All right, my friends, welcome back to the show.
Anti-war radio on Chaos 92 795.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide, KAOS 959.com.
And our first guest today is Daniel Levy.
He's the director of the Middle East Policy Initiative and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
His own website is prospectsforpeace.com.
I believe you used to work for Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, prime ministers of Israel.
Is that right, Daniel?
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Yes, I did.
I worked in the prime minister's office under Barak.
He was the negotiator for the Israeli side and was the negotiator under Robin as well.
Oh, really?
That's very interesting.
And I was able to catch a little bit of Steve Clemons' conference that was held yesterday, that they played on C-SPAN yesterday morning, about the upcoming Annapolis conference.
And I saw you speaking at that.
And I guess the first thing is to cover this letter that's been signed by, it seems like, the whole establishment addressed to Condoleezza Rice and George Bush, telling them, this is what you ought to do at this upcoming Annapolis peace conference to try to work things out between the Israelis and Palestinians.
So can you tell us about that letter?
With pleasure, Scott.
The letter that you're referring to, you can see on my blog, ProspectsForPeace.com, on Steve Clemons' blog, The Washington Note.
And what we essentially did, ourselves, two other NGOs, the International Crisis Group, which people would probably be aware of, and something called the U.S. Middle East Project, led by Henry Siegman.
We worked with, really, some of the senior folks who dealt with this issue in the past.
And we initially sent a letter, they sent a letter under their names to President Bush, to Secretary of Rice.
We're talking about Brent Scowcroft, Spig Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton, Tom Pickering, Ted Sorensen, Nancy Castellan Baker, and others.
Since then, we've gathered about another 70 signatories, a very serious group of former officials, former ambassadors, former national intelligence, national security people here, people who've handled this issue and who've handled broader global issues.
The message is, good that you're getting back into the business of engaging on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It's long overdue.
The seven-year hiatus has cost everyone there, Israelis, Palestinians, and American interests in the Middle East.
For Annapolis, for this effort to be a success, rather than risk the devastating consequences of failure, you have to do several things.
And we listed three things that we put at the center of that.
One is make sure this has substantive content.
In other words, we need to get to a place where you actually clarify where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going to end.
It's not that the devil's in the details, it's that we now actually have to give the details.
Say you mean 67 lines with one-to-one land swaps, et cetera.
So number one, content.
Number two, be inclusive.
And see this as a continuation of the stubborn, ideological, blinkered way of looking at the Middle East, where there's the good guys and the bad guys, and you push as many people into the corner of the bad guys as you can.
So be inclusive.
Involve not only more Arab states, but also Syria, and find a way to address the Hamas Gaza reality, because to punish people into submission is not working, and it's not going to work.
Hamas are a feature that's here to stay.
If you're not going to engage Hamas directly, then encourage rather than discourage your international allies from addressing Hamas.
And thirdly, make this meaningful on the ground to the people living there.
Finally, get some traction on the day-to-day issues that so poison the atmosphere and that you've been committed to ever since this.
People remember there was this thing called the Roadmap.
Ever since the Roadmap was launched, there's been a commitment to security reform on the Palestinian side, institutional reform on the Palestinian side, to easing daily life for the Israelis, to remove checkpoints, to ease the closure, to free settlement, to remove output, to allow Palestinian institutional life in East Jerusalem to reopen.
Get some traction on those things, not instead of having a substantive peace process that actually delivers a permanent status agreement, but just to ease up the atmosphere.
Those are the points that were made.
It's a very encouraging, I would say, list of dignitaries, including, by the way, former senators and congressmen, and I think it's indicative of a more nuanced debate that's taking place on the issue here today.
Now, it seems like at the conference on C-SPAN yesterday, all of you were playing down actual expectations for what you think might actually come of this conference.
Look, Scott, first of all, I think it's better, tactically, now I'm talking, not to talk up expectations and then see a situation in the region that doesn't meet those expectations and to have a deterioration and an escalation in the situation as a consequence.
