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Why plans for a two-state solution in the Middle East have failed.

Article Excerpt
From the early United Nations plans for a two-state solution in the Middle East to the present, plans for a two-state solution have come up against immovable obstacles. The original UN plan for Israel would have led to a state that was indefensible in a hostile environment. The plan for a Palestinian state failed to comprehend that the Palestinians, unlike the Jews, had not created an apparatus for self-government. The architects of the plan also failed to allow for the Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism that would impel the Arab states to war and long-term hostility.

In addition to the fact that plans for two-state solutions and peace were not adapted to the actual conditions of the case, concerns for solutions were often subordinated to other considerations such as those of the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, one might hope that attention to the actual contours of the case might improve the otherwise very slim chances for peaceful solutions. These, however, are further hindered by academic theses that misrepresent events.

Messrs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who are at the center of the most recent controversy, are acting in a manner that makes these efforts more difficult. They claim that America's Middle Eastern policy is in conflict with America's national interests because the Jewish lobby, with help from Christian evangelicals, has shaped it to Israel's interests. For this reason, they say, the United States has failed to push Israel to a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians.

Every anti-American website around the world can now cite two American professors at two great American universities to the effect that Israel, through the powerful Jewish lobby, is directing American policy against the interests of Middle Eastern countries. Leaders in Arab and Muslim countries will come under additional pressure to prove that they are not carrying out the policies of Israel. Thus, their willingness and ability to cooperate with the United States in policies that serve all our interests, including those of peace, will be diminished. Whatever differences most of us may have in deciding what the national interest is, that surely is not in the national interest.

Based upon my first-hand experience, I find no merit in the claim by Mearsheimer and Walt that the Jewish lobby has prevented the United States from moving toward acceptance of a Palestinian state. They have vastly exaggerated the ability of the Jewish lobby to influence American policy. They, like some neo-conservatives, also have exaggerated the ability of the United States to control events in the area. They have collected facts and pseudo-facts to fit a thesis that bears only the most peripheral relationship to events in the real world.

EARLY IMPEDIMENTS

Beginning in 1974 I was heavily invested in attempting to produce a Palestinian state in negotiations with the PLO. For a very long time, I believed that the impediment to this result lay in the subordination by Henry Kissinger of such an effort to his determination to drive the Soviets out of the Middle East. Although this belief had a factual foundation, the reader will see by the end of this article why I now am ready to concede that my policy preference faced impediments inherent to the situation that might have defeated it even apart from Kissinger's national security policy.

The vision of some early Zionist leaders for a bi-national state necessarily foundered on two features of the post-World War II world. The Holocaust created a need for a Jewish state that could protect the interests of the Jewish people. There was no place for it, or for the Jews who had been persecuted in both Christian and Muslim countries, except in the ancestral homeland of Palestine, which still contained a large population of Jews. Israel would be a necessary redoubt for persecuted Jews.

Antisemitism in Arab nations also foreclosed for Israelis the possibility of a binational state. Although most educated and cultured Arabs and Muslims are not antisemitic, antisemitism is rife among the broad masses and motivates some leaders. If this were not so, school books would not call for killing Jews and a Muslim religious leader would not have been allowed to call for killing Jews on official West Bank radio. Consider the angry utterance of Prime Minister al-Maliki of Iraq who, referring to Sunni suicide bombers, defamed them in the strongest terms a Muslim can use as "Sons of pigs, sons of Jews." Adolf Eichmann, in his trial, admitted that Haj Amin El Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, who had been Hitler's honored guest during World War II, praised Hitler for killing so many Jews. Arabs from Palestine and elsewhere were recruited into the Nazi Wehrmacht, where they fought on the side of Hitler.

My own relations with Arabs and Muslims were blessedly free of prejudice. While I was a graduate student at Columbia University under the GI bill, I did not detect any antisemitism in the Egyptian students with...

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