Shlaim - Israeli Politics and Middle East Peacemaking

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Israeli Politics and Middle East Peacemaking

Avi Shlaim

Journal of Palestine Studies

, Vol. 24, No. 4. (Summer, 1995), pp. 20-31.

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0377-919X%28199522%2924%3A4%3C20%3AIPAMEP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

Journal of Palestine Studies

is currently published by University of California Press.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/ucal.html.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.orgMon Jun 25 18:46:16 2007

ISRAELI POLITICS AND MIDDLE EAST PEACEMAKING 

AVI

SHLAIM

Israel, Henry Kissinger once remarked, has no foreign policy, onlydomestic politics. Although this remark involves an obvious oversimpli-fication, it does raise an interesting question about the relationship be-tween the two in Israel. While domestic politics influence foreign policyin all countries, the impact of the first on the second is particularlyprofound in Israel, where the questions of national identity involved inforeign policy weigh more heavily on the public mind than they gener-ally do elsewhere.The relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy is nota one-way street. Just as internal politics influence foreign policy deci-sions, developments in the external sphere feed into the domestic polit-ical scene in a never-ending process. The purpose of this article is toexamine the interplay between domestic politics and Middle East peace-making since the June 1992 elections brought Labor back to power af-ter fifteen years of Likud dominance. The main focus is the eventfulperiod from the signing of the Israel-PLO accord on

13

September 1993to the signing of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty on 26 October 1994.

Avi

Shlaim

is the Alastair Buchan Reader in international relations anda fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford. His publications include

Col-lusion Across theJordan

(1988),

The Politics of Partition

(1990), and

Warand Peace in the Middle East: A Critique of American Policy

(1994).

Journal ofPalestine

Studies

XXIV,

no.

4

(Summer

1995),

pp.

20-31.

21

SRAELI POLITICS AND MIDDLE EAST PEACEMAKING

Security

and

Territory

While there is a broad consensus in Israel, encompassing both Likudand Labor, that places national security above peace, there is no similarconsensus on whether Israel should be prepared to trade the territoriescaptured in June 1967 for peace with her neighbors. Here lies the mostfundamental difference between the foreign policy outlooks of Likudand Labor. Likud is committed to the ideology of Greater Israel whichclaims the West Bank-"Judea and Samaria" in its terminology-as anintegral and inalienable part of the Land of Israel. Labor is a pragmaticparty which places security above all other values. For Likud, the Landof Israel is sacred; for Labor, Israel's security is sacred. This is not tosuggest that Likud is indifferent to security or that Labor is untouchedby the ideal of Greater Israel, but simply to point to the different em-phases of their respective worldviews.On the Palestinian question, there was until very recently a curiousconvergence between Likud and Labor. Both parties suffered from ageneral Israeli blind spot when it came to the Palestinians; both wereextremely slow to come to terms with the reality of Palestinian national-ism. Both parties, when in power, preferred dealing with the rulers ofArab states rather than with Palestinian representatives, both were vehe-mently opposed to negotiations with the PLO. Both are still opposed tothe establishment of an independent Palestinian state.The Labor party advocated territorial compromise in the West Bankafter 1967, but what it had in mind was compromise with Hussein ofJordan, not the Palestinians. The infamous statement that there is nosuch thing as a Palestinian people came not from Likud but from La-bor's Golda Meir. Yitzhak Rabin, who succeeded Meir as prime ministerafter the October 1973 war, declared before a joint session of Congressin 1976 that Israel would not commit suicide by meeting with the PLO.He insisted that the Palestinians were not the core of the conflict andthat to consider them as such was "to put the cart before the horse."This solid national consensus began to crack after the Middle Eastpeace conference convened in Madrid in October 1991. Israel's posi-tion in the post-Madrid peace talks featured prominently in the generalelection campaign of June 1992. Yitzhak Shamir represented theLikud's traditional line of refusing to bow to external pressure, defend-ing the integrity of the Land of Israel and supporting an ever-growingnumber of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Yitzhak Rabinrepresented the Labor party's traditional line of trading land for peaceprovided it did not jeopardize Israel's security. He favored a freeze onsettlement activity and promised to be more forthcoming in the peacetalks than his rivals, with priority to go to reaching an agreement onPalestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

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