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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - December 3, 2007

Q's are on initiative for follow-up conference to Annapolis, handling two peace traks at once, and Gaza supplies cut-off

Q. Following the Annapolis meeting, there is now talk of a follow-up conference in Russia early in 2008. What lies behind this initiative?

A. At Annapolis, the Bush administration took two steps that did not meet with the approval of its Quartet partners: it effectively froze the UN, EU and Russia out of the nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process; and it sought to avoid sponsoring an Israel-Syria peace track. At the same time, Washington is seeking ways to prevent further deterioration in America's relations with Russia and is aware of Moscow's growing influence in Damascus, fueled by arms deals paid for by Iran. Then too, the US is also aware that Moscow (like Ankara) has been passing messages back and forth between Jerusalem and Damascus with regard to the prospects for a renewed Israeli-Syrian peace process.

An international Middle East peace conference in Moscow in early 2008, cosponsored by Russia and the US, appears in this context to offer a combination of American compensation for Russia for having hitherto been left out of the Middle East peace process, together with incentives for Moscow to channel its ties with Damascus in a constructive direction. According to reports last week in the American and Israeli press, the conference will be devoted to comprehensive Middle East peace, with emphasis on a Syrian-Israeli track. Deputy Syrian Foreign Minister Feisal Miqdad, who represented Syria at the Annapolis conference, confirmed that Syria hoped to renew peace talks with Israel at the Moscow meeting.

PM Ehud Olmert also confirmed last week that there was a prospect of renewed Syrian-Israeli talks and that President Bush no longer objected to this initiative. Olmert, however, added that in his view Syria was "not yet ripe" for productive talks--meaning it still had to dilute its relations with Iran and Islamist terrorist groups.

Apropos, it now emerges that Olmert's surprise one-day trip to meet with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow last October 18 was linked at least in part to Russia's effort to mediate between Israel and Syria. The Russian mediation effort of recent months has been led by Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Sultanov, a veteran Arab-affairs specialist.

Details of the anticipated Moscow meeting are scarce. The Russians apparently want first to convene a preliminary meeting of scholars to discuss the issues. Initial invitations to this preparatory meeting, slated for late January, indicate it will be held in the "presidential dacha" near Moscow.

Assuming a Moscow peace summit is held and that it deals with Israeli-Syrian relations, this will also respond to the persistent efforts of many within the Israeli security establishment, from Defense Minister Ehud Barak on down and including the entire intelligence establishment, to initiate an Israeli-Syrian track and even award it priority over the Israeli-Palestinian track.

Q. Can the Olmert government handle two peace tracks at once---with the Palestinians and with Syria?

A. This is an issue that plagued Israeli governments throughout the 1990s, when no fewer than five Israeli prime ministers (Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak) were involved in simultaneous or parallel negotiations.

Lest we forget, following the Madrid peace conference of late 1991 PM Yitzhak Shamir, an arch-hawk, managed parallel negotiations in Washington with Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian-Palestinian delegations, and even launched the multilateral process. In retrospect, it was easy for Shamir to sustain these parallel tracks over a period of months because he carefully avoided getting deeply into issues of substance with his negotiating partners. Rabin maintained the Washington talks until the Oslo breakthrough, then negotiated in parallel with the Palestinians and the Syrians, as did Shimon Peres who followed him.

Binyamin Netanyahu's talks with the Syrians were secret and indirect, through the good offices of Ron Lauder, but were serious. In parallel, in overt but reluctant talks with the Palestinians, Netanyahu negotiated the Hebron and Wye agreements. And Ehud Barak tried to proceed in parallel with Syria and the Palestinians but only agreed to the Camp David II summit of July 2000 after the talks with Syria had failed at a dramatic Clinton-Assad summit in Geneva in March of that year.

Can Ehud Olmert balance two tracks at once? Is he interested in trying to do so? Informed speculation in Israel varies widely on these issues, with some asserting that Olmert fully understands the low likelihood of success in his talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and needs the Syrian track for "insurance", and others noting Olmert's own publicly-stated reservations regarding Syrian President Bashar Assad and asserting that he prefers to concentrate on the Palestinian track.

The conventional wisdom during the 1990s held that the Israeli public almost certainly could not be called upon by its prime minister to ratify simultaneous territorial withdrawals on two fronts, Palestine and Syria. But at the same time, parallel negotiations could be sustained and the negotiations themselves could be exploited in order to play one peace partner off against the other. Israeli analysts and experts on the Arab world are not even in agreement as to which peace process should, under ideal conditions, be brought to fruition first: would peace with Syria make it easier to do a deal with the PLO, or vice versa?

It will be interesting to see how Ehud Olmert adapts to this murky reality.

Q. The Israel High Court of Justice ruled last Friday that the security establishment can reduce fuel supplies to Gaza but has to supply additional data regarding its plan to reduce electricity supplies. Why is the security establishment turning off the spigot, why is the court intervening, and what is the ultimate effect of all this on the conflict?

A. The security establishment advocates reducing infrastructure supplies to the Hamas regime in Gaza as a means of persuading that regime to restrain rocket and mortar attacks against Israel. The High Court has intervened, based on appeals made to it by Israeli human rights organizations, because for 40 years now it has offered Palestinians in the territories recourse to its judicial intervention when someone believes their human rights have been violated. The court's readiness to intervene regarding the Gaza Strip after Israel's withdrawal from that territory indicates that it believes Israel still retains some responsibility for the welfare of Gazans even after the Strip was declared a "hostile entity". Were Gaza to be seen as merely another enemy country like, say, Syria, the court would not intervene.

The Israel High Court of Justice is today open to appeal by anyone, including a Palestinian who is not an Israeli citizen, who believes he/she has been unjustly dealt with by an arm of the government of Israel. The court also believes it has the right to review any law passed by the Knesset.

Last Friday, the court applied the principle of "proportionality" to the security establishment's plans to restrict fuel and electricity supplies. It found that vital services like pumping water and running hospitals can be maintained inside the Strip even if fuel supplies are reduced (as they have been for several weeks now), but it is not (yet?) convinced that this is the case regarding electricity. The security establishment is complying with the court's directives and requests.

The interplay between terrorism emanating from Gaza, Israel's attempt to find a persuasive response and the High Court's intervention raises two powerful issues. First, there is no evidence that the Israeli approach of reducing infrastructure supplies has reduced rocket and mortar fire from Gaza into Sderot and the western Negev. The reaction of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, whose life is being made more miserable every day, appears to be greater anger against Israel, not pressure on the Hamas regime to do something about security. Indeed, 40 years of Israeli attempts to wield economic carrots and sticks in order to influence Palestinian behavior have not worked. The long-term solution is political; in the short term security measures are also undoubtedly necessary. But economic pressure doesn't appear to work. The security establishment's failure to learn this lesson is worrisome.

Second, there is a growing lobby inside Israel seeking to restrict the High Court's intervention in a number of spheres of Israeli and Palestinian life. Spearheaded by Minister of Justice Daniel Friedmann, who is backed by PM Olmert, this lobby points to instances like the Gaza fuel and electricity affair and asks why Israel allows its High Court to dictate to the security establishment how to deal with Israel's enemies. It seeks to pass Knesset legislation restricting the reach of the High Court.

To my mind, one of the main reasons why the High Court has become so interventionist is that the Israeli justice system is the only arm of Israeli government that functions well and is manned by high quality people. The level of decision-making in the Knesset is so poor that its decisions beg for judicial review. And the 40-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has taken so many wrong turns, beginning with settlement-building, that the High Court's activism is vital to maintain at least the rudiments of a humane Israeli profile there.