Contemporary Authors

1. The only language they understand : forcing compromise in Israel and Palestine https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036968 Thrall, Nathan, author. The only language they understand : forcing compromise in Israel and Palestine / Nathan Thrall. First edition. New York : Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, [2017] x, 323 pages ; 25 cm DS119.7 .T487 2017 ISBN: 9781627797092 (hardcover) (electronic book)

• Nathan Thrall - https://www.nathanthrall.com/about/

  Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and is a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, for which he has covered Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza since 2010. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, GQ, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among other publications. His analysis is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the BBC, Bloomberg News, CNN, Democracy Now!, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Economist, The New York Times, PRI, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and daughters.

• International Crisis Group - https://www.crisisgroup.org/who-we-are/people/nathan-thrall

  Nathan Thrall
  Senior Analyst, Israel/Palestine
  Jerusalem, Israel

  Please submit all media inquiries to nthrall@crisisgroup.org or call +32 (0) 2 536 00 71

  Nathan Thrall is Crisis Group's Senior Analyst for Israel/Palestine covering Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank. He is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan Books, May 2017).

  His writing has appeared in Arabic in Al- Hayat, Asharq al-Awsat, and Al-Quds al-Arabi, and in English in Foreign Affairs, GQ, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. A contributing editor at Tablet Magazine, he appears frequently in print and broadcast media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Al-Jazeera, the BBC, Democracy Now!, NPR, and CNN. His work can be found at www.nathanthrall.com.

