March 15, 2005
Simulated Negotiation: Daniel Levy on the 2003 Geneva Accords
16 February, 2005:
Daniel Levy, a lead drafter of the (2003) Geneva Accords developed by a freelance team of Israeli opposition leaders and a team of Palestinians led by Yassir Abd-Rabbo, spoke at Brown University about the effects of the independent draft agreement on the peace process.
The Accords are interesting because they present the possiblity that independent practicioners and advisory bodies can influence actual negotiation processes through simulated agreements. The Watson Institute is currently examining the utility of simulations, regularly hosting conventions of the U.N. Security Council for negotiation scenarios and hosting symposia on War Gaming and simulated conflict management.
According to Levy, the high-profile simulated negotiations 'helped drive the actual peace process' that has intensified since the Palestinian elections by putting symbolic political and media pressure on both governments, as well as developing a practical draft document to serve as a departure point for further negotiation among interested parties.
The U.S. State Department and the United Nations semi-endorsed the draft after close scrutiny, declaring support for 'follow-up progress on implementation.'
The Accords also identified several areas of overlapping mutual interest between Palestinian and Israeli leadership, including withdrawal from Gaza, and the Accords spurred the Sharon government to move ahead with a unilateral disengagement peace plan as an alternative.
Read the Journal's interview with Daniel Levy below:
BJWA What was the genesis of the concept of the Geneva Accord?
DL The background to what was quite an unusual thing to do—to produce a model peace agreement in extreme detail—was that a group of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators during the 1999 – 2001 attempt at reaching a permanent status peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians came out of that experience convinced that we had actually begun to develop the basics for whatever a peace agreement would look like: that it could be done and we were very close. Which at the time was very much in contradiction with the more widely accepted version of what had gone on and the narrative as to what was possible and what should go on.
The reality was that the negotiations had been discontinued. There was no longer a political negotiation process taking place between Israelis and Palestinians, and there was a sense that this would continue for some time and that we didn’t have time—that we should use this time where the officials were no longer trying to bridge the gaps and work through the issues, while things were still fresh in our minds from this 1999 – 2001, to conduct a very serious informal and nonbinding track to attempt at continuing the negotiations where they left off. And that’s partly why many of those involved had been the official negotiators.
There were other things that guided us. We were conscious of the fact that more prep work needed to be done with the publics, because everyone for many years had been saying, “Ah, there’ll be a two-state solution. Ah, there’ll be a two-state solution.” But we felt we had reached a stage where it wasn’t that the devil was in the detail. There was no more space for constructive ambiguity. We lived in such a transparent world that if coming back from negotiations the Israeli’s would say, “Oh we found a solution on issue X.” And the Palestinians agreed to this and the Palestinians said, “We found a solution on issue X.” And the Israelis agreed to Y, and X and Y weren’t the same thing, or X and Y was a fudging of language, then people didn’t want to hear it. We needed constructive clarity; ambiguity would reach the stage where ambiguity was destructive in terms of what was required. So we wanted to provide that clarity. We felt that we had to come forward and say to the publics that this is what it entails.
Another lesson we’d learned, as I’d mentioned, was that the negotiators were not up to the job. The negotiators themselves hadn’t done the prep work on all sides. There had been a lot of track to stuff that had gone on prior to 1999 that had fed into the official peace talks. There was a paper drawn up in 1995, with which I was involved as a kind of a background policy person, between Abu Mazen, now the Palestinian president, and Yossi Balen. It was called the Balen – Abu Mazen agreement of 1995, which was far less detailed than Geneva. We saw the extent to which the understanding reached as a framework agreement by Balen and Abu Mazen and the teams who worked on their behalf in ‘95 had acted as a kind of semi-official guide to some of the negotiators. And we felt that we had to rework some of those ideas, because some of the ideas were never put to the test in the negotiating room. Apparently it had fallen a little bit short, new ideas had emerged, and we needed to go into more detail.
