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June 3rd, 2010 | 
Author: The flotilla tragedy has brought fresh interest about whether the blockade of Gaza should be maintained.
Of course, the blockade can be lifted immediately if Hamas would say that it accepts what the international community — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — has demanded of it since 2006: Israel’s existence, a denial of violence and adherence to past agreements. These criteria have been reaffirmed repeatedly by President Obama over the last year.
Indeed, it would be useful if flotilla activists would use the same energy to press Hamas to accede to peace as it has pressed Israel. It is odd to see self-proclaimed peace activists on the same side as an organization whose signature policy for more than 20 years is exhorting teenagers to engage in homicidal suicide bombing and then adorning the public space with “martyr” portraits.
The origin of the blockade is not punitive, but defensive. It can be found in Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the 3,300-plus rockets that fell on Israel between then and the Gaza War in December 2008 and 2009. An unconditional lifting of the blockade now would be a windfall for an unreconstructed Hamas, which would turn a trickle of smuggled rockets from Iran into a flood.
The better question is whether it is possible to recalibrate the blockade in a way that would bar the importation of rockets and protect Israeli security, while easing conditions on the ground. This leads to the issue of dual-use items. The past has demonstrated that Hamas has no scruples about diverting select construction materials as well as other aid meant for the public good in Gaza and utilizing it to build weapons.
To ease tensions with the international community without sacrificing Israeli security, there might be an advantage for Israel to agree to a streamlined dual-use list. Instead of saying all is forbidden unless it is explicitly approved, it might be easier to say all is permitted but that which is prohibited explicitly by the dual-use list. As such, there would instantly be a rationale for everything that is disallowed.
Yet, the first approach of Hamas agreeing to live peacefully with its Israeli neighbor would be preferable and profoundly transformative.
-http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/rethinking-the-gaza-blockade/?ref=opinion
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My latest Institute PolicyWatch delves into the upcoming proximity talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, noting the current role of the Arab League and the US in influencing the process, and examining the attitudes and goals of all parties as they once again enter the negotiating process. Here is an opening excerpt:
Proximity Talks: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
By David Makovsky
May 5, 2010U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace George Mitchell is currently in Jerusalem amid wide expectation that on Saturday the Palestinians will approve proximity talks with Israel. For its part, Israel has already agreed to the talks.
Following a phone conversation this past Monday between President Obama and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the White House said it had urged proximity talks with the Palestinians as a means of transitioning to direct talks as quickly as possible. Indirect talks are a departure from the more direct format that has defined Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since the landmark Madrid peace conference in 1991. As late as 2009, during the final months of the Olmert government, Israeli and Palestinian leaders were meeting directly almost every week. But in 2010, it appears that U.S. envoy George Mitchell will be shuttling between Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem and President Mahmoud Abbas’s office in Ramallah.
Although Israel has been willing to hold direct talks for months, Abbas has convinced himself and others that face-to-face meetings would leave him politically exposed if they do not prove to be serious. But while expectations on all sides are modest, the proximity approach has emerged because alternative proposals — such as a statement of U.S. principles — seem even more problematic and fraught with risk.
The NY Times’s blog Room for Debate published a series of short pieces yesterday on the controversy surrounding the announcement of the approval of 1,600 new building units in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Schlomo, to which I contributed, alongside Aaron David Miller, Daoud Kuttub, Daniel Gordis, and other experts on the region. A snippet of my thoughts on the subject follow, with a link to the blog, where you can find our collective input.
While critics insist the move by Netanyahu was deliberately aimed at angering the Obama administration and doubt that Netanyahu was blindsided as he insists, such an accusation seems unlikely to be true.
It was widely known that the Biden mission was a fence-mending visit designed to improve U.S.-Israel relations after a period of friction in bilateral ties during the past year. Indeed, until the incident, Biden’s comments have been pitch perfect for Israeli ears. His trip was intended to assure Israeli concerns about U.S. commitment to their security…
…two lessons must be learned from this incident. It is the second time that the prime minister of Israel claims to have been blindsided by his own bureaucracy. The first time was last November, a week after Netanyahu had what he has called his best meeting with Obama, in which no aides were present. At the time, it was announced that 900 housing units would be built in the Gilo neighborhood of East (actually southern) Jerusalem.