In Thrall to Theory
Seth Mandel
Commentary.
144.4 (Nov. 2017): p44+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Jewish Committee http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text:
The Only Language Tiley Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine By NATHAN THRALL
Metropolitan Books, 336 pages
WILLIAM F. Buckley Jr. once wrote of his friend and frequent sparring partner John Kenneth Galbraith, "It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn't used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships."
It is tempting to apply this quip to Nathan Thrall. A harsh critic of Israeli policy, Thrall nonetheless has earned a rare degree of respect and intellectual admiration from his ideological adversaries. And that's why Thrall and his belligerent new book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, must be taken seriously.
The book gets many things right, as when Thrall scornfully offers a list of common excuses for why each round of diplomacy fails:
Bad timing; artificial deadlines;
insufficient preparation;
no agreed terms of reference;
inadequate confidence-building
measures; coalition politics;
or leaders devoid of courage.
Many blame imbalanced mediation;
poor coordination among
separate negotiating channels;
1 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
scant attention from the U.S.
president; want of support from
regional states; exclusion of key
stakeholders; or clumsily choreographed
public diplomacy.
He justifiably knocks the naive and "deep-seated belief that both societies desire a two-state agreement and therefore need only the right conditions--together with a bit of nudging, trust- building, and perhaps a few more positive inducements--to take the final step."
Thrall reminds readers that "no strategy can succeed if it is premised on Israel behaving irrationally." And he chides those who warn Israel that she stands on the precipice of a one-state solution: "In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from a single state than they have been at any time since the occupation began in 1967." That's because the very security measures that draw the ire of the international community, like fences and other physical barriers, have been making separation, not integration, a fact on the ground. And the very incrementalism Thrall denounces as counterproductive, like "quasi-state" Palestinian governing institutions, makes political separation easier.
Alas, what Thrall gets right is far outweighed by what Thrall gets wrong. Begin with the book's central thesis: Only displays of force by one side can win (and have won) meaningful and lasting concessions from the other. The imbalance of power in this situation, in Thrall's telling, is that Israel has it and the Palestinians don't. Thus, The Only Language They Understand is a call to violence against Israel.
"It is force--including but not limited to violence--that has impelled each side to make its largest concessions, from Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution to Israeli territorial withdrawals," Thrall writes. Attempts by the world powers to tamp down confrontation, facilitate security cooperation, provide economic assistance, and build Palestinian institutions, Thrall says, "have entrenched the conflict by lessening the incentives to end it."
Thrall strains to provide a flash history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to conform to his thesis. His purpose is not only to show what the Jews gained by choosing violence but also what the Palestinians have lost by (supposedly) not doing so. What did the Palestinians lose, in his view? Nothing less than the whole country. Thrall claims that nonviolence was the rule for Palestinians up until 1948: "During the first decades of Zionist immigration to Palestine, Jews barely encountered violent opposition. Palestinians instead protested by withholding cooperation, appealing to the Ottoman and British authorities to slow Zionist immigration, and refusing to sell their property. Through such means, more than 93 percent of Palestine's territory remained outside Jewish hands at the outset of the 1948 war."
This is potted. Thrall completely evades the subject of anti-Jewish violence that began in Palestine in 1919. A weeklong riot in 1921, reported the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, cost the lives of nearly 50 Jews. In August 1929 came the massacre of the Jewish community of Hebron, during a week that also saw violence in Safed, Jerusalem, and Jaffa that left more than 130 Jews dead. In 1948, researcher Mark Lewis points out, the Anglo-American Committee reported that spending on security in 1936-37 rose by 840 percent because "the hostility shown
2 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
toward the Jews during the riots was shared by Arabs of all classes; Muslim and Christian Arabs, whose relations had hitherto been uneasy, were for once united."
Thrall's history of the Israeli War of Independence isn't much better. He attempts to paint Israel as Goliath to the Palestinians' David from the beginning in order portray the outcome as inevitable: "By the end of the 1948 war--at every stage of which Israeli forces outnumbered the combined total of Arab forces--Israel had expanded its boundaries to 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine."
This is astoundingly misleading. Israel started with no regular single army and, according to historian Benny Morris, three tanks and barely anything that qualified as heavy weaponry. According to Morris, the Arab armies had 75 combat aircraft, 40 tanks, and hundreds of heavy field and tank-piercing guns. They also had Israel surrounded and began with standing, unified, trained national armies with a massive support network in the Arab world and Arab fighters in the not-yet-partitioned country.
Even when Thrall gets his facts right, his conclusions are a stretch. He recounts the events leading up to the historic 1979 Israel-Egypt peace agreement as a successful attempt by President Jimmy Carter to pressure Israel the way no president had been willing to do before or since. His key moment comes when the U.S. and the Soviet Union, without conferring with the Israelis or Palestinians, released a joint statement that put Israel on the defensive. All the major Jewish organizations condemned the statement, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin pressed the Carter administration to backtrack, which it eventually did.
Thrall's contention is that this backfired on Begin precisely because the Israelis had won the round. Carter pleaded with Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat for help. Sadat soon accepted Begin's invitation to come to Jerusalem and address the Knesset. Sadat thereby "rescued" Carter's peace process, forcing Israel to respond and setting in motion the path to Camp David. "Jimmy Carter succeeded in forcing one of the most right-wing, annexationist figures in Israel's history to do precisely what he had most sought to avoid: plant the seed of a Palestinian state," Thrall trumpets.
This is absurd. What happened was this: Israel demonstrated its strength and its willingness to negotiate, but nothing materialized until the Arab world for the first time accepted that Israel held the upper hand. It was the failure of Carter's attempts to pressure Israel that created the opening.
Thrall's mischaracterization of history is on display again when the subject turns to Lebanon, where Yasser Arafat and the PLO had set up shop in the early 1980s. Palestinian attacks from South Lebanon forced an Israeli military response that became the First Lebanon War, under Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. Israel won, and Arafat decamped to Tunisia and expressed a willingness to negotiate with Israel.
But since Thrall's thesis requires each Palestinian "concession" to be the result of an Israeli show of force, he must twist history again. The event that, in this retelling, precipitated Arafat's concessions was the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Lebanese Christian militiamen entered Palestinian camps and killed 700, unimpeded by Israeli forces. Sharon was later found responsible through negligence by an Israeli inquiry, and resigned.
3 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
For his theory to work, Thrall needs Israel to be active, not passive, here. So in his telling, Sharon wasn't negligent, but practically orchestrated the bloodbath: "Sharon, who had repeatedly told IDF officers that Christian militias should 'clean out' West Beirut, now ordered the army to allow Christian militiamen to enter Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps."
What did Sharon actually say? According to a New York Times report in June 1982, the full quote was: "We never said that we would not clean out or liquidate the infrastructure of the terrorists, which by the way, we discovered was about 10 times larger than what we had thought." Sharon was talking about weapons caches, not people--a fact that lets the air out of Thrall's rhetorical tires.
Occasionally, Thrall's attempts to justify his thesis are little more than pathetic. In 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's talks with Arafat culminated in a major land-for-peace deal, mediated by President Bill Clinton at Wye River, Maryland. At every step of the way, Palestinian violence only delayed the process. When it temporarily subsided, Netanyahu and Arafat signed the deal--but the violence that followed delayed the deal's implementation. Here's how Thrall sums it up: "Finalized in fall 1998, during the quietist period of the Oslo years, much of the Wye memorandum was never implemented."
The "quietist" lull, Thrall claims, was fatal to implementing the deal. In fact, the reverse was true. The Israeli government on December 22, 1998, even released a five-point memorandum detailing what needed to be done on the Palestinian side for Israel to end the implementation delay. It read:
1. The PA must refrain from a unilateral declaration on a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
2. The PA must halt violence.
3. The PA must halt the incitement to violence.
4. The PA must refrain from demanding (in violation of the agreement) that Israel release murderers and prisoners with blood on their hands.
5. The PA must collect and remove illegal arms, arrest murderers residing in its areas and cooperate with Israel in combating terrorism.
The memorandum went on to note: "If the Palestinian Authority fulfills all of these commitments, Israel will carry out its part of the Wye agreement regardless of the date of elections in Israel."
Thrall would've been better off ignoring the parts of the story that blew up his thesis than trying to hammer all the round pegs into square holes.
In fact, the kind of book Thrall chose to write put him at a distinct disadvantage. Though the book was released in 2017, he has included so many previously published essays that it feels older and out of date. His chapter on what was, at that point, the most recent flare-up of violence in Jerusalem was written in 2014 and is now irrelevant. His chapter purporting to explain why President Barack Obama's peace push failed was likewise written in 2014.
4 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Obama's diplomacy should have confirmed Thrall's preconceived notions. After all, immediately after becoming president, Obama told Jewish groups that the "no daylight" policy between Israel and the United States would be discarded. Yet not only did Obama fail; we now know it was Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas who ultimately scuttled negotiations. No less a fervent critic of Netanyahu's than the perennial Democratic Israel hand Martin Indyk admitted to NPR that when the U.S. delegation had put together possible outlines of a solution, Abbas "was not prepared to accept them. He was not prepared to answer... And so we never had the opportunity to test Prime Minister Netanyahu."
That's not how Nathan Thrall tells it; Thrall believes the ideology of U.S. negotiators has played a central role in the repeated failure of the peace process. He divides these men into three categories: Skeptics, who don't believe that the Palestinians will make peace on terms Israel's government would accept; Reproachers, who believe that a solution is possible that will satisfy Israel's needs but will also require more pressure on Jerusalem than the Skeptics will countenance; and Embracers, who believe that a just final-status deal and a "no daylight" policy are compatible.
It is clear the Reproachers have Thrall's utmost sympathy. And he admits that "no U.S. administration had been more stacked with Reproachers than Barack Obama's, and no American president had been more sympathetic to Palestinians." Alas for his thesis, "during their eight years in power, Obama and his advisers achieved much less for them than did George W. Bush."
And why is that? The reason is that President George W. Bush did precisely the opposite of what Thrall would recommend. Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was made possible by Bush's written assurances that not only would there be "no daylight" between the U.S. and Israel; those assurances essentially legitimized some Israeli settlements as inevitably-- and, therefore, already functionally-permanent Israeli territory.
Thrall can't process such inconvenient truths, and the closest he comes to an explanation is that Sharon offered Bush a better settlement freeze than Netanyahu offered Obama: "The principal difference was that Sharon offered it in exchange for a halt in the Palestinian violence then raging, whereas when Obama entered office, the Second Intifada had long since ended."
So we're back to violence being a necessary ingredient. That's really all the Palestinians have to offer, isn't it? Sadly, it appears that's all Thrall has to offer as well.
Reviewed by SETH MANDEL
SETH MANDEL, former associate editor of COMMENTARY, is the op-ed editor of the New York Post.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mandel, Seth. "In Thrall to Theory." Commentary, Nov. 2017, p. 44+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515796602/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d91e564a. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
5 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515796602
6 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Thrall, Nathan: THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Thrall, Nathan THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND Metropolitan/Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-1-62779-709-2
An assiduous assault on the management of the apparently defunct peace process that has eluded Israel and Palestine.With this earnest addition to the expanding shelf of commentary on the seemingly irresoluble Arab-Israeli conflict, journalist Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, offers, under the rubric of "Forcing Compromise" (the first third of the book), a detailed history of failed efforts to reach accord in the Holy Land. The problem is more than settlements, recognition of the State of Israel, the eventual status of Jerusalem, or even the number of casualties. It is well-earned distrust on both sides. Writing mostly of Israeli activities and American reactions, Thrall reviews the failures of Camp David, the Wye River meetings, and the Oslo agreements. Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Benjamin Netanyahu were and are wrong; ditto negotiators Marin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and John Kerry. So, too, in various ways, were many American presidents who were, in the author's view, too easy on the Israelis. Thrall proposes increased American and European pressure on the parties without elaborating on what the pressure would be or how it would work. Meanwhile, Arabs and Israelis accept the status quo as their best alternative. The remainder of the book consists of reprints of reviews and essays published elsewhere. The author provides copious footnotes (with many secondary sources cited), and he frequently mentions "Mandatory Palestine" in comparison to the Jewish state. The looming Arab nations in the neighborhood and the Arab League's support of Hamas (which runs Gaza and whose goal is still destruction of "the Zionist entity") are not recognized as threats to peace. Certainly, each party faces legitimate, fundamental problems: rockets, suicide bombers, checkpoints, land grabs, and internecine conflicts. However, as earnest as he is in illuminating the problems, Thrall remains partial and selective in probing them. A troubling and truculent history of the still-stalemated search for peace in the Middle East.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Thrall, Nathan: THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr.
2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668466 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d5dcf53c. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668466
7 of 7 3/14/18, 11:06 PM