But I think we were also just taking a sober look at what one can expect and what one cannot expect.
Unfortunately, it seems that this conference is not going to be about setting out clear parameters for a future Israeli-Palestinian deal.
The conference has somewhat shrunk its own ambitions to being really a relaunching of negotiations and to, as I mentioned before, there being a recommitment to all those day-to-day improvement on the ground issues that I mentioned.
That's good.
It's good that Israelis and Palestinians are talking again.
It will be good if Syria is around the table.
It's good that the U.S. administration is finally seriously engaged in this.
But that's just a start.
Post-Anapolis, there has to be concerted commitment.
That will only happen, I would argue, Scott, is if this administration wakes up and connects the dots in the Middle East and understands that if you want to improve America's image and ability to lead again in the region, if you want to remove a state rallying tool from our real adversary in the Salafist, jihadist world, and if you want to get people's cooperation to move other issues in the Middle East, then you better be damn serious about resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is a gift to any single radical in the Middle East.
Well, so you really do believe that the onus is on the Americans and that if the Bush administration really wanted to get something done here and wanted to have the carrots and sticks necessary to get something done, that they really could?
I don't want to come across to people as saying, hey, you know, Israelis, we've got no responsibilities.
You Arabs, you've got no responsibilities.
It's all up to America.
I'm not saying that.
We have our responsibilities.
And fair, the onus is on us to try and solve our own problems.
America has a role to play, plays a role.
Even by not acting, America is playing a role.
America has sometimes been an enabler, a facilitator of policies that for Israel have been self-destructive, let alone for America as the facilitator.
So I'm saying that right now, bilaterally, just between the two parties, it's difficult for us to move.
America has a responsibility.
And mostly I'm saying it's your own national self-interest.
If you want to continue to be blamed, often justifiably, and to be called hypocrite, often justifiably, for the way you are mismanaging this conflict, then understand that that has consequences for American interests and American national security.
So no, it's not just your responsibility.
It's the responsibility of us as the actors in the region.
But there's an American role here.
And not playing that role, I think has devastating consequences, I would say.
Now, is the basis for these negotiations still the so-called roadmap for peace?
Or is that already scrapped?
I really wish I could tell you it was scrapped.
And without boring people with the very particular vocabulary that develops around any conflict, there was a roadmap launched four years ago by something called the Quartet, not only the Americans, the EU, the Russians, and the UN.
It outlined a two-year framework for getting from here to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East.
And it outlined a series of steps that the parties would take.
And it said that the Quartet, the international community, would monitor this.
Those steps weren't taken.
The international community didn't do the monitoring.
We've missed the deadline.
I think it would probably be better at this stage just to say the roadmap didn't work.
What you need to do is solve the hard political issues, because you're not going to have security.
You're not going to have economic improvement.
You're not going to deal with the settlement issues until you define what the border between Israel and the Palestinians is going to be.
And I think that the Annapolis, in part at least, has become an exercise in reviving the roadmap, if what we see after Annapolis is that there's a real effort to try and at least ameliorate the situation, make the situation easier, don't allow it to deteriorate on the ground on all the issues that I've been mentioning.
But rather than seeing that as an end in itself, because confidence building on the conditions of occupation ain't going to be sustainable over time.
But that's not an end in itself, but this is designed as an oxygen tank to feed the serious negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians.
If the roadmap is just a way of helping in the short term to get to a final agreement, that's not a terrible thing.
But if we go back to the sequential, incrementalist logic of the roadmap, I fear we're doomed.
Speaking of the very concrete things that must be addressed, it seems like to just skip ahead to the most important one, the fate of the West Bank, I once heard a right-wing nationalist on the radio say very plainly, look, Israel is never giving up the West Bank because it's the high ground, period.
And that was where the war was launched from last time, and it's topographically speaking, militarily, strategically speaking, it's the high ground, and they're never going to give it up.
And that's good, of course, was the point of view of the host doing the declaiming, but it sounded like he made a pretty good case.
What do you say to that?
