Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have published another article on the “peace process” (“Into the Lion’s Den”) in the May 1 issue of The New York Review of Books.
The first part of the article focuses on the Bush administration’s headlong attempt to arrive at a “shelf agreement,” which Agha and Malley say is “in some respects the oddest idea for achieving peace,” a process tailor-made for three people: “Olmert can shore up his authority, Abbas his relevance, and Bush his legacy.”
For Israelis, signing the accord will be tantamount to making concessions to a Palestinian Authority that is unable to control its territory, speak for the entirety of its people, restrain violent militants, or halt rocket fire. . . .
Israelis will also doubt that the deal reflects Palestinians’ collective feelings. A move designed to placate their
Palestinians will see [a shelf agreement] as relinquishing their most sacred rights . . . For many Palestinians, a state was never the ultimate goal, let alone a venerated prize. . . .
In their eyes, [the two-state solution’s] three most enthusiastic backers are also viewed as the least legitimate: Israel, which, as the Israeli prime minister put it, will be "finished" without a Palestinian state; the US, which feverishly is trying to realize its president’s "vision"; and that narrow slice of the Palestinian parasitic elite that benefits mightily from the Palestinian Authority . . . .
Both populations believe a shelf agreement “will find its place alongside the series of meaningless, unimplemented deals beginning with
It is a perfect peace storm: the weakest, least experienced prime minister in Israeli history, backed by a lame duck American president leaving office within a year, negotiating “peace” with the Mayor of Ramallah.
Agha and Malley’s own ideas for peace are even more hallucinatory. We’ll look at them in the next post.