Mandel, Seth. "In Thrall to Theory." Commentary, Nov. 2017, p. 44+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515796602/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d91e564a. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018. "Thrall, Nathan: THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668466/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d5dcf53c. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.

• 972
  https://972mag.com/nathan-thrall-the-only-language-they-understand-book-review/129830/
  Word count: 2670

  Everything you think you know about Israeli-Palestinian peace is wrong

  Israelis and Palestinians have grown the furthest apart during periods of quiet; it is in times of violence that the two nations have suddenly become flexible in their positions. That defies everything we tell ourselves about prospects for peace, and everything the world has told Palestinians they must do to achieve it. A review of ‘The Only Language They Understand,’ by Nathan Thrall.
  Israeli police fire tear gas at protesting Palestinian youths in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, October 6, 2015. (Flash90)

  Israeli troops attempt to disperse protesting Palestinian youths in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, October 6, 2015. (Flash90)

  “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine”, by Nathan Thrall, Metropolitan Books, 2017, 336 pages.

  The year 2012 was particularly noteworthy in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: for the first time since 1973, not a single Israeli was killed in the West Bank. This was also the final year of then-Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s state-building project, celebrated by the international community, and even by Israel.
  Related stories

  Stuck between Trump and Netanyahu, Abbas is running out of options
  By Dalia Hatuqa | September 10, 2017
  Decades of failed peace talks: How Israel negotiates with itself
  By Noam Sheizaf | June 28, 2017
  Forget negotiations, Israelis and Palestinians need an intervention
  By Mossi Raz | May 27, 2017
  'I'm part of a dying breed that believes in two states'
  By Dahlia Scheindlin | February 28, 2017

  Theoretically, that should have led to a breakthrough in the peace process, at least as far as the West Bank was concerned. Conventional wisdom in Israel and in the world said that the violence and corruption that flourished under Arafat’s leadership were the main determinants in the collapse of peace talks and the meltdown of an Israeli “peace camp,” by virtue of the disappointment and lack of trust they created on the Israeli side. But after Arafat, in 2012, the two men in charge of the Palestinian Authority were: Mahmoud Abbas, who all but ignored Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip and saw security coordination with Israel as sacred (as he reportedly told a delegation of Israeli peace activists in 2014), and Prime Minister Fayyad, whose main focus was institution-building, and who refrained from almost any type of confrontation with Israel.

  Instead, the exact opposite happened: Israel’s interest in the peace process completely died out. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who thee years earlier agreed under the duress of American threats to the idea of a Palestinian state, began laying more and more obstacles in its path. Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was added as a new “core issue” in negotiations. Netanyahu’s demand that Israel maintain complete freedom of military action in a future Palestinian state hollowed out the very idea of Palestinian sovereignty. “Economic peace,” which had been Netanyahu’s proposed alternative to actual peace during the 2009 elections, turned out to be an empty slogan. Settlement construction and expansion continued unabated, and the settler population in the West Bank rose, according to data collected by Peace Now, by around 15,000.

  Nathan Thrall book coverIn the summer of 2012, only 55 percent of Israelis supported peace talks with the Palestinians, compared to around 70 percent at the start of 2003 — the height of the Second Intifada. The Israeli street was putting zero pressure on the government to resolve the conflict; to drive the point home, the Labor Party’s campaign that year completely ignored the Palestinian issue, and the “security” platform it did put forward didn’t include the word “peace” even once. In short, complying with Israel and the international community’s demands didn’t get the Palestinians any closer to their own state, and certainly didn’t bring the occupation any closer to its end.

  It has actually been uprisings and the application of pressure on Israel that handed the Palestinians their most significant achievements over the years. On the eve of the First Intifada, Israel rejected the favorable Peres–Hussein London Agreement, which would have handed control of the West Bank back over to Jordan. After the intifada, the Israeli government agreed to negotiate with the PLO for the first time, and agreed to allow its leaders to return from exile to the West Bank and Gaza. The Second Intifada broke the taboo surrounding the withdrawal from settlements anywhere in the greater Land of Israel, ultimately leading with Ariel Sharon’s Disengagement Plan from Gaza; after the Disengagement, Sharon’s (and then Olmert’s) Kadima party won elections on a platform calling for an even broader, and significant, unilateral withdrawal from parts of the West Bank.
  The Shuafat Refugee Camp, technically a part of the Jerusalem Municipality was left on the 'other' side of Israel's separation wall, seen in 2015. Following the violence of 2015, redrawing Jerusalem’s borders to exclude neighborhoods like Shuafat Camp have entered the mainstream. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

  The Shuafat Refugee Camp, technically a part of the Jerusalem Municipality, was left on the ‘other’ side of Israel’s separation wall, seen in 2015. Following the violence of 2015, redrawing Jerusalem’s borders to exclude neighborhoods like Shuafat Camp have entered the mainstream. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

  In the same vein, the violence in Jerusalem in the summer of 2015 opened up cracks in the consensus about the city’s municipal boundaries, and these days even right-wingers are advocating abandoning Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods that have been cut off by the separation wall. During quiet periods the two sides grew further and further apart, and it was in times of violence that the two nations suddenly found flexibility in their positions. All that defies everything we tell ourselves about prospects for peace.
  The only language they understand

  The fact that crisis creates opportunity and that periods of calm entrench the status quo could sound rather trivial in any other diplomatic context. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even more so the peace process that accompanies it, is immersed in narratives and jargon that are completely divorced from reality on the ground. At the top of the list is the illusion that there are two sovereign entities — an Israeli one and a Palestinian one — in a complicated conflict over borders. In reality, the only sovereign is Israel — the Palestinian Authority is merely charged with managing on its behalf it a population without any rights living within its borders.

