Middle East resolution now could preclude a cataclysmic conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian issue will determine whether the region’s future will be one of peace and prosperity.

Benjamin Natanyahu, right, will object to any new parameters that undermine his vision of a Greater Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.

Next year marks the centennial of the Balfour Declaration, the British statement that paved the way for Israel’s founding in 1948, and for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as the larger Arab world, that continues today.

World leaders gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly probably won’t have time to discuss this perennial political challenge. But despite all of the Middle East’s other — and seemingly bigger — problems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the linchpin issue that will determine whether the region’s future will be one of peace and prosperity.

The conflict — whether it is resolved or not — will also help define US President Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy. As Obama’s second term nears its end, it is worth recalling that when he came to office in 2009, he sought rapprochement with the wider Muslim world. In his historic Cairo speech that year, he described the Palestinians’ situation as “intolerable” and promised to pursue a policy of “two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security”.

Obama has made little progress on this issue since then, though not for lack of trying. During Obama’s first term, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Republicans in the US congress united against him to derail any meaningful peace efforts. And during his second term, US Secretary of State John Kerry led a heroic nine-month effort — involving almost 100 bilateral meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders — that petered out.

Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have both expressed a willingness to meet, in Moscow or in some other location, but no one seriously expects the parties to make real progress towards a two-state solution at this point.

One reason is that Netanyahu is waiting for Obama to leave office. His priorities are to secure a massive military aid deal with the US in the coming months, and to orchestrate a new public relations blitz justifying his government’s policy regarding settlements in the occupied territories, which the international community has condemned as illegal. Moreover, Abbas’s authority is slipping, and there is no mandate for a Palestinian leader to pursue serious peace efforts.

Leaving office without having made progress on an issue he specifically promised to resolve would be a colossal failure for Obama. Fortunately, he still has time. He should push for a UN Security Council resolution that establishes new parameters for a future peace accord, and replaces UN Security Council Resolution 242, which dates back to the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The international community agrees that ending the conflict is in everyone’s interest. France has long argued for a new resolution, and Russia has no incentive to oppose one. Obama should start by approaching Russia, the EU and the UN to discuss how the resolution should be phrased.

He will need international support because Netanyahu will certainly object to any new parameters that undermine his own increasingly apparent vision of a Greater Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.

Netanyahu will have US allies to run interference for him. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump doesn’t even mention a two-state solution in his platform; and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has assured US pro-Israel advocacy organisations that she opposes any new Security Council resolution to lay the foundation for a future accord.

Still, a new resolution would ideally come this November, just after the US election, sparing the next president the political costs. A Clinton administration would benefit from already having something to work with, and a Trump administration would benefit from low expectations, while being restrained from doing more damage than it otherwise could have done.

The resolution itself will have to be far more comprehensive than previous efforts by the Security Council. Indeed, Resolution 242 doesn’t even mention the Palestinians or a future Palestinian state. A far better model would be the Arab League’s 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which embodies a much wider regional perspective, and which Obama has previously said would give Israel “peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco”.

Moreover, a new resolution should establish that the international community will recognise no changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regard to Jerusalem.

Admittedly, a resolution now would not lead to immediate peace, or even to peace talks. It might divide Israelis and Palestinians further. But if the world wants to avoid a future cataclysmic confrontation between a coming Greater Israel and a Palestine backed by a larger alliance of Arab countries, the conditions for talks leading to a stable two-state solution must be established now.

Obama is in a position to establish a framework for an eventual settlement. If he does, it would demonstrate that his Cairo speech was not in vain, and it might even justify the Nobel peace prize he received at the start of his presidency, when he vowed that peace between Israel and Palestine would be a defining part of his legacy.

Carl Bildt is a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden.

Project Syndicate