In an interview on US-Israel Relations

Why did you select this next book, Peace Process?

The US has been actively involved in trying to promote peace for the last 50 to 60 years and having some understanding of that is pretty important. The book I chose is by William Quandt, who is a former government official and also a distinguished academic. His book is a careful, detailed, systematic and objective look at American involvement in the Israeli-Arab peace process from the 1960s onwards. So if someone is looking for a comprehensive history of America’s efforts to try and bring peace to the Middle East, this is about the best one I know. Quandt does not have an axe to grind; he’s not writing it from a perspective that’s particularly sympathetic to either side. And he was actively involved in the process during the Carter administration when he was a deputy on the National Security Council, so he knows how the policy process works. For someone who wants to know what the US attempted to do and why all of these efforts ultimately failed, it’s the best single book that I could recommend.

There’s another book I should mention here that is more personal, and in a sense gets more into the politics of the relationship. That’s Aaron David Miller’s book, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Middle East Peace. Miller was directly involved in negotiations for six different Secretaries of State, and he does have a certain axe to grind and certain scores to settle. Nonetheless, it’s a fairly objective, fair-minded, self-critical book and, although he disagrees with our book in some ways, his discussion contains a lot of evidence showing how important the lobby has been in shaping American policy towards the conflict. Together these two books will tell you a great deal about why there is still a conflict going on and why American efforts have failed thus far.

What is the take-home from these two books? What can we learn going forward?

For me the central lesson is that historians in the middle of the 21st century will look back upon America’s failure to broker a Middle East peace, particularly during the Oslo period, as a great tragedy. There was an opportunity in the 1990s to put this conflict finally to rest, and that opportunity was squandered by mistakes made by the US, and by Israel and by the Palestinians. The result is a very bleak future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. I think people have to begin to recognise that the two-state solution may no longer be possible, and that time is rapidly running out. And if you don’t get a two-state solution, then all the other alternatives look substantially worse.  And the United States bears much of the blame for this.

Wasn’t progress made towards Oslo, towards peace, when George Bush senior was stricter with Israel, for example threatening to withhold loan guarantees? Do these books make that argument, that when the US draws a line in the sand and says, ‘OK, you can’t do this!’ to Israel, that it’s a lot more productive than when the US just lets Israel do whatever it likes?

Yes. In fact, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was Israeli foreign minister in the late 1990s, says in his own book on the conflict, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, that the two American presidents who did the most for Israeli-Arab peace were Jimmy Carter and George Herbert Walker Bush. He goes on to explain that the reason they were able to make progress is that they didn’t pay as much attention to Israel’s supporters in the United States, and they were able to put pressure on both sides as a result. They were not able to do it hard enough and long enough to produce a final peace deal, but I think there’s no question we made more progress when the US was acting in an even-handed way and willing to twist both Israeli and Palestinian arms.

There’s that quote from James Baker, George Bush Sr’s Secretary of State: ‘F**k the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.’ But why Carter? I wonder why those two presidents took a different approach.

Ben-Ami has a revealing passage where he says something like Carter was a ‘rare bird’ among politicians, because he just wasn’t all that sensitive to domestic lobbies. He wasn’t connected to the American Jewish community, he came from Georgia, and he just didn’t care as much about placating them. And I think Bush Senior and Baker were operating from a world-view that said, ‘We’re just going to push the American national interest here, and this is going to be good for Israel too.’ They believed that in the aftermath of the first Gulf War that the US was in a very powerful position to make some progress, and they used that position effectively. Now, if you compare Carter and Bush Sr to both the Clinton administration and the more recent Bush administration, the latter two presidents tended to be very deferential to Israeli sensibilities. The result, unfortunately, was a total of 16 years with virtually no genuine progress, except that the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank nearly doubled. The Clinton administration did try to make progress but, as Aaron Miller notes in his book, ‘too often the US acted as “Israel’s lawyer”’. That’s why Oslo failed, and that’s why the situation got even worse under George W Bush. And we are now in a much deeper hole.