Realities of the New Middle East: The Two-State Solution : หน้า 21/52

REALITIES OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST 15 tion of the international consensus, obscures a deeper problem: realities on the ground have already destroyed much of the viability of the two-state solution. The greatest policy challenge for American leadership will be to reverse the realities that doom the two-state solution or find an alternative. Either task will be extremely difficult, but failure to move realistically in either direction will fuel political cynicism and despair in the region and hamper the general conduct of American diplomacy, even on seemingly unrelated issues. The two-state solution is dying because the Palestinian Authority is a shell, because neither Palestinians nor Israelis truly believe that a two state solution is viable or trust that the other side is committed to it in a meaningful way, and because the state institutions needed to reach an agreement and make such a solution work have disintegrated on the Palestinian side. And if the capability of the Palestinian leadership is questionable, so is the political will of Israel and the United States. Washington has never undertaken any sustained diplomatic initiative to pursue a solution that did not have the strong support of the Israeli leadership. And while part of the Israeli leadership shows signs of a determination to pursue a two-state solution, four decades of policies have made it extremely difficult politically for them to act on such convictions. Facts created by Israel on the ground—new settlements, new barriers, and new roads that effectively carve up the West Bank into separate zones (ten, according to a World Bank study)—are serious obstacles indeed. The Bush administration has been widely criticized for its disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Certainly, coming into office in the wake of the bloody collapse of a decade-old peace process, the new American leadership did indeed react by scaling radically back on its diplomatic commitment to the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the Israeli-Palestinian arena was not walled off from the Bush administration’s audacious vision for regional transformation. Bush’s boldness manifested itself in three ways. First, he was the first American president in generations to use “Palestine” as a proper noun. U.S. policy since 1967 moved glacially from quiet hostility to the idea of a Palestinian state to the implicit assumption that it would be an eventual outcome of negotiations. Only in his last days in office did President Clinton move the American support for Palestinian statehood into public view; by contrast, President Bush has repeatedly backed such an outcome. Second, Bush’s “freedom agenda” for regional democratic transformation was actually launched for Palestine, not for Iraq. In June 2002, the president called for comprehensive political and constitutional reform as a condition for American efforts to support Palestinian statehood. Third, Bush greatly elevated efforts to combat Palestinian terrorism. The second intifada led him to abandon efforts to promote strong Palestinian leaders capable of making and enforcing security commitments, which the United States had undertaken as a result of the Oslo process. He also moved far beyond isolation of those the United States viewed as “tainted by terror” to active efforts to overthrow them. The United States supported an Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat in 2002 and then worked to promote Fatah’s takeover of the Palestinian Authority, which from a legal standpoint can only be defined as a coup against Hamas after its election victory in 2006. --- CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE