Baker Institute fellows call for urgent effort on peace between Israelis, Palestinians

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

The international community needs to devote more attention to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to avoid the possibility of an eruption of violence, two fellows at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy told an audience May 10. The discussion, titled “Seeking Peace Between Israel and Palestine: The Way Forward,” was held at the Baker Institute.

	Baker fellows Yair Hirschfeld, left, and Samih Al-Abed both argued that the dramatic changes in the Arab world provide new opportunities for peace.

Samih Al-Abed, the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at the Baker Institute, and Yair Hirschfeld, the Baker Institute’s Isaac and Mildred Brochstein Fellow in Middle East Peace and Security in Honor of Yitzhak Rabin, both argued that the dramatic changes in the Arab world provide new opportunities for peace. But they cautioned that failure to take advantage of those opportunities could lead to disaster.

“If we’ve learned anything from the past few months, it is that people’s basic values and rights cannot be ignored without consequences,” Al-Abed said. “I think there is a real opportunity to move the region forward and achieve an end of the conflict.”

Hirschfeld noted that both Palestinians and Israelis have made significant strides in recent years. The Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas has created “a real state-building ethos on the Palestinian side” and has cooperated with the Israelis on security arrangements. The Israeli government has gradually come to fully accept the concept of a two-state solution, he said.

But Hirschfeld, who is currently teaching at the University of Haifa in the Department of Middle Eastern History, also pointed to potential dangers to the peace process. He said continuing attacks by Hamas from Gaza, the new Egyptian government’s attitude toward Hamas — especially the issue of controlling the Rafah border crossing, the impending vote at the United Nations on Palestinian statehood and the concern that the United States might put forward a proposal that is politically unacceptable to the Israeli government could all have negative effects for the region.

Al-Abed countered that Israeli behavior has already threatened the chances for peace. He argued that unchecked settlement growth on the West Bank, the construction of the wall dividing Israelis and Palestinians and Israeli revocation of Palestinian residency rights and destruction of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem make it imperative that the international community establish an oversight mechanism that forces Israel to live up to its obligations.

Al-Abed, who heads the Palestinian Housing Council, a nonprofit institution that provides development plans, loans and other forms of support to help meet Palestinian housing needs in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, also called for a broader framework for negotiations. He said the current bilateral approach does not take into account the asymmetrical power reality between occupier and occupied. Bringing in the international community would help to address this inherent imbalance, he said.

“Going forward, I think the U.S. government should involve more the major global powers and regional players in the peace process,” he said. “By doing this, it can more effectively serve the cause of peace and the U.S. will not have to assume all the risks involved if the parties fail to reach an agreement.”

Hirschfeld closed on a note of caution. “Negotiations tend to be successful under two conditions,” he said. “Either if there’s a win-win so that both sides want to move there or that there’s a dramatic lose-lose so that both sides are afraid of it. We are in the second phase.”

A webcast of the entire event can be seen at http://bakerinstitute.org/events/seeking-peace-between-israel-and-palestine-the-way-forward.