So for all of those reasons we did this and we also felt that we needed to be a bit more clear to the world in terms of what we were asking of the international community, because as the negotiations proceeded, some new ideas came up in terms of the multinational role in helping to resolve some aspects of the Israeli – Palestinian conflict. We thought that it would be good to pre-prepare the international community so they would be more able and ready to step up to that role.
BJWA You mentioned the need for preparation on both sides. The [Geneva] plan has been critiqued by many as largely an intellectual exercise, largely an academic plan. If all parties were rational actors, and if there were a sense of willingness on both sides to acquiesce, this would be an ideal solution. But where is that willingness? Without such willingness, what role does this plan have in the peace process?
DL I’d almost turn the question on its head and ask, without such a willingness, can there be a peace process? I think we have had occasions in the past where the parties have come to the table with a pretty realistic take on what needs to be done. And I think and hope that that will be the case again in the future. I think without that you won’t be able to actually get to a resolution of the conflict and I think it’s not something that’s fantastical and not doable. I think it’s something that’s very doable.
To kind of draw you into the exercise of the negotiations themselves: One of the interesting things when we were negotiating was that part of the negotiations would be, “This is our position, these are our needs, this is what makes sense for us.” Both sides accepted as a legitimate negotiating argument, “I need this to market to my own public.” So we were taking these things into consideration. It wasn’t just, “Let us pretend we are Martians. We’ve come down and you can play the role of Israeli. You can be Israeli Martians and you can be Palestinian Martians and now let’s kind of,”—or better, an analogy that you’re more familiar with at the moment: Vulcans. “Everyone’s a Captain Spock and this is just a rat.”
We weren’t doing that at all. These are people who lived in the heart of the conflict, and live in our society. That’s why it was Israelis and Palestinians. That’s one of the unique things about Geneva. It wasn’t people from the outside. It was people who for years had won or lost political elections on the Israeli side and won or lost political support on the Palestinian side by virtue of advocating positions that at certain times they could carry the public with them and certain times they couldn’t. So sometimes we literally argued. We said, “Okay. Bottom line, is there security overriding logic in this? No. It’s an aspirin that I need for my public and without this I’m not going to be able to sell the deal.” And the other side would say, “If you’re going to go on that, I need these kinds of backups, these guarantees, because this would fly with my public.” And that was quite a lot of the game.
BJWA What about this plan lends itself to success, when the others—partition plans such as those the British proposed in the ‘30s, and the initial ‘47 plan, the Oslo Accords, Camp David—have failed?
DL This is the first detailed Israeli – Palestinian attempt to say this is what it’s going to have to look like. Obviously the things that preceded 1948 were all while the area was still under various mandates, in the time of empires and colonies. The mandatory powers or the United Nations were suggesting the plans. The conflict has had its own trajectory. Initially it wasn’t an Israeli – Palestinian conflict in as much as it was Israeli – Arab. An independent Palestinian movement for national liberation only emerged in the 1960s. One can see the late 1980s, and especially 1988, an important watershed, when the PLO for the first time recognized the two-state solution and began a dialogue with the then U.S. administration.
So I think that with various time lags and catch-ups and with one side being ahead of the curve at one time and the other side being ahead of the curve at the other, we’ve been kind of nervously dancing around the fire of what the two-state solution should look like for over a decade, perhaps closer to two decades. We didn’t invent this out of thin air. We took what had gone on in the negotiations, what the Clinton Parameters had suggested. Because the bizarre thing about the 2000 negotiation experience was, first you had a summit of leaders in July at Camp David, hosted by Clinton, Barak, Arafat. Then in December, about five months later, Clinton put his parameters on the table. And then, in January, you had the senior officials, but not the principals, negotiating at Taba. But my take on it is it should have been in the reverse order. When you listen to it, it’s quite wild. It makes more sense to say, first of all we send senior negotiators to try and breach the differences. Then the major third party honest broker, the U.S. administration, puts its ideas on the table. Then based on those ideas the principals come to that table. That is actually how it should have been done.
BJWA Then this is an attempt to take a different perspective, predicated on the fact that the main problem with the prior negotiations were these nitty-gritty details—sort of a trepidation about entering into this very vivid picture about what the two states would look like.
DL Well, not really. Because we’d gone beyond that. We began to go there and it was prematurely suspended. I was a negotiator at Taba, and what happened at Taba isn’t that we reached a dead end in terms of the negotiations. We reached a dead end in terms of the political timetable we were working according to, because it was two weeks out from Israeli elections and Barak basically said it was too late. And we lost credibility even within our own party and the Intifada was going on. The closing statement of Taba, which was the last official permanent status negotiations in January 2001, says the parties were never closer and we could resolve this in a short period of time.
And we took that at face value. Everyone else said, “Ah, you know, that’s what you say at the end of a negotiation.” We took it at face value and said, “Okay. Let’s test it.” Because we couldn’t be accused of what we always accuse the other side of, which is being stuck in the box of your own thinking. You know, you’re convinced of your case and you don’t challenge it. We had to prove it, after what had happened. We had to prove it to ourselves first of all, by the way. I would even say that Geneva was born of a very selfish act, of testing whether we were dreaming and bullshitting ourselves by saying it was possible.
So we took exactly where we got to in Taba. Of course as things emerged over three years, some theses had to be changed because the reality on the ground was changing. But we took that and tried to spin it out into a detailed agreement. And you said, “very nice, academic, sit on the shelf.” What we’d very consciously done is said, “No, we’re going to go out and campaign for this. First of all, we’re going to make it available to everyone.” And we did something unprecedented in Israel. Life in Palestine is different; they did something parallel. I’ll mention what it is in a minute.
We did something unprecedented in Israel. We mailed to every Israeli household the full text of the Accord with the maps: a hugely expensive enterprise. Israel’s a small place. You won’t think it sounds like that much, but there are over a million households in Israel. We sent a copy of the Geneva Accord to every single household. We said, “Judge for yourself. Throughout this peace process, no one ever put you in the picture. This is transparent. We’re putting you in the picture.” The Palestinians distributed it as an insert to daily newspapers, as there’s no daily mail system there. And we went out and actively educated and campaigned for the content and for the adoption of this kind of an approach. We very consciously said, “This isn’t supposed to collect dust on the shelves.”
We think it’s going to be an unavoidable point of reference to the extent whereby, when Condoleeza Rice had her Senate Confirmation Hearings a couple of weeks ago, she said, “There has to be a viable Palestinian state.” And senator Lincoln Chafee of here [Rhode Island] turned around and said, “When you say viable, would you mean something along the lines of the Geneva Accord?” And she had to respond to that. And we feel that it’s now become an unavoidable point of reference and perhaps the most prominent point of reference for anyone who is thinking about what a permanent state solution would look like.
BJWA Many critique the Oslo Accords as a tactical or strategic change in terms of the Palestinian mindset. Had the Palestinians actually accepted a two-state solution, in terms of not just wanting the complete eradication of Israel? Or was it actually a strategic change? Making a detailed map is one thing, but how do you ascertain that the motives on both sides are genuine?
DL Yes, and the question is asked on the flip side. Was Oslo just another way of maintaining the Israeli occupation and the Israelis haven’t really come to terms with it? But to your question, it’s always difficult to go into the realm of the psychology of actors in any kind of process. I think that the key principals who were involved in the beginning of the Oslo process and who were involved in the 1999 – 2001 attempt at a permanent status negotiation and in the Geneva initiative, and in other things, have been genuine in what they’ve come to the table trying to achieve. I think Rabin understood where it needed to go. Peres understood where it needed to go. I think Arafat at the beginning understood where it needs to go and accepted that, although his behavior raises the most question marks. Nonetheless, I’ve said what I’ve said and I stick by it. I think it could have been done with him. I certainly think that’s the case of the key Palestinian negotiators who have pursued this process. I think it was true of Barak and I certainly think it was true of the Geneva Initiative negotiators.
Neither side is a monolith. Bibi Natin Yahu, who was elected as Israeli Prime Minister in 1996, opposed the Oslo Accord and had voted against the Oslo Accord in the Israeli Parliament, just prior to the election, said, “I want to continue the Oslo process.” Did he genuinely intend when he accepted Oslo as something he would continue to implement that he was leading towards a two-state solution and an end of occupation? My sense would be no. So I think it’s not a monolith on either side. I’m sure there are Palestinians who are using this as a way of furthering a very different goal and I think there are Israelis who pay lip service to the peace process as a way of furthering a very different goal. In the specific of the Geneva Initiative—
BJWA Not even something as a specific goal, but in terms of accepting partition as a concept—
DL No, which is a specific goal. We’re going to divide this land. Israeli domination of the West Bank ain’t gonna be. Palestinian control of everything at the expense of Israel ain’t gonna be. Look, if the Palestinians were playing it tactically, see, they’d say, “We’ll take a bit at a time. First, we’ll get back as much of the West Bank as we can, then a bit more of the West Bank. Then hopefully we’ll have all of the West Bank. But then we’ll go on for our struggle to get back the rest of Israel.” If that were the case then I would say why didn’t they accept Camp David?
I think the seriousness of the Palestinian commitment to a viable two-state solution was partly what guided them in rejecting a nonviable offer made by the Israelis. Do you see what I’m saying? If someone didn’t really care, if someone wasn’t serious about ending this, saying, “This is the red line. That’s it, now we move forward. We’re not in conflict with you any more.” If they weren’t so serious about it they’d say, “Fine we’ll accept this solution. Anyway, we were never going to come to terms with the Jews. Anyway we’re going to carry the war against them, so now let’s have the war against them for 80% rather that 20% of the territory.” So I think the seriousness of ending the conflict meant you had to get it right.
Now those who were involved in the Geneva Initiative have taken very serious domestic risks by lining up behind this. And they’ve gone out to their own public and said, “Hey, we’re telling it like it is. You can’t have it both ways. Either you want a negotiated solution to the conflict and a two-state solution—and that means making certain concessions on the refugee issue; that means we’re not going back home.” And that’s what the Geneva Initiative authors have come out and said. Or, “we can fight to our last drop of blood to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” But the two don’t go together. You can’t say you’re in favor of a two-state solution and say you’re in favor of an unlimited right of return of Palestinians. And that was a very, very important belated signal to tell the Palestinian public.
BJWA Yassir Arafat’s line consistently throughout the Second Intifada was that, “I don’t have control over Hamas. I don’t have control over these terrorist factions.” You either take that at face value, either he doesn’t have control, or he and the Palestinian leadership don’t want to or don’t care about reigning in these terrorist actions. And the same applies to the extreme Israeli side. Because the Palestinian Authority is a different entity than the state of Israel, there are certainly different things that you can expect in terms of how to rein in these various factions. How do you make things on par with one another? And how do you negotiate with a leadership that has uncertain control over his populace?
DL The short answer is you can’t, of course. Right down to the most banal things. In our negotiation of course it was writ large because they were not negotiating opposite an official side. Just the very logistics of conducting such a negotiation was that you would always have to ask for a permit for the Palestinians to be able to leave the territories to come to the negotiations. But even when it’s official negotiations, like now—there are the beginnings of official contacts—the Palestinians have to go through Israeli checkpoints. They’re dependent on the goodwill of the Israeli side to even come to the meeting. This has a dynamic that obviously feeds problematically into how the negotiations are conducted. This is one of the reasons why, I think, quite often bigger negotiations were conducted outside the region. Just to get away from that.
But I think the more important point you make is this huge asymmetry. Now we are not talking about two state actors, with a clear sense of what the Palestinian sovereignty is, with its own control of its territory, etc, with clear sources of power. That doesn’t exist; it is an asymmetry. I would say it’s a line in the sand where Palestinian control of Palestinian affairs begins and ends and where Israeli control of those affairs begins and end. I mean, we have a Palestinian Authority. There is a Palestinian Minister of Transportation. What does it mean? It’s a joke. What does it mean that there’s a Palestinian Minister of Transportation when there are 723 Israeli obstacles to freedom of movement in the West Bank? And that the Transportation Minister can do zero about that, when there are 760 kilometers of road on the Palestinian side that can’t be used by Palestinians? I mean, you begin to see the dimensions of this asymmetry.
