Seize the moment

US Secretary of State John Kerry contends that failure to pick up on peacemaking now could have devastating historic consequences for Israelis and Palestinians

By LESLIE SUSSER
John Kerry 370 (photo credit: REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)
John Kerry 370
(photo credit: REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)
No American diplomat has ever worked harder for peace than Secretary of State John Kerry.
It is, he insists, a decisive moment in Israeli-Palestinian history and leaders on both sides need to take courageous decisions or face the consequences. The watershed choice is between making concessions to achieve peace, security and potentially spectacular economic success or digging in and condemning their respective peoples to perpetual conflict, economic hardship, and, for Israel, international disdain and growing delegitimization.
“If we don’t eagerly grab this moment, we will condemn ourselves to future conflict,” Kerry told a meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea in late May. “We are staring down a dangerous path… that will be haunted by violent extremists who rush to fill the vacuum left by the failure of leadership.”
It was not only the enormity of the choice; it was also a case of now or never. “What happens in the coming days will dictate what actually happens in the coming decades.
We’re running out of time… and if we do not succeed now, we may not get another chance,” he declared at the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum a week later in early June.
In Kerry’s view, in a Middle East undergoing profound generation-driven change, Israeli-Palestinian peace is also a vital American interest. He argues that the young people who sparked the upheaval need business and economic growth to create the better lives they seek. Otherwise, in this latest phase of the struggle between Western-style modernization and Islamist-bound tradition, the radical traditionalists will win.
As Kerry sees it, an Israeli-Palestinian peace, primarily because of the political implications, could be a tipping point in favor of a moderate outcome. It could also help create a model for wider regional economic cooperation.
In trying to prod recalcitrant Israeli and Palestinian leaders to move in the right direction, Kerry employed a two-pronged tactic: apocalyptic rhetoric aimed at the leaders and their respective constituencies and calculated to create a sense of urgency; and action to mobilize organizations and groups with leverage on the principal protagonists, like the Arab League, the American Jewish community, various international players and the business communities in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
In late April after talks with Kerry in Washington, Arab League foreign ministers upgraded their 2002 peace initiative to include mutually agreed Israeli-Palestinian land swaps; in early June, Kerry appealed to American Jews to urge the Israeli government to go for peace. “For your children, do this; for your grandchildren, do this; for Israeli children and Palestinian children and for Israel, let them know that you stand behind negotiations that will lead to two states for two peoples living side by side in peace and security, and that you are part of the great constituency for peace,” he implored.
Kerry also routinely raises the Israel- Palestine issue with every world leader he meets from China and Japan to Brazil and New Zealand, and says they all want to help.
“Everyone is invested in a resolution and everyone has a role to play,” he insists. And when the Israeli and Palestinian Business Communities launched their “Breaking the Impasse” initiative in late May, Kerry, although he had nothing to do with its inception or development, was quick to welcome them aboard. “They represent a courageous and visionary group of people, civic and business people, Israelis and Palestinians, who have I think the uncommon ability to look at an ageless conflict and actually be able to see opportunities for progress,” he declared.
For their part, the leaders of the Breaking the Impasse initiative echoed Kerry. “Resolution of the conflict is the single most important factor to create jobs and generate growth and prosperity throughout the Greater Middle East,” they averred.
“We are concerned that the absence of a permanent solution to the conflict will ultimately result in a catastrophe for both peoples… Therefore, we call on the political leaders to move forward with boldness, courage and a sense of historic mission to provide a comprehensive vision necessary for resolving all the final-status issues in the framework of agreed terms of reference, ending all claims and securing peaceful and good neighborly relations between the two states,” they added in a joint resolution.
By late May, nearly 200 top Israeli and Palestinian businessmen and other prominent civic leaders, accounting for about a third of the combined GDP, had joined the initiative.
In going public at the World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan, they announced that they intended to leverage their collective business experience and influence to convince leaders on both sides to begin serious negotiations aimed at reaching a full-fledged peace agreement.
The initiat ive began with an approach by Palestinian billionaire Munib al-Masri, chairman of the giant Palestinian holding company PADICO, to Israeli high-tech and venture capital guru Yossi Vardi, chairman of International Technologies Ventures, at a WEF meeting in Istanbul last June. Over the next 12 months their teams met secretly over a dozen times under WEF auspices to draft a joint plan of action. They decided to limit themselves to lobbying the politicians by highlighting the business opportunities peace would open up as opposed to the potentially devastating threats to their businesses of continued conflict.
