, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York
, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of Ame...
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Khalil Shikaki , 14 May 2012
- Palestinian youth and the Arab Spring
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Mona Christophersen , Jacob Høigilt , Åge A. Tiltnes , 16 March 2012
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Nicolas Pelham , 17 February 2012
- Religion, territory and violence: exploring emerging religious-political groups in Israel and Palestine
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Jacob Høigilt , Tilde Rosmer , Hanne Eggen Røislien , 3 November 2011
- For lack of a better alternative, Palestinians go to the UN
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Khalil Shikaki , 29 September 2011
- Today's call on Palestine’s future: interim arrangements instead of comprehensive peace
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Tamar Hermann , 26 September 2011
- Comparative perspectives on state-building for a future Palestinian state
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30 August 2011
Israel, America and the New Middle East
Henry Siegman
, 14 February 2011
Summary
Virtually overnight, the Arab Middle East has been unrecognizably transformed. The implications of that transformation for America’s vital interests in that region and for Israel-Palestine peacemaking will be far-reaching. The peace process so far has been a meaningless exercise as successive US administrations chose to ignore the reality that Israel’s
long-planned goal of establishing irreversible control through its settlements over Palestine was clearly in sight, if not already an accomplished fact.
Given the vast imbalances between the two parties, and the commitment of successive Israeli governments to expanding the settlement enterprise, there was never the slightest chance of a two-state solution without forceful US intervention. That intervention never came, as the US, deferring to domestic political pressures, pretended it believed Israel’s declared commitment to a two-state accord.
Israel’s leaders believed that Arab authoritarian regimes, whose survival depended to a considerable extent on the US security umbrella, would keep in check popular Arab outrage over the failure to halt Palestinian dispossession. The fall of Mubarak and the tremors it has caused in neighbouring Arab regimes will henceforth prevent them from exercising that restraining role, or from collaborating with the US and Israel in an anti-Iran coalition, thus undermining Israel’s strategic situation.
Rescuing a sovereign Palestinian state offers the US a chance to restore the credibility and influence it has been losing in the region and to weaken Iran’s. Given the tectonic changes in this area and the threat they pose both to American and Israeli interests, a US intervention to end the Israel-Palestine conflict is not only politically conceivable but, perhaps for the first time, achievable.