I think what it means is that one has to be realistic. It’s not that one has to be easy on them, or forgiving, but realistic in terms of what they ask. You know, as the Israeli side, better than anyone else, what the limitations are and what they are permitted to do. Recently, just to give you a sense of the proportions of the lunacy of it sometimes, for a long time during the Intifada, any armed Palestinian would be considered a target, so the Palestinian police, the security apparatus, were not allowed to carry weapons, visible weapons, or they’d be a target for the Israelis. So okay, “Clamp down on the Palestinian militant groups, but you’re not allowed to carry weapons.” I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Monty Python. There’s this fabulous sketch. “He attacked me with a bunch of grapes, or he attacked me with, you know, a peach.” How are they supposed to clamp down? So now you’re back to a situation whereby the Israelis recognize that the Palestinian security forces are going to have to be armed in order to someway be a preventive tool in terms of asserting their authority. So what it takes is a) an understanding of the limitations and b) an Israeli willingness to make this work.
BJWA It strikes me that, immediately following Arafat’s death, there seems to be a rebirth in the peace process, whereas the argument before his death was that perhaps he was legitimately attempting to check the various Palestinian militant groups. But it seems that Abu Mazen is now showing signs of being able to do that. Does this suggest that Arafat was, in fact, not doing everything that he could do?
DL I prefer less to dwell on the past in terms of what the Arafat contribution was. We had a meeting with president Abbas two days after his inauguration as Palestinian President last month, and one of the participants—in fact, I think it was a Palestinian participant at the meeting, not President Abbas himself—made the very poignant and witty aside during the meeting that on the Palestinian side, they have to do everything to convince the Palestinian public that what’s happening now is a continuation of the Arafat legacy. And on the Israeli side, they have to do everything to convince everyone that it’s in fact a complete discontinuation of the Arafat legacy. And there’s a lot to that, because I think that more important than what happened in the past is for the Palestinians to be able to sell what’s going to happen in the future as something that—
Look, I think that what happened on the Palestinian side was that there was an appreciation for Arafat as being someone who had put the Palestinian issue on the world map. He was the symbol of Palestinian national integration and he was apparently a very problematic interlocutor for peace, but also, which is more relevant for the Palestinians, not a fantastic CEO. And I think people on the Palestinian street began to feel that deeply.
So I think on the one hand there’s a big discontinuity in terms of how Palestinian affairs are going to be managed. But I also think that it would be legitimate, when the Palestinians do go for an agreed two-state solution, to say that he paved the way for that. I think it will be important for the internal legitimacy. But I also think that there’s some truth to that. I don’t think it’s a deeply revisionist act in terms of the position that Arafat began to adopt in the lead up to and post Oslo.
BJWA In recent weeks the Bush administration has said that it likely would be actively engaged, though from the sidelines—not as engaged as it was, for example, at Camp David in 2000. But at the same time, they realize that America needs to be more engaged than it was during the first months of the first Bush administration. What do you personally believe should be the level of American participation this time around as compared to the past?
DL My short answer to that is that seriously handling this issue does not look kindly on those who only want to be half involved. You’ve got to expend political capital, and political currency, and time and energy on this. And some of the early signs of the second George W. Bush administration are quite encouraging, that there’s an understanding, as you’ve said, that they were too hands off and they were too limited in their involvement. I hope that that understanding goes a little further and that it actually goes into the realm of understanding.
I think that they adopted an approach of conflict management and I’m not sure that this conflict lends itself to being managed so easily. My question is, have they switched disks and understood that it requires conflict resolution? Unless you have a horizon of conflict resolution, your conflict management strategy is destined to failure. We had the laughable—if they didn’t lead to so many deaths and loss of life in Israel and Palestine—examples during the first administration of the Zinni mission. They appointed a special envoy called Zinni, General Zinni. And I don’t think he had enough backing, I don’t think he had enough of a mandate and he came home. And then they appointed Ambassador Wolf to oversee the roadmap implementation. And he went home again. There were those of us in the region who said, “Wait a minute. You’re not taking this seriously. This is not America carrying its weight.”