He's absolutely right.
One problem.
He wasn't doing that interview in the 16th, 17th, 18th or 19th centuries.
Talking those terms in 2007 really is an insult to what has gone on in military development over these years.
Yes, you'll always have some military people and especially some non-experts who'll say, we have to capture the next hill.
We always have to have the high ground.
I'll give you something from the Israeli experience.
In 1967, Israel scored a stunning military victory before we had the West Bank and before we had the Golan Heights.
I mean, let's talk about high ground.
The Golan Heights is the real high ground, which is, of course, the Syrian area that Israel now occupies.
In 1973, when Israel started from a position of territorial superiority, Israel suffered a very serious hit, and being on the Golan Heights didn't help.
It's an absolute nonsense.
I can tell you that I've been in negotiations.
I've worked with, we did this Model Geneva initiative, which if anyone hasn't heard of it, is well worth looking up.
It really presents a detailed model of what an Israeli-Palestinian agreement could look like, and it was negotiated by very serious former and sometimes current officials on both sides, people who had been through the negotiating process, Camp David and Taber, et cetera.
People who I worked with in that included the former Israeli chief of staff, the former deputy head of the Mossad, the former head of Israel's internal security services, former commanders, regional commanders, the former head of the central command, which includes the West Bank, so they know a little bit about this high ground, okay?
And they were the ones who said, this is a security liability for us to maintain the settlements.
If you remove the causes, barely, Israel is in a much better security situation.
Let's have a border, an agreed border, an internationally recognized border from which Israel could defend itself.
Now, yes, there are people who are gonna say, oh, Israel can't do this, Israel can't do that.
Thank you very much from the comfort of America for telling me that Israel will always be in war and not at peace with its neighbors.
That guarantees no future whatsoever for Israel.
So yes, we can stay on the West Bank because it's nice and hilly, but then we won't have peace, and I would argue that Israel, unfortunately, will not be sustainable in the long term under those circumstances.
Now when it comes to American intervention, hands-off or hands-on, pushing this way or pushing that way, it's funny.
I think just in the last year, we've seen news reports that say that the Israeli government was thinking about some strikes on Syria that America talked them out of, and of course, eventually, I guess, gave the green light for the one on September 6th.
But at the same time, I think I remember last spring, the Israeli government, the Olmert government, was trying to shake hands and make a peace deal with the Syrians, and the Bush administration said, no, you're forbidden from doing that.
So I just wonder, you know, what is the true nature of the conflict between Syria and Israel, and is it justified over the Golan Heights, and is America just in the way of peace breaking out there?
This administration has at times taken a remarkable, almost but not quite unprecedented, position.
It's not unusual for an American administration to say we cannot want peace more than the parties themselves.
What is unusual is to say we want peace so much less than the parties themselves that we will play the role of being an active obstacle to negotiations between Israel and its neighbors.
Dramatically, that has happened on the Syrian track, exactly what you referred to.
The sense for several months now coming out of Jerusalem, coming out of the Israeli side, has been of seeing a strategic advantage in re-engaging with Syria, knowing that this would affect the regional climate, knowing that this would affect the climate in Lebanon, knowing that this would affect the climate with Iran as well.
And so the Israeli defense establishment actually has led the call to re-engage with the Syrians.
What we had over a period of several months was, let me put it gently, a distinct lack of American enthusiasm for such an effort.
Now, what that translates into for the Syrians is the Syrians saying, wait a minute, you want us, without any guarantees up front that Israel will withdraw right out of the Golan Heights, you want us to re-engage unconditionally.
While in the meantime, the Americans are still boycotting us, are still in a way promoting regime change in Syria, no way.
The benefit for us of getting into the room with the Israelis, us here playing the Syrian role, getting into the room with the Israelis without having a guaranteed outcome, is that that also means that America is in trouble.
And there's a changing of the dynamic there.
The Israeli-Syrian deal is actually not that complicated.
There have been Israeli-Syrian negotiations on and off for many years, certainly for more than a decade and a half.
