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Friday, May 24, 2013
Observing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts to restart negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis one can't help but be struck by a sense of déjà vu. Kerry, who visits Israel and the Palestinian territories this week, has launched an initiative to improve the economic conditions of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This proposal might be considered innovative if a plan to "improve the Palestinian quality of life" -- which in practice means improving the conditions of Israel's Palestinian subjects while ignoring their subjugation -- had not been mooted in 1983 by Secretary of State George Shultz. In the intervening decades, Palestinian "quality of life" has worsened considerably.
Similarly, there are reports of Kerry touting an Arab peace plan that would reaffirm the 1967 boundaries as the basis for a settlement. The same plan was originally put forward by Saudi Arabia's then-Crown Prince Abdullah at the 2002 Arab summit meeting and reiterated in 2007, both times to general Israeli and U.S. indifference. The core principles in the original initiative were far from novel: they simply recapitulated the terms of U.N. Security Council resolution 242 of 1967. Like its nearly-identical predecessors, the plan was ignored by the Israeli government, even though it includes explicit reference to the possibility of territorial "swaps" Israel has long insisted on.
Finally, there are again rumblings of a new U.S. initiative to re-start bilateral negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. After over two decades of failed U.S.-brokered talks on the basis of the Madrid-Oslo model, this proposal too is far from novel.
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