  The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, a new book by Nathan Thrall, is one of the more important documents bridging that mythology and reality. Thrall is one of two International Crisis Group analysts in Israel and has lived in Jerusalem with his family since 2011, which means that in addition to closely tracking political elites he also has the intimate and intuitive familiarity of someone who is on the ground, and who is attentive to various social dynamics. (In other words, he knows what it feels like to send your kids to school during an “escalation” in Jerusalem.) His writing is practical and flush with details, manages to escape the self-righteous or preachy tone that characterizes so many analysts, and doesn’t seek to create false equivalencies between the two sides for the sake of political correctness. Thrall examines things from from a realist perspective, which places far greater importance on individuals’ and groups’ actions than their rhetoric or ideological declarations. That, too, is refreshing and overdue.
  The Israeli army demolishes the Ganey Tal settlement in Gush Katif, Gaza, during the disengagement. August 22, 2005. ‘The Second Intifada broke the taboo on withdrawing from settlements anywhere in the greater Land of Israel, ultimately leading to Sharon’s Disengagement Plan.’ (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)

  The Israeli army demolishes the Ganey Tal settlement in Gush Katif, Gaza, during the disengagement. August 22, 2005. ‘The Second Intifada broke the taboo on withdrawing from settlements anywhere in the greater Land of Israel, ultimately leading to Sharon’s Disengagement Plan.’ (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)

  The first third of the book, from which the title is drawn, focuses on the history of Arab-Israeli peace talks from Camp David until the present day. Thrall demonstrates how external pressure, uprisings, and wars led both sides, Israelis and Arabs alike, to abandon their maximalist positions and adopt compromises that had previously appeared impossible to accept. Even the way that the sides approached basic national and religious values (refugees, Jerusalem, and more) changed when enough external pressure was applied.

  For example, the Arab defeats led the Palestinians to accept the existence of the State of Israel, to accept Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, to make due with half of the territory they were promised in the 1947 Partition Plan, to give up (in practice) the demand for a full return of refugees, to give up the demand of a full withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, and to agree to creative solutions like land swaps in order to make things easier for Israeli leaders by reducing the number of settlements they would have to evacuate.

  Uprisings and wars led Israel, for its part, to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, to leave the security zone in southern Lebanon even though Hezbollah hadn’t been defeated, to agree to autonomy in the occupied Palestinian territories, to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, to withdraw from Gaza, and come to terms with Hams rule there. Yet at the end of the day, Thrall writes, “Palestinians have failed where other Arab nations have succeeded because they never posed a real threat to Israel and were too weak to protect their concessions from further erosion.” The logical conclusion is that all of the international community’s attempts to limit Palestinian pressure on Israel and to get the two sides back to the negotiating table “with no preconditions” actually make an agreement more and more elusive, and undermine the goal of advancing a two-state solution.

  With regards to the Americans, Thrall writes, those presidents who confronted Israeli most directly — Eisenhower and Carter — are the only ones who achieved anything in the Middle East. In comparison, the embracing approach of Clinton, Bush and at times Obama, failed to yield a single agreement, primarily because Israel sees the status quo as the most beneficial situation.
  John Kerry has a private chat with Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, December 12, 2013. “Kerry believed his personality and determination could lead to an agreement within nine months. Thrall calls it ‘faith-based diplomacy’.” (State Dept photo)

  John Kerry has a private chat with Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, December 12, 2013. “Kerry believed his personality and determination could lead to an agreement within nine months. Thrall calls it ‘faith-based diplomacy’.” (State Dept photo)

  One of the best chapters in the book concentrates on the failed negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013-14. Despite clear evidence that the maximum the Israeli government was willing to give didn’t even approach the minimum the Palestinian leadership could sell to their people, Kerry nevertheless believed that his personality and determination could lead to an agreement within nine months (!). Thrall calls it “faith-based diplomacy,” which is just-slightly more polite than “messianic,” the term then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon was quoted using to describe Kerry’s fervor. Accordingly, the principle effort of Kerry’s “negotiations” were endless talks between himself and Netanyahu, the result of which was a document that seemed far-reaching to Israelis and Americans, but which leaned toward Israel more than Olmert’s offer and even the Clinton Parameters of late 2000. Nevertheless, the Americans were astounded that Abbas rejected it.

  It would be remiss, however, to attribute the American obsession with restarting fruitless negotiations between the two sides — talks for the sake of talks — to the naiveté of a few presidents or secretaries of state. The peace process, like everything the United States does in relation to the Palestinian problem, is in many ways a function of the special relationship between Israel and the United States. In its rhetoric, the United States is calling for change but its practices — keeping other countries and international bodies at arms length from the conflict, supporting Israeli military operations, and more — make the U.S. a status quo actor, and futile negotiations make the status quo all the more tenable. As Thrall concludes, “the potential benefit of creating a small, poor, and strategically inconsequential Palestinian state are tiny when compared with the cost of heavily pressuring a close ally that wields significant regional and U.S. domestic power.”
  A state that almost was

  Two-thirds of the book is a collection of articles and essays that Thrall published over the years, primarily in the New York Review of Books. Most of them are excellent; a few haven’t aged as well. The description of the process that transformed the Palestinian Authority from a state in waiting to becoming part of the Israeli regime is particularly fascinating and important. That said, as somebody who has been following Thrall’s work for years, I would have liked to see more original material in the book, especially about the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations, and the question of whether we are actually entering a new era.

  Of slightly less importance, I felt that Thrall at times describes or retells events in a way that allows it to fit the theory. For instance, the correlation between the wave of terrorist attacks in 1994-95 and the accelerated negotiations ahead of Oslo II seems tenuous. Likewise, there is serious evidence that Israeli negotiators believed the goal of the Oslo process to be a Palestinian state, and that their hesitance to state that publicly was primarily borne of domestic political considerations. Even if Oslo has become a brilliant and effective mechanism for managing the occupation, as Thrall points out, there is no proof that was the intention from the get-go — only speculation in hindsight. Either way, it’s not a particularly important debate.

