Glenn Robinson
Informed Comment / August 20, 2024
Monterey, Ca. – Last month’s sad passing of Martin Indyk provides an opportunity to reflect on the US Middle East project over the past three decades, and to assess the potential need for new directions. This is particularly true given the events in Gaza over the past ten months and the march toward regional war that is now unfolding.
Indyk, along with Dennis Ross [both committed Zionists] and a small handful of other men, dominated American policy toward Arab-Israeli issues since being surprised by the secret negotiations in Oslo between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators in 1993. The defining strategy of this small circle of men was to allow “no daylight” between American and Israeli positions. Such a close embrace, they argued, would convince all Arab parties of the futility of trying to drive even a small wedge between American and Israeli interests, which, in turn, would provide more peace and security for Israel. They posited that an Israel secure and at peace would be beneficial for broader US interests in the Middle East.
This was their project, and it has failed miserably.
As Ross acknowledged in his obituary for Indyk, neither man came to the issue from a neutral position. Rather, their efforts were informed from the beginning by a passion for Israel. Such a passion was part of the problem. Throughout the peace negotiations of the 1990s, in the words of their colleague Aaron David Miller, America acted as “Israel’s lawyer” instead of as the world’s sole superpower seeking to grab a golden strategic opportunity to end a conflict that had bedeviled American interests for decades. Indeed, the failure of the Oslo peace process was among the greatest strategic failures in American diplomatic history. With the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR, and the defeat of Iraq, everything was in place for the US to compel an agreement between two parties who were willing to deal but needed firm American leadership to get the job done. Instead, Indyk, Ross, and their colleagues dealt in “confidence building measures” and other inconsequential small steps, failing to recognize and decisively act upon this strategic opening that had been presented to them. The prospects for peace were then killed off by rejectionists on both sides, who were given years to mobilize and organize – including Hamas on the Palestinian side and Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in Israel.
But the “no daylight” mantra has continued to live on beyond the moribund peace process in every US administration since. Even Barack Obama, who clearly had (prescient) reservations about Netanyahu, signed on to the largest US military aid package in history for Israel, at $38 billion over ten years. The Biden administration may well match that number in one year, even as Israel undertakes obviously escalatory strikes, such as bombing the Iranian embassy in Damascus and assassinating in Tehran the very Hamas leader with whom it was negotiating for a ceasefire and hostage release.
The premise that underlay the “no daylight” strategy has come to ruin. Clearly, Israel is less secure today than it was in 1993, as was shown on October 7 and in the subsequent depopulation of swaths of Israel surrounding Gaza and the Lebanese border. The prospects for peace now lie buried in the rubble of Gaza along with the bodies of tens of thousands of Palestinians. How many suicide bombers will emerge over the next decade from those who have lost their families? As the slaughter in Gaza permeates social media, the possibility of Israel being accepted as an ordinary neighbor by the region’s nearly 500 million Arabs and the world’s two billion Muslims is now lost for at least a generation. This was a prospect that was real and exciting in the 1990s, before Indyk and his team wasted such a golden opportunity for peace.
It is time for the US to step back from the failed “no daylight” approach to Arab-Israeli peace-making. Israel must begin to pay a political and economic price for its ongoing and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, and for its acts of provocation that have invited regional conflagration. Constant American support for Israel’s worst actions has allowed Israel’s basest influences to come to dominate a country that is now very much at risk of losing its status as a democracy under the rule of law.
Some political projects in history fail because their underlying strategy contradicts the goals of the broader project. The American strategy for the past three decades, of hugging Israel so tightly that peace and security would flow, has clearly failed. If the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same failed thing, then US policy today toward Israel and its neighbors is, indeed, insane.
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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:
Al Jazeera English Video: “Blinken says ‘decisive moment’ for Gaza ceasefire talks”
Glenn E. Robinson is a Senior Fellow at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey Ca.
