Humanly impoverishing", is how Palestinian intellectual Edward Said
once described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting the
despair with which many view the century-old struggle between two
victimized and historically oppressed peoples over one tiny piece
of coveted land.1
The story of the South African transformation, by contrast, is
"humanly enriching" to most observers. In 1994, this African nation
overcame centuries of racial domination and strife to elect a new
government on the basis of one person, one vote democracy. Its new
constitution, passed in 1996, provided a bill of rights more
thorough than any other in the world. And despite the enduring
challenges that South Africa faces - unemployment, HIV/AIDS, and
crime - the country remains a potent symbol of both freedom and
forgiveness.
As recently as 1990, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the South
African struggle, and the "troubles" in Northern Ireland were
spoken of as equally irresolvable dilemmas. The end of the Cold War
brought the softening of old antagonisms and inspired renewed
efforts at peacemaking in all three cases. But while South Africa
made the transition to democracy, and Northern Ireland stabilized
somewhat, the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians
eventually collapsed into violence.
Troubled Comparisons
Unfortunately, most comparisons between the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and the others have been extremely selective and highly
partisan. This has even been true among observers in South Africa
and Northern Ireland, who might have been expected to offer
valuable insights from their own experiences but were instead
seduced by the potent symbolism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and seized on it to express enduring local passions. At the UN
World Conference Against Racism in August 2001 in South Africa,
some delegates equated Israel with apartheid South Africa - a
comparison that Israeli peace advocate Yossi Beilin rightly
condemned as a distortion of both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and South African history.2
In Northern Ireland, republican sympathizers hoisted Palestinian
flags, while the Israeli Star of David appeared, incongruously, in
Protestant neighborhoods.3 Instead of self-serving and superficial
comparisons that merely superimpose one conflict atop another,
comparisons are needed that look specifically, and carefully, at
the negotiating processes themselves.
Examining the Processes
One difference immediately apparent between the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process and the others is that it involves the partition of
territory. In South Africa, the idea of partition drew active
support from a few groups but was eventually banished to the
margins by the campaign for a unitary state. In Northern Ireland,
partition never drew serious consideration, and a binational
arrangement was devised as the best way to manage two sharply
opposed national visions.
There is no clear pattern here. The unitary state was part of the
solution in South Africa but part of the problem in Northern
Ireland. The mere fact that partition was central should not, by
itself, have doomed the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The
partition of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, for example,
occurred peacefully and by mutual consent, despite many decades of
shared history and the relative fragility of the Slovak economy and
institutions.
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been complicated by
religious differences that simply do not exist in South Africa on
the same scale. But Northern Ireland's conflict is also a religious
one - no less bitter for being a fight among Christians - and yet
it has proved manageable. And the cultural differences that South
Africa has been able to overcome are no less stark than those that
exist in the Middle East. Clearly, some other feature of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process must be to blame.
Lack of Shared, Public Negotiating Institutions
The key difference lay in the institutional structure of the Oslo
peace process, inaugurated in 1993 with the signing of the
Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn. Oslo was
designed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gradually,
through a series of interim stages. The idea was to use each stage
to build confidence and cooperation before moving on to the
next.
The negotiations were handled by a diplomatic elite; most of the
bargaining was done in top-secret, back-channel talks. The hope was
that the trust that slowly developed in this small inner circle
would eventually radiate outwards to the rest of Israeli and
Palestinian society. Unlike the negotiations in South Africa and
Northern Ireland, the Oslo process never created shared, public
negotiating institutions composed of representatives from the
various parties on both sides.
In South Africa, the government and eighteen other political
parties came together in 1991 to form the Convention for a
Democratic South Africa (CODESA), in which they publicly formalized
negotiations that had previously only taken place at the highest
level. In Northern Ireland, the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation
was created in 1994 and the Northern Ireland Forum in 1996, until
finally the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 provided for a 108-member
Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast.
In many ways, these institutions were failures. The CODESA talks in
South Africa collapsed, were reconstituted, and collapsed again;
the Belfast Assembly continues to lurch from one crisis to the
next. But the public negotiating forums in South Africa and
Northern Ireland helped the peace process achieve a kind of
permanence. Because public representatives of the various
communities were involved in these institutions, ordinary people
were included in the negotiations in an indirect and sometimes
direct way. This gave the peace process life beyond the formal
institutions themselves.
Crucially, by excluding groups that refused to abandon armed
struggle, the public negotiating forums in South Africa and
Northern Ireland helped to marginalize extremist organizations.
Boundaries were set around the methods of political action that
would be considered legitimate, and violence was officially and
publicly rejected by a broad array of groups. That is at least
partly why the repeated collapse of negotiations in South Africa
and Northern Ireland did not precipitate a return to armed
struggle.
The public negotiating institutions did not resolve the fundamental
differences between the parties, nor did they solve many of the
technical difficulties that arose. Back-channel diplomacy was still
necessary to secure the final agreements. But the public forums
helped the peace process win the support and involvement of the
vast majority of ordinary people on all sides, and therefore
provided a political environment in which negotiated agreements
could survive setbacks.
Oslo's Backward Order
The need for shared institutions was foreseen by the architects of
the Oslo process. They realized that cooperation between Israelis
and Palestinians would have to continue even after a "permanent"
partition settlement was reached, possibly in the form of a
political confederation like that of the Benelux nations in Europe.
The two societies were too entwined - socially, geographically, and
economically - to be totally separated.