  The biggest weakness of a realpolitik analysis is that it treats states as “black boxes” that produce rational outcomes, and tends to have a harder time evaluating internal political and cultural dynamics. Thrall discusses the importance of institutions like J Street and the New York Times in pushing the American government into another round of peace talks that only strengthened the status quo, and he briefly discusses the identity of the American negotiators themselves — but he never delves too deep into those topics. He also barely touches on the rise of the new Israeli Right and the maximalist demands that it has brought into the mainstream. The impression that Israel succeeded at thwarting the two-state solution, in my opinion, opens the door to changes in political dynamics in the not-too-distant future.

  The book is important, interesting, an easy read, and it serves as a crucial resource for the most significant core issues that occupy the news cycle — from Jerusalem to Gaza. It also gives original and instructive answers to the failure of the peace process that go beyond simply casting blame on one side or another. But the crisis of the two-state solution is not just a crisis of the the political process which was supposed to result in two states; a major part of it is the crisis over the very idea of statehood, and the disintegration of nationalist societies all over the world. Thrall notes at the end of the excellent analysis which opens his book that, “through pressure on the parties, a peaceful partition of Palestine is achievable.” That might be true, but it’s also reasonable to assume such a result would not be a “final status” resolution but merely the beginning of a new chapter.

  This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here. Translated by Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man.

• Middle East Policy Council
  http://www.mepc.org/only-language-they-understand-forcing-compromise-israel-and-palestine
  Word count: 1985

  The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine
  The Only Language They Understand Book Cover
  Book Author
  Nathan Thrall
  Reviewer
  Lawrence Davidson
  Reviewer Title
  Professor emeritus of history, West Chester University
  Publishing Info
  Metropolitan Books, 2017. 323 pages. $28.00, hardcover.

  In each of the last 50 years, hundreds of books on the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict have been published. A majority of them, particularly those written in English, have assumed — some more flagrantly than others — that there is something inherently positive, and even necessary, about Zionist Israel. At the same time, there is often a corresponding assumption, often quite openly presented, that there is something inherently negative about the Palestinians and other Arabs.

  This has been so, despite the fact that Israel has been demonstrated to be every bit as violent as other states and certainly more violent than the Palestinians. It is so, despite the fact that Zionist Israel has been shown to be more discriminatory in its domestic practices, indeed more racist, than most other states and certainly more racist than the Palestinians. The behavior of present day anti-Semites, none of whom are yet in possession of state power, cannot compare to the racist practices of today’s empowered Zionists.

  The international community, in particular the United States, does not have a good record of confronting Israeli racism and arrogance. It has not gone beyond words in the defense of Palestinian rights, even when the denial of those rights has been in defiance of UN resolutions and international law. This lack of forcefulness has permitted not only the deterioration of Palestinian rights, but also the devaluation of international law itself. As such, allowing Zionist Israel to continue on its chosen path is in no one’s interest.

  Given this situation, Nathan Thrall’s recent book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, appears to promise some welcome insight into how to effectively deal with a downward spiral that affects us all. Thrall is an analyst and writer specializing in Middle East affairs, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This book has been well received by reviewers in such diverse publications as the New York Times Book Review and the British-based Financial Times. This is so despite the fact that the work appears to be, in part, a cobbled together series of earlier essays by the author, written between October 2014 and September 2016.

  Thrall’s thesis is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not insoluble. However, to solve it will require "the threat of real losses, whether human, economic or political" on both sides of the conflict (p. 27). This is particularly true when it comes to changing the behavior of the stronger party — Israel.

  To back this assertion Thrall notes that "each of Israel’s territorial withdrawals was carried out under duress" (p. 27). This was certainly the case at the end of the 1956 Sinai Crisis. U.S. President Eisenhower called Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and told him that "if Israel did not unconditionally withdraw [from Egyptian territory], it would lose all aid from the United States and from American Jews, and the U.S. would not oppose Israel’s expulsion from the UN" (p. 28). This approach worked; Israel rapidly announced its withdrawal.

  It is important to note that, in 1956, Zionist Israel was not yet backed by a powerful and influential lobby to counter such presidential threats. By the next time such a situation arose, under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the outcome was different. Thrall does give President Carter credit for trying to deal forcefully with the Israelis, but ultimately it was to no avail. Though the author does not go into details, the reason for this was that by Carter’s time, U.S. support of Israel was no longer just a foreign-policy issue. It was a domestic one. As such, particularly at the congressional level, support for any forceful approach toward Israel was subject to the influence of heavily financed special-interest groups that collectively functioned as agents of a foreign power: Israel. Senator William Fulbright recognized this fact as early as 1963 but could not derail the lobby’s growing power. The Palestinians had no counterbalance to this Zionist lobby.

  Thus, in 1977, when Jimmy Carter tried to force compromise on the Israelis for the sake of peace and justice, he was ultimately unsuccessful. He was unable to stand up to Zionist domestic-lobby pressure in Congress and within the Democratic Party itself.

  The rest of Thrall’s book, chapter two and beyond, describes how the target of forceful persuasion shifts to the weaker party, the Palestinians. That is why, in the past 25 years, meaningful concessions have come from only one side. As Thrall suggests, events that look like great Israeli concessions, such as the Oslo Agreements (p. 143) and the withdrawal from Gaza (p. 157ff) turned out to be Israeli tactical maneuvers to undermine or isolate Palestinian opposition to the ultimate Zionist goal: absorption of the West Bank. One should point out here that Hamas fighters would claim Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was made under the duress produced by their forceful resistance.

  Getting back to targeting the weaker party, Thrall believes that leaders of both sides went along with this fatal shift in emphasis. The Israelis, of course, had no trouble with it in practice. However, some Zionists have spent (and continue to spend) much of their time in what looks like explaining away a guilty conscience. The author describes Ari Shavit’s argument in My Promised Land that the historical situation of the Jews made the founding of Israel inevitable, and all of the associated violence "unavoidable" (p. 90). Thrall calls the book a "trojan horse" of exoneration designed for American readers (p. 89).

  Shavit can only see things from the Israeli perspective, but we expect more from Thrall. Although the author does note that Israeli strategy, while sustainable, is not without costs (p.133), he really does not analyze the many negative domestic consequences that have placed Israeli democracy in crisis mode. For instance, many Israelis have come to question whether their country can provide a promising future for them or their children. Many of those who can get a foreign passport — ironically, this usually comes from Germany — have done so. Likewise, emigration out of Israel is now regularly greater than immigration into the country. This has helped give rise to Zionism’s fear of a "demographic holocaust." These are symptoms of the fact that Zionist Israel has become a moral disaster for its own people and for Jews and Judaism in general.

