
Thrall is a curious sort. I don’t believe that he really wants to do Israel in, but he argues powerfully (in a NY Times op-ed and in a longer piece in the Guardian) against the liberal-Zionist view that a reasonable peace deal can be negotiated if there’s an amenable political alignment and a sufficient good-faith effort by all negotiating and mediating parties. He sees Israel as making this impossible.
Interestingly, this is the mirror opposite of views from former Israeli doves like Benny Morris and others who see Muslim fundamentalism and Palestinian recalcitrance perpetually refusing to come to terms with the Jewish state. What they all have in common is “knowing” that a negotiated compromise can’t happen. (I wouldn’t bet on this outcome in the near future, but to “know” that one or the other side won’t ever bargain in good faith is to court a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
What follows is from his Guardian piece, “Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace“; except for the part about Wye River and Netanyahu, he presents reasonable observations, which he then peremptorily dismisses:
Postmortem accounts vary in their apportioning of blame. But nearly all of them share a deep-seated belief that both societies desire a two-state agreement, and therefore need only the right conditions – together with a bit of nudging, trust-building and perhaps a few more positive inducements – to take the final step.
In this view, the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s would have led to peace had it not been for the tragic assassination of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The 1998 Wye River Memorandum and its commitment to further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank would have been implemented if only the Israeli Labor party had joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to back the agreement. The Camp David summit in July 2000 would have succeeded if the US had been less sensitive to Israeli domestic concerns, insisted on a written Israeli proposal, consulted the Arab states at an earlier phase, and taken the more firm and balanced position adopted half a year later, in December 2000, when President Clinton outlined parameters for an agreement. Both parties could have accepted the Clinton parameters with only minimal reservations had the proposal not been presented so fleetingly, as a one-time offer that would disappear when Clinton stepped down less than a month later. The negotiations in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 were on the brink of agreement but failed because time ran out, with Clinton just out of office, and Ehud Barak facing almost certain electoral defeat to Ariel Sharon. The two major peace plans of 2003 – the US-sponsored road map to peace in the Middle East and the unofficial Geneva accord – could have been embraced had it not been for a bloody intifada and a hawkish Likud prime minister in power.