The following is David’s written testimony presented to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations’ panel entitled “Middle East Peace: Ground Truths, Challenges Ahead” on March 4th, 2010. More information on the panel, and the testimonies of David’s co-witnesses – Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, Robert Malley, and Ziad Asali – can be found by clicking here.
Testimony of David Makovsky before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Lugar, and Distinguished Members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before this Committee this morning to discuss a subject whose future holds great importance for U.S. foreign policy.
To date, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has not worked out as the Obama Administration had hoped. The picture is mixed. While the developments on the ground in the West Bank have shown promise and hope, the top-down political negotiations have not only made little progress, but have even regressed. We have gone from a point where Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were at advanced stages of negotiations, to a point where there have been no negotiations at all between the parties for nearly a year. There may be several reasons for this, yet as President Obama himself has publicly admitted, it is due in no small measure to an early miscalculation by Washington that triggered a series of events and expectations that could not be overcome during the Administration‟s first year.
David yesterday published an opinion piece entitled “Different Perspectives” analyzing the potential prisoner swap deal for Gilad Shalit in the New York Times’ opinion blog “Room for Debate”, alongside Op-Ed articles by Daniel Gordis, Daoud Kuttab, and others.
Different Perspectives
David Makovsky
With the help of German and Egyptian mediation, Israel and Hamas are trying to broker a deal that would end the 3 1/2-year captivity of Gilad Shalit, reportedly in return for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. In Israel, there are four different clusters of policymakers weighing the move. Their interests may vary, even though outwardly they will present a united front.
The first group is the cabinet. These are politicians who have born the brunt of the public campaign urging that anything and everything be done to ensure Sergeant Shalit’s release. This public campaign for one soldier’s release has been huge, which is not surprising in a small country where army service is compulsory and many parents feel that it could have just as easily been their son captured. Thus, these elected politicians will support a deal for Sergeant Shalit, as they tend to be the most sensitive to public opinion and will put a premium on the political windfall that could accrue to them.
To read the whole piece, alongside other commentary on the Shalit prisoner exchange, click here
David’s latest Op-Ed on the challenges Hamas poses to peace between Israel and the Palestinians:
The Palestinians’ spoiler
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArtStEngPE.jhtml?itemNo=1123062&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&title=%27The%20Palestinians%27%20spoiler%20%27&dyn_server=172.20.5.5.
Advocates for engaging Hamas often argue that if the group is given a stake in the creation of an independent Palestine by being included in peace negotiations, it will moderate its positions. This co-optation argument is based on the misguided assumption that Hamas is a pragmatic nationalistic movement, motivated primarily by calculations of how to gain power.
How Obama Could Earn His Nobel Prize
By Joe Klein
October 15th, 2009
The Nobel Peace Prize, presented prospectively — a triumph of hope over inexperience — threatens to become a central metaphor of Barack Obama’s turbocharged political career. He seems fated to be feted for who he is not (George W. Bush) and who he might turn out to be, but not for things he has actually done. This is dangerous stuff, politically. It almost guarantees disappointment. So the prize presents him with an immediate challenge: How does he go about actually earning it? The foreign policy that Obama favors, patient diplomacy on a multitude of fronts, requires qualities of wisdom, horse-trading and fortitude that we can’t yet be sure he possesses. Nor does it lend itself to high drama; it is more often about the slow reduction of tensions, or the creative stalemate that prevents things from getting worse, than about Nixon going to China.
The American University website put up a summary of David’s September 16th talk with Hisham Melham at AU’s Center for Israeli Studies. Hisham and David discussed not only Myths, Illusions, & Peace, but also a wide range of Middle Eastern topics. Here’s a quote from the summary:
Responding to probing and nuanced questions from Melham, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya who was the first person to interview President Obama after his inauguration, Makovsky discussed his new book, Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East.
“People look at the Middle East from 50,000 feet in the air,” said Makovsky, Ziegler Distinguished Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “From 50,000 feet, everything looks very clear. The realists tend to say, ‘Just impose peace.’ The neoconservatives say, ‘Just impose democracy.’ We think there are a lot of maladies and dysfunctions in the Middle East that have nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. We don’t deny that this issue is evocative; we just have our doubts that it will solve the other conflicts. Will it have side benefits? Yes, but the Iran nuclear ascendance will retain its power, the sectarian problems in Iraq will continue. We shouldn’t oversell it.”