  The author does better when it comes to analyzing the costs for the Palestinian side. Here he takes up the example of Salam Fayyad, the American-educated and appointed (not elected) prime minister in Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority (PA). PA strategy under Abbas entailed bilateral negotiations, diplomacy and security cooperation with Israel (p. 130). Fayyad believed that through such a strategy, the PA could "establish unilaterally a de facto Palestinian state." The cornerstone of this effort was to be a "reformed security force" that would be devoted to securing the rule of law on the West Bank (p. 112). This effort was funded by the United States, which also managed the training program.

  In the long run, the Palestinians under occupation could not control the evolution of their own security force any more than other aspects of their public lives. Soon outside pressure compelled the Palestinian security force to prioritize keeping the Israelis on the West Bank safe. This was done in the name of "counterterrorism" (p. 113). The resulting corruption was most evident during the 2008-09 Israeli war on Gaza (during which Abbas apparently supported the Israelis). Palestinian security personnel were used to suppress all support for the Gaza Palestinians (p. 119). Fayyad finally resigned from office in 2013.

  It is probably a sign of popular fatigue on the West Bank that this corruption of the security force was but a secondary concern to a Palestinian public more worried about "stalled salary payments and increases in the cost of living" (p.129), even as they deeply resented their economic dependency (p. 131-2) on a government that was, in many ways, a native extension of their foreign oppressors.

  After a time, Thrall starts to show the same fatigue as the West Bank’s dependent population. He seems to weary of his thesis that force is the only language Israeli leaders respond to. By the second half of the book, he appears to conclude that there is no practicable way to make the Israelis adopt policies they see as against their national interests. Correspondingly, "no political incentives exist for the U.S. to change its policies …. [because of] the [political] costs of heavily pressuring a close ally that wields significant regional and U.S. domestic power" (p. 209). Thus, U.S. policy cannot go beyond pressuring the Palestinians not to pressure Israel, and unsuccessfully nagging Israel about its settlement expansion. So much for his book’s encouraging title.

  This seems a bit too easy, and it is worth taking a look at Thrall’s assumptions here. In just what way are present Israeli policies in its "national interests"? They can only be so if we grant Israel’s right to remain a racist and expansionist entity. For what it is worth, I believe this alleged right is being questioned by ever-greater numbers of both Jews and non-Jews. It should also be kept in mind that, like the Palestinians, most Israelis are bound to their pocketbooks, and there might come a time when economic pressure makes racism distinctly not in their "national interest." Nor is American popular tolerance for U.S. support of Israel endlessly inevitable. For instance, will there come a time when America’s economic conditions no longer generate popular support for the billions of dollars in "aid" (which Thrall characterizes as a "mismanagement of American taxpayers’ dollars," p. 191) to a racist Zionist state? Most probably, that time will come.

  Unfortunately, Thrall places little hope in present efforts to achieve economic pressure on Israel. For instance, he does not think the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has the ability to ultimately change Israeli policy. Such boycotts cannot "stop the country's banks, cable television companies, or supermarkets from operating beyond the 1967 lines, nor would they significantly reduce the number of settlers, most of whom work... in government jobs in the settlements and in the private sector in Israel proper" (p. 186). This may be true, but he does not ask alternatively what the BDS movement can do. It is already making it increasingly uncomfortable for Israeli cultural, sports and academic organizations to operate abroad. It has begun to interfere with the ability of Israeli corporations to compete for international contracts. A great many things might get more difficult for Zionist Israel due to an international BDS movement that proves more difficult to stop than is, purportedly, Israel itself.

  The author never really carries through with the assertion of the book’s title, that force against Israel is necessary for this long conflict to be brought to a just end. Though he tells us how many policies without force behind them have failed, he makes little effort to show how force might be achieved. Thus he brings no closure to his thesis.

  The reader comes away with the feeling that Nathan Thrall is willing to accept a future that, de facto, condemns the Palestinians to permanent oppression and the Israelis (and the rest of the Jews) to a heritage of racism and chauvinism. I am not sure if that is Thrall’s personal position, but the book leads the reader in the direction of such fatalism. I hope more readers than not will remain unconvinced.

• Time
  http://time.com/4800819/nathan-thrall-the-only-language-they-understand/
  Word count: 269

  Is Force the Solution to Peace in the Middle East?
  By Karl Vick June 1, 2017

  Life is short, and writings about Israel and the Palestinians can be very, very long. So it’s a good thing there’s Nathan Thrall. An American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom, Thrall has lived in Jerusalem since 2011, writing dense but rich reports for the International Crisis Group, and now The Only Language They Understand. It posits that the key to resolving the conflict lies not in negotiations but in force–which history shows is what produces change.

  Force doesn’t have to mean violence. Jimmy Carter’s coercive threat to end military aid to Israel pushed that nation onto the road to peace with Egypt. But violence cannot be ignored, Thrall says. Only after staggering military losses did the Palestine Liberation Organization reduce its territorial demand to land lost in 1967. It was the first intifadeh that drew Israel to the negotiating table, and the second that preceded its pullout from the Gaza Strip.

  Thrall reckons that control of Gaza is about as much as the Palestinians should expect. They lack the military power (and, outside a militant minority, the bloody-mindedness) to get Israel to risk the uncertainties of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, which it has comfortably controlled for half a century. Although Thrall judges elites on both sides remorselessly, he says peace talks fail for a reason: “No strategy can succeed if it is premised on Israel behaving irrationally.”

  This appears in the June 12, 2017 issue of TIME.

• The Hindu
  http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/the-only-language-they-understand-forcing-compromise-in-israel-and-palestine-review-peace-under-pressure/article21821361.ece
  Word count: 953

  'The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine' review: Peace under pressure
  Stanly Johny
  December 16, 2017 19:23 IST
  Updated: December 16, 2017 19:13 IST
  [17NFisraeljpg-1]

  The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine Nathan Thrall Metropolitan Books ₹918
  A West Asian expert argues that only under coercion will Israel negotiate a settlement with Palestine

  While announcing his decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, U.S. President Donald Trump described the city as “as the capital the Jewish people established in ancient times.” This was hardly surprising. During the campaign, Mr. Trump had called the contested city Israel’s “eternal capital.” By making good on a campaign promise, the President has lived up to his pro-Israel image. But if one looks at the modern times, as Nathan Thrall writes in his book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, Jerusalem was the “cultural, political and commercial capital for Palestinians, connected to Bethlehem in the south and Ramallah in the north.” Today’s Jerusalem is claimed by both sides.

