Smoke rises from the U.N. headquarters in Gaza
When Barack Obama takes office Tuesday, among his first tasks will be sifting through the rubble of the Gaza war for some sign that long-term Israeli-Palestinian peace is still possible. The Bush Administration managed over the weekend to help broker a cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, and Obama has said he intends to weigh in on the diplomatic front as soon as he becomes President. On Sunday, Obama's top adviser, David Axelrod, said, "Events around the world demand that he act quickly, and I think you'll see him act quickly." (See pictures from the conflict in Gaza.)
Obama will probably name a team of diplomatic envoys to the region before the end of the week, transition officials say. Among the names that are circulating are those of former Senator George Mitchell, an experienced diplomat who has previously tackled Arab-Israeli issues, and Richard Haass, a center-right realist who currently heads the Council on Foreign Relations. Obama will also name former Clinton envoys Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke to special positions with overlapping responsibilities in the region. (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House.)
But after three brutal weeks of fighting in which Israeli forces killed more than a thousand Palestinians, the first question Obama and his diplomats will face is whether the old model for Middle East peacemaking is still valid. That model was developed last year by his choice for National Security Adviser, General Jim Jones, who was tapped to be President Bush's Middle East envoy in November 2007.
Jones' model was modest in its goals. Though Bush was aiming for a full peace deal in the Middle East, Jones quickly decided that until someone could show Israelis, Palestinians and skeptical American national-security officials that peace could work, no one would sign on for a larger deal. So early in 2008, at a dinner in Israel with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and top U.S. diplomats from the region, Jones proposed a new approach: instead of going for a grand deal, they would pick one place under Israeli occupation and make it a model. In consultation with the Israelis and the Palestinians, Jones and his team settled on the isolated and embattled West Bank city of Jenin.
Jones brought in the European Union to teach law and order to the local political leaders and enlisted Blair to organize economic assistance for the city. He revamped the training of ragtag militias into a police force and personally took on the Israeli military. He was friendly, says one Israeli officer who sat through dozens of meetings with him, but he was also "formalistic and strict." Condoleezza Rice credits him with relentless pressure on the Israelis to abandon roadblocks and hand over territory. "He was just very, very persistent and put a lot of pressure until they could get it done," Rice says. Even the Israeli military now agrees that the Jenin project has been a success, as moderate Palestinian officials have a robust and functioning security force that has been given control of the town and its surroundings.
In theory, the Gaza war has not changed that. The Israeli attack on Gaza nominally targeted Hamas, the political enemy of the moderate Palestinian Fatah party, which controls the West Bank. And despite the bloodshed in Gaza, Jenin and the West Bank have remained calm. So from the perspective of the Israeli security forces and Fatah leaders, the Jenin model "seems as if it's working and is worth continuing," says Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa program director at the International Crisis Group, who traveled to the region last week. In an interview with TIME recently, Jones said, "I don't have the sense right now that all the work we did is going down the tubes." He added, "I think they still believe" in the idea of a two-state solution, but "I haven't asked that question since Gaza."
Yet there are two problems. First, the Gaza bloodshed has made talking to the Israelis impossible in the short term. "The images people are seeing here are having a very, very profound emotional impact," Malley says. But even if those wounds heal quickly, Hamas remains in control in Gaza, and neither Israel nor the West is willing to negotiate with the group. Just last week Hillary Clinton said the U.S. cannot negotiate with Hamas "until it renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements." A senior European diplomat who has been in talks with the Obama Administration says that in private the Obama team is equally firm. "I took what she said literally," the diplomat said. "And the bar remains where it has been" for talks with Hamas.
But the same diplomat offered a somewhat more nuanced view of the need to bring Hamas into the process anyway. "What the outbreak of the terrible violence in Gaza has shown is that it's very difficult to have progress on the West Bank only negotiations," the diplomat said. He said it would fall to the Arab countries to bring Hamas closer to those principles. "The Arabs themselves [must] find some way of finding an accommodation," the diplomat said.
In that regard Fatah leaders believe things could have gone worse in the Gaza war. Hamas' attempt to generate pressure on Arab governments to back away from the Palestinian Authority and support Hamas' positions has failed: on Friday, a meeting in Qatar of Muslim states on the crisis was attended by Syria, Iran, Sudan and Hamas leaders, but was boycotted by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, all of whom remain committed to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. The Gaza war, says Gaith al-Omari, a former Palestinian negotiator, "has crystallized the divisions" in the Arab world over the path to Palestinian statehood.
Al-Omari argues that Abbas cannot begin negotiations soon, but in a month or two, he will have to show that his approach can deliver results. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will all have their own domestic political and regional strategic reasons to push the process as well. The senior European diplomat said he expected that in the wake of the cease-fire, there will be a "huge international effort to reconstruct Gaza." Clinton, in her testimony, embraced Jones' Jenin model and said, "We're going to continue that kind of approach."
But the damage from the Gaza war has been heavy. So while hope may be sweeping Washington over the coming days, some longtime Middle East observers are less starry-eyed: "Whatever's going to happen from the change [in Washington]," says Malley, "it can't make up for the wounds of the last three weeks."