I’ve remarked here several times that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the attempt to resolve it is the wickedest of problems. The core reason for this is that everyone pretty much has a broad understanding of what the solution should look like, but no one has been able to effectively sell it to the Israelis, the Palestinians, and anyone else interested in resolving the over 70 year dispute that predates the formation of the modern state of Israel. On Monday Jared Kushner gave some remarks to Congressional interns that, of course, immediately leaked. Including audio. Wired got their hands on the audio and you can find it at this link, as well as a transcript. Kushner addressed the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and peace process in part of his remarks. These were contradictory. At the outset he said:
So first of all, this is one of the ones I was asked to take on, and I did with this something that I do with every problem set you get. Which is you try to study the historical context to understand how something got to where it is, who was successful, and who wasn’t successful. And you try to [unintelligible] is research it and look at the conventional sources but also try to get some unconventional sources as well. And what I’ve determined from looking at it is that not a whole lot has been accomplished over the last 40 or 50 years we’ve been doing this.
The third one is that I have tried to look at why people haven’t been successful in the negotiations, so I looked and studied all the different negotiations. I spoke to a lot of people who have have been part of them, and I think the reason why is that this is a very emotionally charged situation.
This is actually a good start and makes sense. However, Kushner eventually made his way to espousing a seeming contradictory and opposite position on how to approach the problem set:
You know everyone finds an issue, that “You have to understand what they did then” and “You have to understand that they did this.” But how does that help us get peace? Let’s not focus on that. We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on, How do you come up with a conclusion to the situation. That was one thing that we achieved, which we were quite happy about—which is, you know, small thing, but it’s actually a pretty big thing over there. But something that we thought was a pretty big step.
So, what do we offer that’s unique? I don’t know … I’m sure everyone that’s tried this has been unique in some ways, but again we’re trying to follow very logically. We’re thinking about what the right end state is, and we’re trying to work with the parties very quietly to see if there’s a solution. And there may be no solution, but it’s one of the problem sets that the president asked us to focus on. So we’re going to focus on it and try to come to the right conclusion in the near future.
You can click across and read and/or listen to the whole thing. He does bounce around a lot, but much, if not most of the criticism has been around him contradicting himself on not wanting a history lesson and not knowing if the new administration’s approach is offering anything unique. I think the former issue, the criticism, may be a bit overblown. He clearly contradicted his earlier remarks, but he did state that he’d done a lot of prep. Obviously I have no idea if that is or is not true as I’m not involved in this process this time.*
As to the latter point I don’t think it is that big a deal. In 2017 there aren’t really a lot of unconsidered options for how to solve this problem. In fact I’d argue that there are really only four possibilities. The first is the status quo, which is unsustainable in the long term. The second is the long pursued two state solution. The third is a one state solution, which, depending on how it was designed and implemented, might be a viable alternative. The fourth option is quite simply to let the Israelis and the Palestinians go at each other, which, with the exception of the extremists on all sides, is clearly not an acceptable alternative.
The real issue, as I’ve stated before and I’m sure I’ll state again, is actually being able to market and sell whatever solution is put forward. It was partially Arafat’s fear that he couldn’t sell what Ehud Barak was offering at the end of the Clinton Administration to the Palestinians that led him to say no. I have that directly from the retired senior foreign service executive who had been hired by the Palestinian Authority to advise them during the negotiations. Arafat’s other concern was that after the majority of Palestinians rejected the offer that he’d be killed (same source).
Reading is Fundamental: The Israeli-Palestinian DisputePost + Comments (102)