Diplomatic fantasies at the Council on Foreign Relations
While the CFR prefers to be courteous with foreign guests, it let Shtayyeh’s appearance go to waste, by feeding him mostly softball questions.
By DORE GOLDPALESTINIAN PRIME Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh – refusing to recognize that Arab states have a right to defend their vital interests. (photo credit: ALAA BADARNEH/POOL VIA REUTERS)Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh appeared on November 17 at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). What might have been an opportunity to hear new thinking from the Palestinian side turned out to be a disappointing display of much of the same old rhetoric that led the Palestinian leadership to its current quagmire.While the CFR prefers to be courteous with foreign guests, it let Shtayyeh’s appearance go to waste, by feeding him mostly softball questions. The unfortunate result of this is that the audience walks away learning very little.When asked by the CFR moderator, Richard Engel of NBC News, about the situation of the Palestinians today, Shtayyeh chose to begin with an attack on Arab states for their relations with Israel. True, maybe he would prefer that Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates declare the end of their conflicts with Israel only after all Palestinian political demands are met, however, Shtayyeh refused to recognize that Arab states have a right to defend their vital interests.Since 1948, they had suspended these rights for the sake of the Palestinian cause. What Shtayyeh ultimately wants is for the Palestinians to continue to hold their past veto power over the Arab world. Essentially, he wants the Arabs to be Iranians, who supply Palestinian organizations like Hamas with weapons and money while taking the most extreme positions against peace. What the Arabs have begun to say this year is that this option is no longer on the table.None of the questioners at the CFR asked what the Palestinian leadership thinks about Iran, even though it is this subject that preoccupies the Arab world and threatens it directly. A question to Shtayyeh on this subject would have been fitting. Does he have an opinion on this?Iran, together with its Shi’ite proxy armies from Afghanistan and Pakistan, have committed ethnic cleansing of the Sunni Arab population of Syria, many of whom have now become refugees in Europe. Does Shtayyeh have a view of the Iranian-backed missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, including this month’s strike on a Saudi oil facility near the port city of Jeddah? In June of this year, the office of the UN secretary-general confirmed that recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities used missiles of “Iranian origin.” Aren’t Arab governments supposed to take positions on acts of this sort?Frankly, the cracks in the Palestinian veto of peace that appeared in 2020 are undeniable. Shtayyeh is unprepared to answer why. The story of that split began with the fact that the response of the Palestinian leadership to every proposal for peace since the 2000 Camp David Summit with President Clinton has been a loud but consistent “No.”INDEED, IT is possible to identify at least six separate occasions since Camp David when the Palestinian leadership turned down offers to make peace. In the last episode in 2014, then-secretary of state John Kerry worked tirelessly to advance yet another American peace plan that included a provision allowing the parties to accept the plan with reservations about specific clauses. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yes to peace. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just walked away. Asked by president Barack Obama in the Oval Office if he accepted Secretary Kerry’s plan, he just replied, “I’ll get back to you.” But he never did.Shtayyeh goes back and tries to re-write UN Security Council Resolution 242 which never called for a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it captured in 1967. Britain, which co-authored the resolution with the US back then, stated through its foreign secretary in 1970 that Israel was not expected to withdraw from all the territories. A letter from president George W. Bush (43) dated April 14, 2004, confirmed the view that it was “unrealistic to expect the outcome of negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”The Bush letter was approved overwhelmingly by both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives. Yet Shtayyeh insisted that a full withdrawal is binding on Israel, not leaving any room for other interpretations that have been asserted by various Western leaders in the past. He makes what he calls the “border of ‘67” sacrosanct. He ignores that the boundaries back then were not international borders but only armistice lines, requiring new borders to be negotiated. He talks about the Madrid Conference forgetting that President George H.W. Bush (41) spoke there about the need for a “territorial compromise”.Right now in this sensitive period of transition in America, when new people are coming to Washington to take over in January, Shtayyeh is probably hoping that selective reinterpretations of the Middle East peace process can be used to the Palestinians’ advantage. Describing the stipends granted to families of those who engaged in terrorism as a “social welfare” program might work as a strategy if the audience hearing this argument is either incredibly or ignorant.That is not how the Council on Foreign Relations operates, and it is wrong for a Palestinian leader who calls himself a prime minister to make such assumptions. In Israel, that is not how our leadership will address the incoming Biden administration, and the Palestinians would do well to advise their leaders from entertaining such diplomatic fantasies.Ambassador Gold is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and the former director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
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