Yitzhak Rabin almost sealed the deal.
Even Netanyahu had a secret envoy that dealt with the Syrians.
Ehud Barak almost sealed the deal.
It's the Golan Heights, we know what it is.
It's land for peace, it's security arrangements, it's mutual recognition, and then a set of other commitments and guarantees, but they're not complicated.
It seems that Syria will come to Annapolis, but my sense is that America has still not decided with clarity whether it is ready to engage with Syria.
It's part of a way of doing things here in the last years, which is an anathema to me and to many people who follow diplomacy, which is that somehow if you sit in a room with someone, you're doing them a favor.
Somehow to engage is to endorse.
Somehow diplomacy is appeasement.
All these notions are unfortunately part of the neocon baggage that has done so much damage to the region, I would argue to America.
And will Annapolis be part of the process of getting beyond this neocon nonsense?
Hopefully.
You've written in the past about the influence of David Wumzer and Richard Perle and their clean break plan that they wrote for Benjamin Netanyahu.
Can you explain, I guess, to the degree to which you think that this has actually become American policy or what effect that clean break strategy has had over the long term?
Well, here's the interesting thing, Scott.
In the paper you referred to, the 1996 paper that was written for the then incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, as you said, it was written by several of the people who were associated with the neocon movement with the project for a new American century.
And their argument was, you have to end this peace process with the Palestinians, and you have to create a transformation list agenda in the region that will eventually be conducive to Israel gaining peace and security on its own terms.
It talked about toppling the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, talked about removing the Syrian regime, about ending the Oslo process, et cetera.
In comes the right wing Israeli Prime Minister, and this is way too radical for him.
Netanyahu doesn't try and topple Saddam Hussein.
Netanyahu talks to the Syrians, doesn't try and topple that regime.
True, Netanyahu in effect, although not declaratively, but in effect helps to try and kill the Oslo process.
So a paper that was much too radical for a radical Israeli right wing Prime Minister.
When the ideas contained in that paper continue to float around in American circles, President Bush is elected.
Some of the neocorns managed to place themselves in relatively influential office.
But I think the real break is 9-11.
I think before 9-11, there's very little sense here in America that the policies suggested a transformation list agenda for the Middle East was going to be pursued after 9-11.
Different narrative, different reality.
The opposition here feels on very shaky ground in opposing anything.
Global war on terror is the defining mantra.
And these ideas get a re-airing.
And unfortunately, I think they have been at least part and a significant part of the mix that it's guided a woefully unsuccessful and actually disastrous policy.
Well, and part of the policy has been that everybody's got to be a Democrat or they don't count.
So George Bush, I guess, repeatedly said that the Israelis do not have to do a thing to try to make peace with the Palestinian Authority because it wasn't democratically elected in the proper way, etc., and called for new elections.
Then Hamas won.
And they said, oh, well, Israel doesn't have to deal with Hamas because Hamas are terrorists.
But now they're the democratically elected government of, I guess, at least Gaza, if not the West Bank.
What are the Americans and the Israelis supposed to do now?
You could not be more right in pointing out the hypocrisy.
What happened?
The Palestinians, as you said, conducted legislative elections.
The Hamas got 44 percent of the popular vote, but a clear majority in the parliament because of the way the constituencies were allocated and the division between the national election and local constituency elections.
Rather than saying, OK, you're an Islamist movement who we believe is still committed to a platform that includes violence against civilians and that we're not willing to deal with.
But you've made the decision.
You made the decision as what we consider to be violent Islamists to participate in an election.
You've won an election.
Now you have to decide.
Do you want to run a government or do you want to run a militia?
It didn't have to mean immediate direct engagement.
But what it should have meant is that Hamas was given the responsibility to govern and the process that was taking place inside Hamas of coming to terms with participation and even management of the political process.
But that process inside Hamas should have been allowed to move forward.
Not Americans, but perhaps other international actors, Europeans, South Africans, Norway, they should have all been encouraged to work their links with Hamas, to not cut off all the financial taps.