  Two claimants

  Israel captured the western half of the city in the 1948 war with the Arabs and established its seat of power there. The Palestinians say East Jerusalem, which has been under Israeli occupation from 1967, should be the capital of their future state. Against this background, Mr. Trump’s decision is a huge concession to the Israelis and his supporters say it would help the peace process in the long term. But, history tells us, concessions or inducements have done little in extracting compromises from Israel, which is the dominant power in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Thrall, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, writes that when it comes to Israel “force is language.” He tests this hypothesis with historical facts in the book, which is a detailed study of the peace process since the 1970s. American Presidents have historically been pro-Israel even as the U.S. remains the primary negotiator between Israelis and Palestinians.

  In that sense, Mr. Trump is following suit. But there were two Presidents who “succeeded in compelling Israel to undertake a full territorial withdrawal.” After the Suez war, Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw from the territories it captured during the war. Israel did not have any intention to do so. But, after the Eisenhower administration said aid to Israel would be cut unless it withdrew (and the Soviet Union threatened to launch rocket attacks against Israeli positions), then Prime Minister Ben Gurion backed off.

  President Jimmy Carter’s achievement was long-lasting. When Mr. Carter started engaging with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Israeli government, led by right-wing leader Menachem Begin, opposed it vehemently. Begin described the PLO as a murderous anti-Semitic organisation.

  The Israeli right at that time had not even recognised Palestinian claims over occupied territories. The Begin government even used the Jewish lobby in Washington to put pressure on the administration and approached the Egyptians to reach a peace deal bypassing Palestinians. It didn’t work as the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, said any engagement with Israel should address the Palestine question as well. President Carter was also pushing for a resolution of “the Palestinian problem in all aspects.” Finally, Begin blinked. He made a counter-proposal to the Americans, which led to the Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt, the Framework for Peace in West Asia, which served as the blueprint for the 1993 Oslo agreement. The Obama administration was also critical of Israeli policies, issuing repeated warnings against its settlement activities in Palestinian land. But President Barack Obama didn’t achieve any breakthrough. “Obama finished his presidency much as he had started it: bold in words and timid in deeds,” writes Thrall. In the case of Israel, the Obama administration believed that “Israel would eventually grasp its truth.”

  Palestine’s concessions

  The Palestinians have also made concessions over the years. In the 1948 war, Israel captured 23% more territories than what even the UN had proposed for “an independent Jewish nation.” When the PLO was formed, its goal was to “liberate” all of Palestine. Later, the PLO settled for an independent Palestinian nation within the 1967 border — which is only 22% of the historic Palestine.

  When the Oslo agreement was signed and a provisional government was formed in parts of the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian leadership excluded Jerusalem from the process, allowing Israel to continue the occupation of East Jerusalem. But even with these compromises, the Palestinians failed to move towards sovereignty.

  Almost a quarter century after the Oslo accords, the Palestinian Authority still controls only parts of the West Bank, with Israel building more settlements in the occupied land. Gaza is blockaded from all sides. The peace process is in tatters. That’s why Thrall calls the Oslo process the “Oslo trap.”

  Why is Israel not serious about peace with Palestine? Israel made peace with Egypt and Jordan. It once offered a peace plan to Syria. But it keeps ignoring the demands from Palestine.

  According to Thrall, it’s because Palestinians never posed a real threat to Israel and “were too weak to protect their concessions from further erosion.” To bridge this imbalance in power, Israel has to be brought under international pressure. The only country that could do so, as the past shows, is the U.S. But when the U.S. is taking sides with Israel, as Trump’s Jerusalem move suggests, Palestinians are left to themselves.

  The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine; Nathan Thrall, Metropolitan Books, ₹918.

• Mondoweiss
  http://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/diplomacy-language-understand/
  Word count: 3956

  he failure of Ponzi scheme diplomacy: A review of Nathan Thrall’s ‘The Only Language They Understand’
  Middle East Eamon Murphy on June 7, 2017 9 Comments

  Decrease Text Size
  Increase Text Size
  Adjust Font Size

  26 Mar 1979, Washington, D. C., USA --- Egyptian President Anwar as-Sadat, US President Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin shake hands at the signing of the Camp David accords, a peace treaty signed by Sadat and Begin. Washington, D. C., USA, March 16, 1979. --- Image by © CORBIS

  Nathan Thrall is the It Boy of Israel/Palestine analysis, an expert whose message suits the moment. His new book, The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine, comes endorsed by Leon Wieseltier and Elliott Abrams as well as Rashid Khalidi, a confluence that seems impossible, until you realize that Thrall’s work reflects what has become at this late hour the respectable consensus: that Israel is mostly to blame for the present impasse, and progress depends on Washington’s taking a different tack. Just what should be done remains vague, in Thrall’s book and in discussion generally, in large part because the U.S. role is exempted from realistic analysis. If, as Thrall contends, only force—understood to include popular pressure and economic sanctions, as well as violence—has a record of drawing concessions from the parties, then the question is, who will force the U.S. to stop perpetuating the conflict, its policy for the last 50 years? Until some tectonic shift in global power, the only possible answer is us. But writing too polite to name the enemy, or too enmeshed in the establishment to recognize it, seems unlikely to bring about the necessary change in consciousness.

  The book consists of previously published dispatches from the region, introduced by a long historical essay that lays out the argument. Thrall’s command of the recent facts is impressive, but his grasp of the past is weaker, and his first chapter misses the forest of the conflict for the trees of diplomatic intrigue. The hero of his story is the thirty-ninth president, a Southern governor who somehow found the wherewithal to strong-arm Israel’s prime minister into making peace with an Arab neighbor and addressing the status of the Palestinians in the occupied territories:

  When Jimmy Carter entered the White House in January 1977, no one expected that he would quickly obtain two of the most significant agreements in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and the Framework for Peace in the Middle East, which served as the blueprint for the 1993 Oslo Accord.

  These agreements were significant all right, but if Thrall understood their significance he’d be far less enthusiastic about Carter’s “success.” There’s a reason a treaty was concluded between Israel and Egypt, and persists amidst the wreckage of Mideast peacemaking, and it isn’t Jimmy Carter’s unique virtue: unlike Palestinian statehood, this was in the interests of the regional hegemon (Israel) and its superpower patron (us). Indeed Camp David was a ruinous development for the Palestinians, dooming them to indefinite occupation and accelerated colonization in the West Bank, and a murderous onslaught in Lebanon, even as it formally acknowledged their “legitimate rights.” This makes it a strange precedent for forcing compromise in Israel and Palestine.

