OT (e.g., about something)
Rather than do a bunch of PMs, I thought I'd just post the initial trip report (written yesterday) here instead.
ctb/A@thisiswhatpolicywonksdo.com
I'm back from the Middle East now, having had five extremely full days (2 in Jordan, 3 in Israel) of talks with everybody from Islamists to settlers, politicians to soldiers, think-tankers to journalists. I'll write up a full set of notes when I get the chance, but I wanted to get folks thinking about my chief conclusion.
People out there, especially in Israel, perceive the situation differently from the way people here and in Europe seem to. Basically, there's a strong consensus that we are in the early stages of what might be called the "post-peace-process era." Nobody knows what's coming next (or even what should come next, for that matter), but almost nobody thinks the next few years will look like the last decade, since there is general agreement on both sides that the other side isn't interested in bridging, or domestically able to bridge, the outstanding gaps.
Israelis are either simply at a total loss, combining confusion and dread, or they are thinking about some kind of move toward unilateral disengagement and partition (despite all its obvious difficulties). On all sides, fears that the status quo is unsustainable for much longer (say, months at a max) are mixed with an absolute inability to predict what will come after the big bang. I didn't get a sense that regional war was anything more than a long shot, but that was about the only positive thing I found out there.
Greatest possibilities for constructive US actions at this point seemed to lie in work with the surrounding countries to keep the conflict contained (warning Syria and Iran to stop messing around, soothing and bribing Jordan to keep it calm, working with Egypt and the GCC countries to make sure they don't make the situation worse). Also, it makes obvious sense to try to keep both Palestinian and Israeli leaderships from blowing the situation up for good. Beyond that, god knows--although I'd be thinking big, because the real issue probably isn't "how to stop the violence and get back to the table" (since that's unlikely to happen anytime soon), but rather "given that the Oslo phase of Israeli-Palestinian relations is over, what comes next?" |