Basically, rather than Hamas having to make the decision, the decision was made for them because the bar was set at a place that was intentionally impossible for Hamas to meet.
The three conditions that were set on Hamas were not serious.
It wasn't.
The message should have been, Scott, Hamas, you know what?
We disagree with you on 12345678 things.
But for us to be able to in any way work with your government, we have one ask.
Cease fire.
No violence.
And I think that could have moved us forward in very, very serious and constructive ways.
The opposite was done.
What was the effect?
A, Hamas didn't have to have the responsibility of governing.
Hamas told the Palestinian population, it's not our fault.
Not that Hamas is bad government or bad managers.
It's that the Americans, the Zionists, their allies in the region, the puppet regimes, as they call them in the region, they are all strangling you because they don't like the democratic choice that you made.
That was one thing that happened.
The second thing is within the world of political Islam.
The Islamists, like Hamas, who have not attacked Americans, are not a priori anti-Americans who say that we are willing to be part of a democratic political process, who say that our grievances are what we need addressed.
We don't hate you for who you are.
We have grievances like the occupation.
They were in an argument with the other Islamists, with the Al Qaeda types, with the people who said we will never participate in democracy.
It's a Western colonial implant with the people who said we do want to revolutionize the Middle East, create a caliphate, all these scary things.
The majority of the political Islamists are not Al Qaeda.
The majority look more like Hamas.
But what we did was we emasculated the Democrats within the world of political Islam.
All Al Qaeda had to do was smile and applaud on the sidelines and say, we told you, we told you if you play their democratic game, they're going to screw you anyway.
So that was the second thing that happened.
That was devastating.
It strengthened the radicals within Hamas, which was surely not the intention.
It set us on the road to the reality today of a divided Palestinian polity, a situation in which it's somehow legitimate to impose a siege on the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza.
I have huge problems with Hamas.
I'm an Israeli.
I've lived through Hamas violence.
By the way, I've lived through Fatah violence and violence from other Palestinian factions.
But the point is, when we were in Gaza, we couldn't defeat them.
There's not going to be a military solution.
Sure, there are security steps that you can take.
But this needs a political solution.
The whole Hamas issue needs a political solution.
By bringing them into the political game, we were along on the right track.
And now we dramatically segue onto the wrong track, and we're all paying the consequences.
Well, throughout this interview, you keep bringing up land for peace and grievances that seem to be, in your estimation, related to actual events here on Earth and space and time and that sort of thing.
But, you know, Dana Perino, the White House spokesman, was just making it clear, I think yesterday, that the President understands the root cause of the problem here, and that obviously is Islamic extremism, not occupation.
Well, I feel very uncomfortable saying this, but I think what that means is that your President really, after all these years, still does not understand the Middle East.
And the effect of that is that you will continue to pursue policies that I believe deeply damage American interest and American security.
They destabilize the Middle East.
It's just not the case.
Yes, there are Islamic extremists out there.
But if you look at the world and you see in the Middle East and in the Muslim world an undifferentiated sea of green hostility, then you're in trouble.
If you look at that green and you begin to see the different shades and you understand that there are people you can work with, the majority of the people you can work with, there's a minority that has it in for you and that may not be movable on this issue.
But they're a small minority.
Rather than shrink them down to their natural, manageable dimensions, you continuously conflate and bloat them up into much greater dimensions by all this Islamofascist, it's-all-about-Islamic-extremists nonsense.
You need to be engaging with more actors in the Middle East, in the Islamic world.
The majority of Islamists have grievances that are soluble.
But if you see this as you're with us or against us, you're evil or good, you hate us for what we are, nonsense.
There are root causes.
There are legitimate grievances.
And if you're incapable of recognizing them, get out the way because you're doing damage to yourselves and to everyone else.
It's this entire narrative that this has nothing to do with occupation.
It's Islamic extremists that is-that is driving, unfortunately, the Middle East off a cliff with huge repercussions for America.
