The wisdom of dispatching international troops and/or creating an international protectorate to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been has been debated in openDemocracy by Tony Klug, Stuart Cohen, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Bernard Avishai, and others.
These are important, timely questions: the roadmap is showing signs of stagnation, and several prominent American and international opinion-makers (such as Martin Indyk, former United States ambassador to Israel) are increasingly voicing interest in an American-led inter-positional force. Whether this would act on its own, as part of a United Nations force, or under the Nato banner, such a force would go well beyond the role of monitoring implementation of the roadmap; it would assume primary responsibility for fighting Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Unfortunately, all these proposals are misguided for the same reason: history shows that real progress in the Arab-Israeli conflict always comes from agreements made not by outsiders, but by the warring parties themselves.
The problems of dispatching American troops
A US-directed inter-positional force is intuitively attractive. Its proponents contend that by putting the terrorist-fighting responsibility in the hands of a third party as opposed to the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, the moderate Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas would have greater leverage and authority to take on the extremists. Moreover, it is argued that the presence of American troops would give the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) the security to make strategic withdrawals.
The timing for such a force may also seem propitious. For the first time, the west trusts a Palestinian leader. And in the post-9/11 strategic environment, heightened US involvement in counter-terrorism operations has become more palatable to the American public. Furthermore, champions of an inter-positional force are keen to argue that several recent historical precedents demonstrate the apparent viability of international mandated trusteeships. East Timor and Kosovo, the argument goes, show the possibilities of nation-building; proponents of international peacekeepers say the same model could be applied to establish a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state.
The desire to fortify Mahmoud Abbas is a laudable objective; he has, after all, expressed a willingness to end the intifada, though it is still unclear whether he has the capability to do so. Yet in any case, as Stuart Cohen eloquently argues, relying on US forces to separate Israelis and Palestinians would likely create serious problems.
First, it is uncertain that the US (or any other external military force) could do a better job than the IDF, which has infinitely more experience rooting out terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza. Is the Bush administration prepared, morally and politically, to take full responsibility for potential escalations of Palestinian terrorism that could result from restricting Israeli counter-terrorism efforts?
Second, an aggressive inter-positional force that cracks down on the terrorists would invariably come to be targeted itself. When this happens, would American GIs have the same motivation and staying-power as the IDF to complete the mission? Although the American public has so far been surprisingly tolerant of a rising level of casualties in Iraq, Americans have historically shied away from nation-building exercises, particularly when they get bloody. The Hizbollah suicide bombing in Lebanon Lebanon in October 1983 killed 241 US marines and sent them packing from Beirut.
Nor have peacekeepers in that region of the world successfully protected the warring parties from each other. Advocates of US forces would do well to recall the ease with which the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, dismissed the Sinai-based UN forces leading up to the Six-Day War in June 1967. And prior to Israels withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah preyed on Israel by launching rockets over UN peacekeepers heads.
It all comes from within
There is another, more fundamental, reason to oppose dispatching US forces: neither the Palestinian public nor the Israeli government wants them.
History shows that breakthroughs in the Arab-Israeli conflict have never been diktats from a third party. I agree with Emanuele Ottolenghi: while the US can facilitate negotiations, peace ultimately depends on the warring parties themselves sharing a mutually acceptable vision.
A number of examples can be cited in favour of this argument. The most spectacular is the momentous visit of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem in 1977, paving the way for the Camp David Accords of September 1978 and the subsequent Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. By declaring before the Israeli parliament that Egypt wished to make peace, Sadat convinced a sceptical Israel that it was safe to enter a partnership with its neighbour. President Jimmy Carter would earn a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the deal, and Washington sweetened the package by pledging to financially compensate both countries. But significantly, the treatys success was the result of Egyptian-Israeli initiative.
The Oslo Accords of 1993 tell the same story. The symbol of the peace process throughout the 1990s may have been the photograph of President Clinton flanked by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn. But the photogenic signing ceremony was the culmination of intense Israeli-Palestinian talks in which Washington was not a part, or in fact, even aware.
Although faith in Oslo would unravel once it became clear that Arafat had no intention of reining in the rejectionist terrorist groups, there was one tangible success. The 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty formalised a well-established, albeit unofficial, secret relationship between Jerusalem and the Hashemite kingdom. The US provided valuable incentives for Jordan to go ahead with the treaty, including hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief, military hardware, and favourable trading agreements. But the decisive factor was again a shared vision, not US interference.
Thus far, the Bush administration has wisely rejected the temptation to dispatch significant military forces to do Israels bidding. If they did so, not only would US forces risk getting mired in a bloody quagmire, they would likely prove ineffectual. The lesson from Arab-Israeli history is that the US can play a useful facilitating role provided the warring parties themselves find the formula for peace. For better or worse, this is the only path to peaceful coexistence between the Israelis and Palestinians.