Now we have the appointment of General William Ward as a special Security Coordinator. This was announced by Secretary of State Rice during her first visit in the region. And I think it was significant that she came to the region so quickly after her appointment. And we’ve heard the extent to which this is being talked about as a very major plank in terms of the issues she’s going to be focused on. Now I hope it’s the beginning of a more concerted, consistent, not-getting-scared-away-from-this-too-easily, engagement.
I understand it’s not simple. There are a myriad of domestic political pressures that feed into American engagement on this issue because you can’t engage on this issue if you’re not willing to lay down the law to both sides at certain times. The analogy I draw is being a friend—and America is a friend of Israel and should continue to be a friend of Israel, and that’s important. But let’s take it down to our personal lives. If my friend’s absolutely blind drunk and about to get into a car and drive, then it’s my duty as a friend to say, “No you’re not. Don’t you dare do that! Give me those keys.”
And I think it’s the same with America and Israel sometimes. Sometimes Israeli policy can be very, very directly self-defeating. And it’s America’s role, not only as the honest broker, but also as Israel’s friend, to step up to the bat and say that sometimes.
And, I don’t see how America constructs a broader policy of engagement in the Middle East and a broader attempt to guarantee security, combat terror, and spread democracy without getting the kind of credibility on this issue that the first Bush administration desperately lacked. They were not credible in the Arab world because of the way they approached the Israel – Palestine issue, amongst other things, but in many ways this was a key underminer of US foreign policy credibility in the last four years. And the quote I wanted to read you was by Chuck Hagel, who at a World Affairs Council meeting on the 21st of January said, “U.S. reengagement in a revived Middle East peace process will be the single best action we can take for our public diplomacy in the Muslim world.” And I think Chuck Hagel told it absolutely right. And I don’t think one’s going to be able to carry forward with the broader agenda without taking something of a different pitch on Israel – Palestine.
BJWA In the past it seems that the Bush administration has been sort of grappling with the fact—whether they’re justified or not in believing this—that a much increased American influence in Israel and the region would actually turn off a lot of the Arab countries because they would see that as American interference. But I think that has been one of the concerns of the Bush administration, certainly in their first administration and it seems that they’re turning away from that more recently.
DL I don’t think it was a concern. I think the concern was, “We can’t do anything with this, we can’t run ahead of the parties, the parties aren’t ready, this is a political hot-potato domestically.” Let’s be honest. I think that was a major part of it. And I think there was a certain ideological affinity of some in the administration with the more retrograde, problematic elements within the Israeli political world. And I think there is a certain coincidence of outlooks which are very, very unhealthy towards achieving a lasting peace between some of the neo-cons and some of the hard-line nikudniks. And those factors, and other factors that feed into domestic politics were much more telling I think.
I think the other thing the administration needs to be convinced of is that you can get the Palestinians and Israelis on board for this. Now, what I would argue is, you’ve got the publics. The publics are ready. There’s huge fatigue after four years of Intifada. I think a lot of what’s going on at the moment is the public saying, “Enough. Screw you. Do whatever you have to do. And we’re sick of the dividers.” And in opinion polls, we see that the publics are ready for the deal. They need guidance.
But there were polls taken on Israeli and Palestinian sides last month, one by an institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one by Halish Kakhi’s research center—and he’s the preeminent Palestinian pollster. And it took the content of the Geneva Initiative, without calling it the Geneva Initiative, and asked in great detail, “Do you support each separate item and do you support the whole package?” And 64% of Israelis said they support the whole package, and 54% of Palestinians said the same. So the public is there. And I think the U.S. administration has to be convinced that you can take this forward towards a promising conclusion. And hopefully the circumstances would lend themselves to the administration being convinced of that now.
Posted by BJWA at 09:41 PM
