The retiring United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process has insightfully identified a major reason the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to boil and to entail widespread death and destruction.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland criticized the international community for relying on short-term fixes such as improving quality of life in occupied territory or diversions such as seeking peace deals between Israel and other Arab states. The crescendo of bloodshed during the past year underscores the ineffectiveness of such approaches.
Needed but not employed was a concerted and sustained diplomatic effort to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state. “What we have seen,” said Wennesland, “is the failure of dealing with the real conflict, the failure of politics and diplomacy.”
Much of Wennesland’s criticism was directed at the international community as a whole, but his points would apply especially to the United States, the patron of the party to the conflict that controls the land in question and resists Palestinian sovereignty.
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force. This was true with the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war after Israel conquered in 1967 what is now the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
The central feature of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s policy was a huge airlift of military supplies to Israel. Nixon and Kissinger, viewing the conflict in Cold War terms, considered their policy a success by enabling Israel to turn the tide of battle while shutting the Soviet Union out of a meaningful regional role.
Fast forward to today, and the emphasis is still on military escalation. Israel, in its vain effort to “destroy Hamas” and strike down adversaries on its northern border, is more committed than ever to increasing death and destruction as its default approach toward any security problem. The United States has abetted this approach by gifting $18 billion in munitions to Israel since October 2023.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria does nothing to discourage these tendencies and may instead encourage them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the events in Syria with celebration and self-congratulations, claiming that Assad’s fall was due to earlier Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and Iran. The change of regime was an occasion for Israel increasing rather than decreasing its offensive military activity in Syria, including seizure of a previously demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan frontier and airstrikes in and around Damascus on the very weekend that rebels were entering the capital.
During the intervening years since the 1973 war, a couple of U.S. presidents did make genuine efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the necessary follow-up — largely the responsibility of subsequent administrations — did not occur.
After Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin pocketed the resulting peace treaty with Egypt while ignoring the part of the accords dealing with the Palestinians. After Bill Clinton in 2000 laid on the table his "parameters" for a deal, the two sides came closer than ever to a peace agreement, but an Israeli election ended the negotiations and the new Israeli government did not return to the table.
The current impending change in U.S. administrations offers little or no hope for positive change on this subject. After social media posts by President-elect Donald Trump that said nothing about diplomacy and instead talked about “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages were not released by his inauguration on January 20, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his “strong statement.”
Ignoring that Israel has both the power and the land and is inflicting many times more suffering on innocent civilians than anything Hamas has done, Netanyahu said that Trump’s statement “clarifies that there is one party responsible for this situation and that is Hamas.”
Echoes of a 1973-style Cold War mentality can be heard today in much discussion of U.S. policy toward the Middle East and overwhelmingly in Israeli rhetoric. The main bête noire this time is Iran, reducing the influence of which is a constantly invoked rationale for hawkish and military-heavy policies.
The Middle East is not the only region that has demonstrated the fallacy of the notion of de-escalating a conflict through military escalation. As Wennesland puts it, “Politics is what ends war, and diplomacy is what ends war.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Nor does it mean seeking agreements for the sake of agreements, motivated in large part by a desire to wave supposed accomplishments before a domestic constituency. This was true of the so-called "Abraham Accords," which were not peace agreements at all but instead were largely about Israel not having to make peace to enjoy formal relations with other regional states, with which Israel was not at war anyway.
It was true as well of the enormous priority that the Biden administration put on seeking a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia, which, even if it had materialized in the form the administration envisioned, would not have served either U.S. interests or the cause of Middle East peace. The administration’s effort along this line was counterproductive not only in further reducing any Israeli incentive to make peace with the Palestinians but also, as President Biden himself admitted, in probably being an additional motivation for Hamas to attack Israel last October.
As for what diplomacy does mean, it includes the concerted and sustained use of diplomatic energy, policymaking bandwidth, and political capital to address directly the core issues underlying a conflict and bring about a result that makes a difference. In the Middle East context, that result needs to include Palestinian self-determination and an end to occupation.
Correct understanding of diplomacy also speaks to what a foreign policy of restraint means. It does not mean isolationism. In areas such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can mean an increase in diplomatic involvement and in the priority that policymakers give to the goal being sought. As the restraint-minded Quincy Institute puts it in its statement of principles, the United States “should engage with the world” and pursue peace “through the vigorous practice of diplomacy.”
Much damage from the policies that Wennesland laments has been done and cannot easily be reversed. The Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, which tsk-tsks from the United States have done nothing to stop, have led many observers — though not Wennesland — to believe that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
But even if the requirement of Palestinian self-determination could be achieved only through a one-state solution that provides equal rights for all, the same principle — that peace can be achieved only through vigorous diplomacy and not military escalation — applies.