The mistake in Oslo was that the creation of shared institutions
was left to the end of the process instead of being taken up at the
beginning. This was only partly because Oslo was concerned with
territorial partition and the creation of symbols of Palestinian
sovereignty. More importantly, the Oslo process reflected the
pervasive Third Way political philosophy of the 1990s, which was
optimistic about peace and prosperity but skeptical about the
ability of government bodies and institutions to achieve these
goals. Israeli doves like Shimon Peres pursued the idea that while
the primary obstacles to peace were political, the primary vehicle
of peace would be regional economic development. The emphasis in
Oslo was on voluntary cooperation between Israelis and
Palestinians, not the creation of shared institutions.
Whatever the merits of Third Way ideas in other contexts, they
failed in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Seven years of
diplomacy among a political elite, a handful of joint voluntary
projects, and strained coordination between security forces failed
to change the adversarial relationship between the two societies.
Peace was never represented by a public institution and therefore
was never a political reality, much less a social one.
Political Instability
There was a great deal of hope, at times, but support for the Oslo
process declined steadily on both sides. This was especially
dangerous for the survival of negotiations given the inherent
instability of both the Israeli and Palestinian political
systems.
The new Palestinian Authority was at times autocratic and at times
anarchic, alternately repressing and coddling extremist factions.
And it was governed, above all, by PA Chairman Yasser Arafat's
"anti-institutional, impulsive decision-making style."4 Militant,
anti-Israel radicalism was virtually the only form of opposition
politics, and violent groups gained support as public protest
against PA corruption and mismanagement grew.
As for the Israeli parliamentary system, it has long been prone to
the repeated collapse of governments because no party has been able
to win an outright majority of seats in recent years. To form a
government, the leading party must form a coalition with one or
more smaller parties, which may then wield disproportionate power
because they can force new elections by defecting. The departure of
religious parties from the Barak government, for example,
precipitated the elections of 2001, which in turn halted ongoing
peace talks and brought Ariel Sharon to power.
Confrontation with the enemy has, until now, been the only cohesive
political force in both societies. It is telling that the first
unity government in Israel in almost a decade was only formed once
the new Palestinian uprising had begun. And it was ironic that only
the repeated Israeli sieges of Arafat's Ramallah headquarters
aroused a sense of unity around him.
When problems arose, Israeli and Palestinian moderates had
difficulty encouraging public support for the Oslo process. Peace
advocates on both sides often wasted considerable energy sniping at
their respective governments and at each other. If a public,
multi-party dialogue had existed from the beginning, the moderates
from both sides might have joined together in an alliance or
coalition. Instead they, like everyone else, were left out of the
process. Without public, institutionalized, multi-party dialogues
between Israelis and Palestinians, peace will not filter down to
the grass-roots level. It will be something that is merely held in
place by external powers, like the perforated calm enforced under
the British Mandate.
Helping Peace Go Public
The peace process needs to "go public" through the
creation of a multi-party "Israeli-Palestinian Forum" for
negotiations and deliberations. Elections for the joint forum
should be held throughout Israel and the Palestinian territories on
a one person, one vote basis and monitored by international
observers. No party that has not renounced violence should be
allowed to participate. Once constituted, the Israeli-Palestinian
Forum could be chaired jointly by representatives from both sides
of the Green Line. Its responsibilities should initially be limited
to debating peace proposals and their discussing implementation,
but it could one day serve as the institutional basis for a "truth
and reconciliation" process similar to those carried out in South
Africa and elsewhere.
Despite the pressing need for a broader regional peace,
participation in a joint, public forum should be limited to the
Israelis and Palestinians themselves. Israel's conflicts with its
other Arab nations do not involve intermingled civilian populations
or competing national visions to the same extent, and would be
better handled through diplomacy on an official level. Moreover,
history suggests that when every country in the region is invited
to the table - as at the 1991 Madrid conference, organized by
President George H. W. Bush - the Arab states goad each other into
hard-line positions and the Israelis retreat into a defensive
crouch. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process should not be rigidly
separated from other negotiations but it should also have a life of
its own.
An Israeli-Palestinian Forum would not be the only space for
negotiations and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. It need not exercise
sovereign powers, and it need not be a backdoor entrance for
binationalism. The important point is that even if it is little
more than a debating society, as the Northern Ireland Forum was, it
will help discourage violence and encourage cooperation.
Conclusion
Democracy cannot solve every problem. Credibility and trust are
just as important. But how is that trust to be established? The
creation of public, multi-party negotiating institutions, made up
of representatives elected by the Israeli and Palestinian people,
would play an important role. It is an approach that has worked in
Northern Ireland and South Africa. Though it has been completely
overlooked in the Middle East, it may well be the key to success.
The "humanly enriching" South African experience teaches that no
oppressed people can gain liberation unless it is also committed to
reconciliation. Equally, it shows that no nation can achieve peace
and harmony until political and social injustices are redressed. It
warns that trust cannot be cultivated if it is left to top-secret
meetings between elite emissaries, and that international pressure
alone will not build local support for an agreement. Only if the
peace process goes public will the public embrace peace.
1 Said, Edward. "Palestinians must take moral high ground." Sunday
Independent. Oct 28, 2001.
2 Beilin, Yossi, qtd. in Pollak, Joel. "The Long Walk to Peace."
The Big Issue (South Africa) November 2001. 20-21.
3 Addley, Esther. "Riot City." The Guardian June 11, 2002. URL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4431040,00.html
4 Rubin, Barry. The Transformation of Palestinian Politics: From
Revolution to State-Building. Cambridge, Masschusetts: Harvard UP,
1999.
