Adopting a framework for comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the change that Obama really needs to herald, write Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere and Omar Dajani In his victory speech on election night, President-elect Barack Obama heralded "a new dawn of American leadership" in the world. Watching him speak as the sun rose here in Cairo, one could not fail to be moved. The Arab world's enthusiasm about Obama's election is tinged, however, with worry about the direction his Middle East policy will take. Many suspect that the president-elect will prove as biased towards Israel as his predecessor, and rumours about the return of Middle East advisors from previous administrations give substance to these fears. We submit, however, that what is needed at this juncture is more than a change of face in Washington. What is needed is a fundamental change in the US's role in Middle East peacemaking. For almost 20 years, the creed governing American involvement in the Arab-Israeli peace process has been that the United States cannot want peace more than the parties themselves. Given the fact that the political costs of failure are high, successive American administrations have stepped back from taking a substantive role in negotiations, allowing the parties to lead the talks. The US, it was argued, should focus on process and build on whatever the parties can achieve through bilateral negotiations -- resigning itself to babysitting until its spoiled charges are grown up enough to solve their own problems. That strategy clearly has failed. After decades of intermittent negotiations, Arabs and Israelis have yet to reach agreement on a solution to this century-long conflict, and with each passing year the problems grow only more difficult to solve. No US administration has managed to avoid being drawn into the morass of Middle East crisis management, no matter how emphatically it was committed to letting the kids fight it out themselves. The Obama administration, similarly, should expect to be supplied with a series of new crises -- rocket attacks, new settlements, indiscriminate shelling, suicide bombings and targeted assassinations, if not full- fledged invasions and generalised tension. But while these crises must be attended to, they remain symptoms of the conflict and should not distract the new administration from the more critical task of achieving peace. Babysitting is not a policy. The policy that the region needs, and the one that can restore American leadership, should focus on resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict itself. Small goals, such as removing roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank or seeking ceasefire understandings, are as difficult -- and politically costly -- as aiming for a solution of the conflict itself. The Bush administration wasted six years before it reached that conclusion. We need not repeat its mistakes. The new administration can truly achieve the change we need if it focuses on developing and promoting a framework for comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict . This framework should be developed in consultation with the parties and international partners, building on ideas articulated in previous talks and agreements, as the Quartet did in developing its roadmap. But unlike the roadmap, the framework for peace should specify a final destination, defining the central terms of a comprehensive settlement with sufficient precision to prevent interminable haggling over their meaning and sufficient formality to make rejection of them too politically costly for any serious party to contemplate. As experience has shown, the fractured character of Middle East politics makes the costs of compromise too great for leaders in the region to shoulder alone. Accordingly, the goal of US Middle East policy should be to lower the costs of compromise by exercising substantive leadership, and thereby assuming some of the burden of the difficult decisions ahead. Capacity need not precede commitment. Among the foundations of President Bush's failed Arab- Israeli policy was the notion that capacity must precede commitment -- that the Palestinian leadership should be strong, democratic and free from corruption before negotiations towards peace could commence. This was a tragic mistake and a recipe for painful delays. Yes, the Palestinian Authority is weak and divided. Yes, the Israeli government is politically fractured, prone to over-reaction, and sensitive to third party interference. Even so, a US- backed framework for comprehensive peace would force all the parties to face the moment of truth in a way that the stale promise of bilateral talks can never achieve. Capacity can best be built, in the Palestinian context, around commitments. Once there is a credible option of a Palestinian state, it becomes easier to build Palestinian institutions, including those related to security. Comprehensiveness is the answer. It is time to forgo the futile debate about which track should take precedence: Syrian-Israeli or Palestinian- Israeli. The framework for peace should address both. Comprehensiveness in commitments does not foreclose prioritisation in implementation; and, more importantly, it would militate against a party becoming a spoiler. Some portray Hamas's rejectionism as an insurmountable obstacle to peace. It isn't. There is no peace for Hamas to reject. However, the promotion of a US framework for comprehensive peace, endowed with international support and ready for the parties' acceptance, will crystallise the positions of the parties, including Hamas, and clear the scene of false debates. The question, therefore, is not whether to engage Hamas. It is what to engage them over. When a credible peace alternative is established, all Palestinian factions will be obliged to show their true colours. Clarity is more constructive than ambiguity. The framework should be not only comprehensive, but also comprehensible. The Oslo process demonstrates that formulations that obscure what is being agreed or bear only slight relation to international law and basic standards of fairness will be difficult to sell -- and to implement. There should be no place for "constructive" ambiguity in the next generation of peace agreements. Pressure works best within partnerships. For an American role to be effective, it has to be built on strong alliances on four different fronts. Within the United States, the support of the American Jewish community is key: an increasing proportion of American Jewry understands that Israel's best hope for security lies in peace and a territorial settlement with its Arab neighbours. Only a good friend of Israel would muster the courage -- and have the credibility -- to tell Israeli politicians to look beyond their short-term political interests at the bigger picture. Within the international community, there is a need to rebuild the consensus within the Quartet and the Security Council and to use those institutions' authority to exert influence on the parties. Cultivating support for peace across the Israeli political spectrum will enable -- and push -- the Israeli cabinet to take the right decision when the moment for compromise arrives. Finally, a two-way dialogue with Palestinian and Arab partners will be critical to devising a fair deal and ensuring support for it. We recognise that none of this will be easy. Indeed, President-elect Obama's greatest challenge with respect to US policy in the Middle East will be to heed his own call for change. He should do that by exercising engaged and responsible American leadership, in keeping with the words his campaign transformed into a national creed: Yes we can. Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere is former adviser to the Egyptian foreign minister and teaches international politics at the American University in Cairo. Omar Dajani is former legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team and teaches law at the University of the Pacific.
