Detached from reality

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The disastrous outcome of the Oslo process – seven years of false peace negotiations that Yasser Arafat exploited to prepare a terror campaign – can be blamed on many factors.

It was driven by the personal ambitions and naive optimism of Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres and the Labor Party, aided and abetted by eager European mediators and officials in the Clinton administration. Journalists who forgot that their job was to report the news, and not to become cheerleaders for political programs, also deserve some of the dubious credit.

But let’s not forget some of my fellow academics who gave the process legitimacy, maintained the facade of peace long after the failure of Oslo became clear, and, even worse, continue today as if nothing has changed. This week, Tel Aviv University is hosting a conference on “track-two diplomacy,” but instead of offering a much-needed re-examination of this approach, packed the program with its architects.

The meetings in Oslo began under the cover of a track-two academic dialogue, such as had been conducted for many years by Prof. Herbert Kelman, a well-meaning social psychologist who runs Harvard University’s Middle East Seminar.

These meetings included generally like-minded Israeli and Arab academics who exchanged pleasantries and negotiated the agreements that professors of peace studies eagerly sought.

These seminars, and the illusion of “ripeness,” helped create the foundations for the Oslo process. Underpinning it all was the notion that Israelis and Palestinians understood each other’s desires, perspectives, fears and vulnerabilities. But over a decade after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and four years after the process imploded into bitter warfare, we know that these assumptions were incorrect.

The expectation that most Palestinians, like most Israelis, were prepared to make pragmatic compromises to end the conflict on the basis of a two-state solution was disastrously wrong.

Indeed, the evidence clearly shows that when such dialogues go from the carefully controlled environment of the psychology lab to the world of politics and interests, the results are very different. This is true not only for Palestinian-Israeli hostilities, but also other bitter ethnic conflicts – the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, etc.

Time after time, handshakes and personal rapport did not translate into grand agreements. Instead, high hopes not grounded in the reality of interests, in an environment of opposing concepts of historic justice, generally ended in disaster.

WHEN CONFRONTED with stark evidence of suicide bombing and Palestinian incitement, academics should be the first to rethink the theoretical starting points. However, like everyone else, we suffer from cognitive dissonance; when presented with evidence contrary to our beliefs even academics will try to rationalize disturbing data to reinforce their existing worldview.

As a result, academics like Kelman and Joseph Montville, and their Israeli partners, such as Ron Pundak, who heads the Peres Center for Peace, cling to the old Oslo mythology. Despite four years of unimaginable terror, their simplistic ideology based on viewing the Palestinians as victims confronting an all-powerful Israel remains dominant.

Their peace dialogues succeeded because they were limited to a small group of Israeli participants from the self-declared peace camp, partnered with Palestinians who tended to be aligned with Arafat’s Fatah organization. These Palestinian leaders met relatively few Israelis who opposed giving up on Jewish historic links to Jerusalem or accepting Palestinian refugees claims.

When these views turned out to reflect those of the majority of Israelis – who reported to their military units to fight terror, voted twice for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and now demand unilateral separation – Palestinians appeared to be taken by surprise.

And at the same time, the Israelis involved in the one-sided dialogues were unprepared for the depth of Palestinian rejectionism and the degree to which historic positions on the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty, Jerusalem, and refugee claims remained dominant.

Four year after these myths violently exploded, influential academics continue to write articles and run meetings extolling the virtues of dialogue and heart-to-heart discussions.

In a recent op-ed published in The Boston Globe, Kelman promoted the Geneva Accords and declared that “unilateral steps would have disastrous consequences.”

In addition to their refusal to recognize the failures of Oslo, the idea that the same Palestinian and Israeli leaders can be trusted to try again is absurd and detached from reality.

After decades of narrow Arab-Israeli dialogues, summer coexistence camps, and summit meetings, it is time for the teachers and researchers in the field of peace studies to confront reality: The quasi-religious belief in “mutually enhancing cooperation” and “reconciliation” is not only wrong; it is also dangerous. It prevents recognition of the situation on the ground and is readily exploited for war and terror, as we have seen.

It is clear that the techniques developed by social psychologists for family therapy cannot cope with deep political and religious hatreds, irreconcilable interests and the strategy of terrorism.

But this does not mean that there is no hope for stability and conflict management. Indeed, a political (rather than psychological) framework based on limiting friction while enhancing deterrence can greatly reduce levels of violence while creating an environment for stability.

Although far from the idyllic peace that diplomats and social psychologists imagine, the conflict management approach has the benefit of being realistic, while not contributing to increased terrorism and violence.

The time for the academics from Harvard, as well as from Israeli universities, to face this reality is long overdue.

The writer is the director of the Program on Conflict Management at Bar-Ilan University and a member of the Board of Directors for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East spme.org

AUTHOR

Gerald M. Steinberg

Prof. Gerald Steinberg is president of NGO Monitor and professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University, where he founded the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation. His research interests include international relations, Middle East diplomacy and security, the politics of human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Israeli politics and arms control.

NGO Monitor was founded following the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa, where powerful NGOs, claiming to promote human rights, hijacked the principles of morality and international law.  NGO Monitor provides information and analysis, promotes accountability, and supports discussion on the reports and activities of NGOs claiming to advance human rights and humanitarian agendas.

In 2013, Professor Steinberg accepted the prestigious Menachem Begin Prize on behalf of NGO Monitor, recognizing its “Efforts exposing the political agenda and ideological basis of humanitarian organizations that use the Discourse of human rights to discredit Israel and to undermine its position among the nations of the world.”

Steinberg is a member of Israel Council of Foreign Affairs; the Israel Higher-Education Council, Committee on Public Policy; advisory board of the Israel Law Review International, the research working group of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), and participates in the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). He also speaks at a variety of high-level government sessions and academic conferences worldwide.

Publications include “NGOs, Human Rights, and Political Warfare in the Arab-Israel Conflict" (Israel Studies); "The UN, the ICJ and the Separation Barrier: War by Other Means" (Israel Law Review); and Best Practices for Human Rights and Humanitarian NGO Fact-Finding (co-author), Nijhoff, Leiden, 2012.

His op-ed columns have been published in Wall St. Journal (Europe), Financial Times, Ha’aretz,International Herald Tribune, Jerusalem Post, and other publications. He has appeared as a commentator on the BBC, CBC, CNN, and NPR.


Read all stories by Gerald M. Steinberg