America's attempts at making peace in the Middle East face a number of internal obstacles, writes Diaa Rashwan* American policy towards the Arab- Israeli conflict is characterised by a long-term structural flaw, in addition to other aspects of that policy that are particular to the Bush administration and which are further impeding efforts to achieve a just and lasting resolution to the conflict. The major political flaw is the pronounced US bias in favour of Israel, which robs Washington of all chance of fulfilling its claim to act as an honest broker. This problem is compounded by a number of errors in US perception. These problems constitute the biggest single obstacle to the success of American attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The major structural flaw is that the US views the Arab-Israeli conflict as a group of discrete, though interconnected smaller conflicts, fought over specific interests, between Arab parties and the Zionist state. This perception first emerged in the wake of the 1967 War, when Israel offered to engage in direct bilateral negotiations with Arab parties whose lands it had occupied, such as Jordan and Egypt, on the condition that negotiations would not be extended to include other occupied lands, or the Palestinian issue, even though that was the origin of the conflict per se. This vision became progressively entrenched under successive US administrations, until it was adopted wholeheartedly after the October 1973 War as the basis for all future efforts at reaching a political settlement. On this understanding, the conflict is in fact a series of conflicts between Israel and each of its Arab neighbours over specific individual interests. It is these particular interests which represent the heart of the conflict, and while some common Arab interests may exist, these are always considered to be peripheral to the real issues. Thus, for the US, there is no such thing as the Arab-Israeli conflict, but rather several conflicts, which go by such names as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli-Syrian conflict, the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, etc. For the US, material interests are always paramount, and whatever symbolic interests may be involved are inevitably secondary. In addition, despite their complexity, these conflicts are not seen by the US as essentially different from any other international conflict in which a settlement was reached through direct, bilateral negotiations with all the parties involved. Since the conflict is primarily one of material interests, the US therefore prefers to bring the parties to the dispute together in bilateral negotiations, so as to avoid interference by unconnected interests in any particular dilemma. Israel, too, prefers this option, as it has always believed that this approach offers the best chance of achieving its own aims. As a result, the US has always favoured direct bilateral negotiations and has always done its best to keep the various negotiating tracks separate. Washington and Tel Aviv were gifted a historic opportunity to demonstrate the "soundness" of their model when Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat visited Jerusalem in November 1977, paving the way for the signing of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty two years later. The American-Israeli model still held sway at the Madrid conference in late 1991, where separate negotiating tracks were established between Israel and Jordan, Syria, and the Palestinians. Despite the apparent vindication provided by the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, this bilateral approach to the conflict has in fact been proven wrong three times in less than 20 years. Israel's withdrawal from occupied Egyptian territory and the end of the state of war between the two nations has not prevented Cairo from continuing to play a key role up to the present day in every aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The same is true of Jordan, which signed a similar agreement with Israel in 1994. The third failure was the collapse of the Camp David II peace talks between the Israeli prime minister and the president of the Palestinian Authority in July 2000. In many ways, this collapse can also be traced back to America's faulty perception of the nature of the conflict: the US put the Palestinian leadership in an almost impossible position, by demanding that Arafat make final decisions about issues which were not exclusively Palestinian concerns. If we look closely at the negotiations, we find that three types of issues were discussed. The first type was those issues that concern Palestinians alone, such as Israeli settlements, the Palestinian state, and economic cooperation between Israel and Palestine. The second type was made up of issues which are of concern to both Palestinians and the wider Arab world, such as refugees, borders, security and water. Finally, there was the issue of Jerusalem: this issue clearly has Muslim and Christian dimensions, in addition to its interest for Arabs and Palestinians. The Palestinian leadership was naturally unable to make final decisions on those issues which it did not have the authority to decide alone, such as the status of Jerusalem and the fate of the refugees. These were the very issues over which the negotiations collapsed. Although it did not officially announce the failure of its theoretical framework, Washington was forced after Camp David II to recognise, at least in practice, that the conflict is a comprehensive Arab-Israeli conflict. It thus began to seek the intervention of other Arab, Islamic, and Christian parties, in order to help the Palestinian leadership to reach final decisions on these issues. A second structural flaw in the American understanding of the conflict, and thus of the means to resolve it, is its long-standing preference for transitional agreements, in which, all too often, the discrete phases of the agreement are not directly linked. The US has always favoured an agreement which is broken down into a number of phases, and in which each stage has defined objectives and conditions that must be fulfilled. However, it has never made any systematic attempt to link these objectives and conditions to those which figured in subsequent phases. In addition, the US has never established a compulsory and unambiguous timeline for implementation of the various phases. In practice, Israel always has the right to exceed the time limits set, and the pretexts it invents are always accepted by the US Administration. Of course, an agreement in phases means that when the objectives or conditions of one phase are not met, the rest of the agreement collapses, and any new attempts at a settlement must start from scratch. The failure of a phased-in final agreement and the practical difficulties it entails were clearly manifested in the Oslo Agreement. It is these same difficulties which are now beginning to emerge once more with the "roadmap". * The writer is head of the Comparative Politics Unit, Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