But how effective are they likely to be, when, besides their numbers and vision, they have no real political or economic clout? They will not submit a peace plan of their own. Nor will there be any joint projects until peace is achieved. “We shall not engage in any normalization under occupation,” al- Masri explained.
To create a better peacemaking climate and to lure Palestinians back to the peace table, Kerry went further. He announced a separate $4 billion plan for economic development in the West Bank, which he described as “bigger, bolder and more ambitious than anything proposed since Oslo.” Rather than classic government to government aid, it would be based on a new government/ private sector partnership model, with both raising capital and government facilitating huge job-creating private sector-led projects.
According to Kerry, this could be a new model for the Greater Middle East too because of the need to create millions of jobs for the restless younger generation.
In the Palestinian case, the plan is being developed by the international Quartet’s special representative Tony Blair. According to Kerry the aim is “to develop a healthy, sustainable, private sector-led Palestinian economy that will transform the fortunes of a future Palestinian state, but also significantly transform the possibilities for Jordan and for Israel.”
For around two months Blair has been working with a high-powered group of experts, purportedly including leaders of some of the world’s largest corporations, renowned investors and top global analysts.
They have been looking at possible highimpact projects, primarily in tourism, construction, light manufacturing, energy, agriculture, and information and communications technology.
According to Kerry, the results of their preliminary work were “stunning.” They claim they could increase Palestinian GDP by 50 percent in three years, cut unemployment from 21 percent to 8 percent, increase the median wage by 40 percent, treble tourism, double or treble agricultural output, and create 100,000 new jobs in home construction alone.
But how much of this is something the Palestinians can bank on? Or is it simply a huge and largely hollow promise to lure them back to the negotiating table? The onus is on Kerry and Blair to silence the skeptics. But for now they are refusing to disclose details. They won’t say who the experts are, they won’t give details of any specific projects and they won’t say where the $4 billion investment in the Palestinian private sector is coming from.
In Kerry’s view, a far bigger economic transformation on both sides would come from actually cutting a peace deal. “With renewed strength, the new neighbor states of Israel and Palestine could actually become another hub in the Middle East for technology, finance, tourism. Israel and Palestine and Jordan together could become an international finance center, attracting companies that simply won’t take that risk today,” he maintains.
Man y Israeli analysts, however, argue that the Israeli economy will not benefit much from peace with the Arab world. The economy is too highly developed, too hightech and there would no significant economic fit. On the contrary, they say Israel’s natural partners are in Europe, Asia and the US. But what this argument fails to take into account are the potentially heavy economic costs of non-peace: the costs of wars or intifadas and the costs of economically or morally motivated company/investor pullouts from a delegitimized occupying power.
On the wider implications of the absence of peace, Kerry pulls no punches. “A Greater Israel that would end up trying to swallow the Palestinian people could only possibly survive in a state of institutionalized division and discord, a pale shadow of the democratic vision that motivated and animated the founders of Israel,” he asserts.
This thinking is not new. But such graphic and unequivocal language by such a high level American official is.
Kerry clearly has both American and Israeli interests at heart and has to be admired for his passionate and courageous commitment to the cause of peace. The problem is the allor- nothing character of his approach. The fundamental question is whether a grand conflict and claims ending peace is really on the table – given the current Israeli and Palestinian leaderships and the complexity of the issues they face.
In other words, is his basic assumption – that full-fledged peace is doable – sound? And will his pressure tactics work? For example, can the Arab League, given the current fragmentation and upheaval in the Arab world, make a significant contribution? And is it realistic to expect American Jewry to put pressure on the Israeli government to go for peace? Kerry counters that failure to pick up on peacemaking now could have devastating historic consequences for both peoples and that they could come to be known “not just for their proud cultures and their contributions to history, or their entrepreneurial energy, but they could come to be known for what they failed to do – or even worse, what they refused to do.”
By the same token, Kerry could come to be known as the man of vision who pleaded and cajoled, who brought every ounce of conceivable pressure short of American sanctions to bear, and, who, at the eleventh hour, rescued the parties moments before they plunged together into the abyss – or as a quixotic latter-day knight of doleful countenance tilting abjectly at windmills before the storm. 