WarSclerotic

Kerry fails to learn history, Israel Hayom, Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi, April 30, 2014

Kerry adopted a “from the root” strategy, trying to turn substantive core issues into procedural and technical questions. Moreover, he ignored the general historical experience that has shown that peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors must be initiated at the outset by the parties themselves.

[T[he words of anger and frustration we have heard cannot be a substitute for a realistic diplomatic strategy that can be implemented in practice, in contrast to a visionary aspiration that is disconnected from the reality on the ground.

Since John Kerry was sworn in as U.S. secretary of state in February 2013, American diplomacy has shown symptoms of schizophrenia. On one hand, the Obama administration’s policy of conciliation — weak and reactive — was taken up a level. On the other hand, in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, Kerry acted frenetically in an intense and relentless effort to achieve a breakthrough.

So while the president and his secretary of state, faced with the repeated use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, passed the ball (and prestige) to the court of Russian President Vladimir Putin, they acted entirely differently on the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Here, Kerry (who gradually moved away from Obama’s more sober approach) acted firmly and decisively, as if the immediate fate of the whole world rested on his effort. In this regard, Kerry’s statement about an “apartheid state,” for which he has already been forced to apologize, was an additional layer to a collection of statements and actions that have indicated, above all, Kerry’s conceptual simplicity and his lack of adequate understanding of previous Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives.

In this context, it appears that Kerry took the unfortunate apartheid analogy from former President Jimmy Carter, who used it in the title of one of his books. Yet Kerry did not learn the necessary lessons from the resounding failure of Carter’s effort to achieve a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace settlement at the Geneva Conference in 1977. Like Kerry now, Carter took an ambitious and unrealistic approach, seeking to tackle at once all the roots of the conflict, with the Palestinian issue at the center.

Instead of emulating the measured step-by-step approach that was used by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Kerry adopted a “from the root” strategy, trying to turn substantive core issues into procedural and technical questions. Moreover, he ignored the general historical experience that has shown that peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors must be initiated at the outset by the parties themselves. Time and time again, the role of the American government has been to help mediate and to offer incentives after an initial breakthrough has been made by leaders in the region on their own.

Kerry, however, got into the thick of things despite a lack of any prior agreements on the sensitive and loaded issues that underlie the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And he did this at a time when America’s superpower status is in decline, and while it is suffering from a serious credibility problem.

Finally, Kerry’s statements and threats illustrate that, despite the fact that he served as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he did not learn the lessons history has provided on the fate of American attempts to impose peace settlements. Indeed, both in 1954 and in 1977, such efforts failed completely and boomeranged on Washington.

In short, the words of anger and frustration we have heard cannot be a substitute for a realistic diplomatic strategy that can be implemented in practice, in contrast to a visionary aspiration that is disconnected from the reality on the ground.

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