Until America can get beyond that narrative, I'm afraid we are all condemned to continue to live in a very unstable and dangerous world.
The only way to change that is to end this nonsense of the narrative of the global war on terror.
I'd love to see more America challenging that.
All right.
Now, I know you have to go.
If it's okay, I'd like to just ask you one more quick question here.
Okay, let's go.
We talked about America's influence and hands-off and hands-on in different ways.
And you did say, I think within the context of the current Middle East setup, that American involvement is very important and that kind of thing.
But I wonder what you think of a Ron Paul-type foreign policy that just says no more subsidies to Israel, no more subsidies to any of their allies or enemies or anyone else either.
Complete hands-off.
Do you think that Israel would be in a better position to make peace and or defend itself, if necessary, if America would just stop intervening altogether?
Let me say this, Scott.
First of all, I totally understand, given what everyone has experienced for the last years, where that is coming from.
I think it's an understandable counterreaction.
Secondly, when I look at the Republican presidential field, it's not my position.
I'm certainly not a voter.
But if I may, as an outside observer, when I look at the Republican presidential field, some of the other candidates scare me, especially a candidate who has as his advisors, people who make the current Bush team look like teddy bears, and I'm talking about Rudy Giuliani.
So I can understand the appeal of the Ron Paul candidacy, especially when compared to the alternative.
I personally think that it is the wrong corrective to the policies that have been pursued in the last year.
I think the right corrective is to remain engaged with the world.
I don't think America has a huge pullback option, I have to say, I think it's to remain engaged with the world, but engaged constructively engaged with the real world that exists out there, not the world that exists in the minds of American fantasists, many of whom sit at the American Enterprise Institute.
It's to engage with the real world.
It's to speak to people not to be scared of diplomacy, to deploy the tools of diplomacy, including aid and assistance in ways that are going to build stability, build American interests, build alliances, to work multilaterally.
The misunderstanding here of the nature of the relationship with Israel is that America is or should pull back from having a relationship with Israel or and or be an honest broker.
The beauty of the relationship as it's currently constructed, in theory at least, is that America can use the fact that it's not an honest broker in order to drive home a bargain that everyone now understands needs to happen and that is in the American interest and that ultimately is in the Israeli interest and that a majority of Israelis understand that.
I would argue that rather than pulling back, if a new administration here said, hey, things have gone a little bit ugly in the Middle East, we need to change direction.
We need to do several things.
I would argue that trying to negotiate a grand bargain with Iran is also not a bad idea, but one of the things we need to do is to remove this thorn that's a thorn for us, it's a thorn for the Israelis, it's a thorn for the region, it's a thorn for our relations with the Islamic world.
That is the unresolved Israeli-Arab conflict.
It can be done.
We know what the contours of an agreement are.
We know what they are on the Palestinian track.
We know what they are on the Syrian track.
Once the Syrian track is done, the Lebanese track becomes easy.
We already have a Saudi initiative that says that if you make comprehensive peace, then all the Arab world will normalize relations with Israel, so we know what to do.
It's a question of do we summon the political will to do it, and then the political skill to implement it.
That, I would argue, is the way forward.
It's to walk the parties through to the place that you know they need to get to, and I would argue that if there's an American leadership, Israel will come along.
Left to their own devices, I'm not sure today whether the Israeli leadership is in a position, even if they want to, where they can get there on their own, and therefore that casts a shadow on the region.
That's what I think would be the antidote to the disastrous policies of the last few years.
I can understand Americans saying, we want out.
I don't think that that's going to be the long-term, responsible, stabilizing, improving of American security way to go about things.
I do think it's to show American leadership in a way that has been so lacking the last seven years, but not just the last seven years.
Alright everybody, Daniel Levy, he was a negotiator for Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin's governments in Israel.
He's director of the Middle East Policy Initiative and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
His website is prospectsforpeace.com.
Thanks so much for your time today, Daniel.
Pleasure, Scott.
Take care.
Have a good holiday, everyone.
You too.
