achieve mutual recognition between Israel and its Arab neighbours, which was viewed as necessary to ensure its integration into the wider region. The recent agreements between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are therefore the realisation of a desire that was present at the very start of the Peace Process.

Given the extent and scope of the current U.S.–Israel relationship, it is often assumed that this commitment was in place from the establishment of Israel in 1948. However, this is incorrect, as the highly developed relationship between the two countries can instead be traced back to the 1967 War. In important respects, as I will later demonstrate, this strategic relationship was influenced and to some extent sustained by cultural and social affinities.

However, the prominence of this relationship within contemporary international relations has not been prevented it from being misunderstood. There tend to be two main misconceptions. The first, which is often voiced by Arab critics of the U.S. foreign policy, holds that Israel is a colonial implant that is only supported by the U.S. because it sustains its hegemony in the region. The second, which to some extent follows on from the first, contends the Israel–U.S. relationship is purely strategic. Both claims, however, ignore the fact that the relationship is without parallel in international relations. As a case-in-point, consider Netanyahu’s impromptu address to both houses of Congress, when he gave a presentation on the Iranian nuclear threat. It is of course near-impossible to imagine the leader of any other state providing a similar tour-de-force. Similarly, it is difficult to grasp the U.S. presenting another state’s proposals as its own, as it did in the 2000 Camp David negotiations.

The Peace Process should be viewed and understood as an extension of this relationship. However, U.S. efforts notwithstanding, it had broken down to the point where security coordination (which has since been terminated) was one of the last remaining areas of cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, by 2009 the two sides were not even on speaking terms. In the post-Oslo era, the overwhelming impression was of stagnation and inertia, as internal political tensions, continued violence, and varying levels of international commitment inevitably impacted upon its trajectory. The framework inaugurated by the Oslo Accords in 1993 persisted, but apparently only because there was no viable alternative. But even so, the established framework for the resolution of the conflict began to appear tired, unimaginative, and poorly adapted to the scale of the challenge. A state of profound torpor began to envelop the Peace Process.

However, this in turn raises the question of why the Palestinian leadership has remained committed to it for so long. After all, it is only relatively recently that it has completely renounced the Peace Process. Here it is instructive to recall that the PA leadership were effectively imported or ‘brought in from the cold’ in the face of a popular uprising that the PLO initially regarded with considerable concern. It was therefore more than slightly ironic when the George W. Bush administration showed such a strong concern about Palestinian governance when announcing the much-heralded Roadmap; not least, because his predecessors and Rabin had viewed Arafat as a potential enforcer who, on the regional model of enlightened autocracy, would impose his will on his own society. Reference to past colonial precedent/s also makes it clear to us that the emergence of a ‘client class’ that has come to function as a mechanism of indirect rule is not a coincidence or inadvertent development.

The past U.S., foreign policy interventions in the region have produced a suspicion that the U.S. attitude to democracy and democracy promotion is, at best, ambivalent. Regional observers can hardly have failed to notice that the U.S. appears to be more comfortable with autocratic or repressive regimes. While it is politically expedient for the U.S. to invoke democracy and human rights, as in Obama’s 2009 Cairo University speech, it requires no great labour of analysis to see that this does not necessarily directly translate to U.S. foreign policy in the region. The 2013 Egyptian ‘coup’, which the U.S. desperately tried to rebrand as anything other than a coup, was a clear case-in-point. The long-established U.S. alliances with Mubarak and the House of Saud further underline and reiterate this.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, provided an opportunity for the U.S. and Americans to reassess this foreign policy legacy in the region. This would have required more searching and critical questioning and past interventions in the region and it was, needless to say, easier to stress, with varying degrees of sophistication and nuance, that Arabs and Muslims are inherently irrational and prone to inflict violence. It was perhaps inevitable that the role and significance of past U.S. foreign policy would be passed over in favour of the considerably more appealing and beguiling thesis of Arab backwardness.

The treatment of political Islam as a recidivist impulse that sought to return to the seventh century AD exemplified this. In contrast, a closer reading would instead reveal that it is in fact an attempt to come to terms with modernity, and more precisely its problematic application to the region. The project of Arab nationalism, which sought to draw on the tools and techniques of the developed ‘west’ while freeing itself from the chains of exploitation and under-development, therefore provided the historical and political context in which political Islam emerged and developed.

More recently, the Arab ‘Spring’ was similarly widely misinterpreted. The inability to address the revolutions across the Arab world in their novelty and spontaneity was clearly indicated by the direct borrowing of ‘Spring’ from the Prague Spring of 1968. This, no doubt, reflected the persistent Western gravitation towards Arab Muslims who want to think, look, and act like ‘us’. Needless to say, this also pre-emptively cancelled the possibility that popular struggle could show cultural variation.

The U.S. policymakers initially greeted the revolutions with tentative support, but then quickly backtracked when it became clear, as with the 2012 election of Mohamed Morsi as Egyptian president, that this could backfire. Similarly, in the case of the Syrian civil war, the U.S. initially extended support to ‘moderate’ elements of the Syrian opposition but then reversed after becoming concerned that this could strengthen ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and al-Nusra Front. This hesitancy and lack of decisiveness in the face of sudden changes could be said to be the defining feature of the U.S. democracy promotion in the region.

Here it should be remembered that the U.S. role in the region was damaged beyond measure by the 2003 invasion of Iraq which, it will be remembered, was explicitly justified as an attempt to promote democracy in the region. Up until this point, the U.S. commitment had been highly equivocal, and the overwhelming impression was that it would only do this if its interests could be ensured. The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, which was instead conducted under a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) banner, further undermined the (already questionable) U.S. claim to be a force for positive change in the region. Instead, the subsequent impression of powerful international states such as Russia and China was that it, and other NATO allies, had abused a humanitarian pretext for its own purposes.

However, even if the U.S. genuinely wished to promote democracy in the region, it would find itself confronted by profound economic, political, and social challenges. Growing population pressures, reduced export revenues, unaddressed economic and social needs, and urban environmental problems are pushing governments and state capacities to their limits.² Succession crises that result from the lack of well-established mechanisms for leadership change will further enable and empower extreme political voices in the region. The economic outlook for the next decade is bleak and demographic growth and rising youth unemployment will further intensify pressures on existing arrangements.³ These pressures raise questions about the region receptiveness to U.S. influence and, by extension, the Peace Process. Given these pressures, it appears more likely that the U.S. will turn away from democracy in favour of ‘stability’.

However, perhaps we are mistaken in equating the Peace Process with meaningful material change. On the contrary, it could instead be understood and grasped at the level of discourse, and as a mechanism that stabilises and anchors an uncertain and unstable reality. The public relations of the Peace Process, in which it appears as a loosely connected series of signifiers, would, from this perspective, establish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Different Dimensions of Conflict and Peace
• 3 The U.S. Role in the Region
• 4 U.S.–Israel Relations
• 5 America and the Syrian Track
• 6 The Palestinian ‘Problem’
• 7 Conclusion
• Index