  To recognize that, we have to see past the rhetoric and maneuvering that Thrall recounts in such detail. Carter called for almost total Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, spoke sympathetically of the need for a Palestinian “homeland,” and moved towards engagement with the PLO. In Thrall’s words, he “squeezed Israel harder on the Palestinian issue than any American president before or since.” Why did he do it? Thrall quotes from his memoirs:

  Since I had made our nation’s commitment to human rights a central tenet of our foreign policy, it was impossible for me to ignore the very serious problems on the West Bank. The continued deprivation of Palestinian rights was not only used as the primary lever against Israel, but was contrary to the basic moral and ethical principles of both our countries.

  Carter always fancied himself a great humanitarian, but as president he was a faithful steward of imperial interests—he lent his name, Monroe-style, to the doctrine that the U.S. would use military force to maintain primacy in the Middle East—and this passage perhaps reveals more of his mindset than he intended. Carter means that Palestinian suffering was a tool for those in the Arab world who opposed normalizing relations with the Jewish state; but a “lever against Israel” is precisely what the Palestinians wound up being for Carter as well. All the pressure he exerted culminated not in a comprehensive Geneva Conference but in a land-for-peace deal between Israel and Egypt, and the latter’s conversion into a U.S. client. At best, the Palestinians were an afterthought at Camp David; at worst, their fate reflected the old adage that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

  The cover of “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine”

  In part, this was due to domestic political dynamics. Thrall describes how the Zionist lobby in the U.S., in coordination with the Israelis, attacked the administration’s joint statement of principles issued with the Soviet Union, co-chair of the Geneva Conference, and halted the momentum towards a summit where Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian rights would both be on the agenda. But when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his celebrated trip to Jerusalem, spurred on by Carter’s apparent attack of impotence, he was really nudging U.S. policy back on the track laid down by Henry Kissinger: “ensure that the Europeans and Japanese did not get involved in the diplomacy… keep the Soviets out of the diplomatic arena… enable Israel to deal separately with each of its neighbors.”

  Egypt was obviously the most eligible neighbor. The messianic Sadat arrayed himself in the Arab cause, including the plight of the Palestinians, but his objective was limited and his strategy cynical: he wanted to regain the Sinai, and joining the U.S. camp was the only way he saw to do it. He’d made no secret of his intentions. In 1971 he declared his willingness to sign a peace treaty with Israel on the 1967 borders. He was rebuffed, because Israel thought itself invincible and Kissinger agreed. In 1972 Sadat expelled Soviet military advisors, a clear come-on to Washington, but still got nowhere. So in 1973 he teamed with Hafez al-Assad of Syria to regain their territory by force. They came close enough to give Israel the worst shock in its history, bringing the superpowers towards the nuclear brink. Suddenly, Sadat’s overtures could not be so rudely ignored.

  Thrall notes that this two-front attack “alerted [Israel] to the necessity of peace with Egypt,” the largest and most powerful Arab country, but by omitting the relevant background he deprives Camp David of its geopolitical context. In the words of Egyptian foreign minister Muhammed Ibrahim Kamel, whose clear-eyed view of the talks led him to resign before the signing ceremony, “Here we have the United States president, without equivocation or ambiguity, coming up with the idea of concluding a strategic American-Egyptian-Israeli alliance,” which is of course exactly what happened.

  That quote is found in Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David, which Thrall cites more than once while ignoring the most revealing bits. For instance, Sadat’s instructions to Carter on day one of the summit, which was officially supposed to work towards a solution for the Palestinians: “Israel has to withdraw from my land. Anything else, my good friend, you can do what you want to, and I’ll agree to it.” Or Carter’s response when Kamel complained that the agreement taking shape failed to include Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza, and Arab Jerusalem: “‘It seems to me you fail to realize my aim,’ Carter said icily.” Or, most revealing of all, what Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin crowed to a friend as soon as the ink was dry: “I have just signed the greatest document in Jewish history!”

  Begin had spent the entire summit acting like he was back in the gulag, a masterful performance, since in fact he was giving up a desert in order to sideline Egypt and gain freedom of action elsewhere—above all the West Bank, but also Iraq (preemptively bombed in 1981) and Lebanon (invaded and occupied in 1982). All that was demanded of him on behalf of the Palestinians was a fig leaf, a proposal for “autonomy,” as opposed to self-determination, presented as an end to Israeli military government and its replacement by “home rule” in the West Bank and Gaza, after five years. Security would remain Israel’s purview. Thrall gives this transparent ruse a reverent introduction: “Carter didn’t know it at the time, but he was about to receive from Begin the concessions that would form the basis of his historic achievement at Camp David.”

  Only by Begin’s clenched logic did this scheme amount to a concession, but accepting Israeli leaders’ shenanigans at face value is something of a pattern for Thrall. He even lingers over the ludicrous notion of granting Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in the territories—”one of the most interesting aspects of Begin’s proposal,” we are told, for which he gave “essentially a moral” argument. Thrall quotes Begin’s sententious pseudo-reasoning: “And now I want to explain why we proposed a free choice of citizenship, including Israeli citizenship. The answer is: Fairness… We never wanted to be like Rhodesia.” Rhodesia “never wanted to be like Rhodesia” either, in the sense of a byword for historical infamy, but it’s a consequence of maintaining a certain kind of regime. The real reason Begin included Israeli citizenship in his proposal is that he never meant a word of it anyhow, so why not? It’s good PR, even four decades later.

  Thrall is not completely in the dark here. Discussing the Oslo Accords in a subsequent section of the same chapter, he states the truth quite plainly: “the agreement was based, at Rabin’s insistence, on the 1978 Camp David Accord, which itself was a modified version of Begin’s 1977 autonomy plan, designed for the specific purpose not of establishing Palestinian self-determination but of thwarting it.” Concessions have become subterfuge, in under ten pages. You could try to explain this discrepancy with reference to the nuances of diplomatic concepts and language, but a more convincing reason is that Thrall needs to overstate Begin’s offering in his account of Camp David in order to make his argument work. For Thrall, the summit is a case study of American pressure and Israeli compromise; that there was no compromise with respect to the Palestinians, only gesture, is rather devastating. “In fairly short order,” Thrall concludes, “Jimmy Carter succeeded in forcing one of the most right-wing, annexationist figures in Israel’s history to do precisely what he had most sought to avoid: plant the seed of a Palestinian state.” A neat story, but the truth is that Begin seized the opportunity to build settlements, integrating choice parts of the West Bank with Israel, and amplify the occupation’s repressiveness, while stymying negotiations.

  Thrall avoids these awkward details, explaining only that the Framework for Peace in the Middle East “was not finalized or implemented in Carter’s time, but it, too, proved to be of great importance.” This is because it led to Oslo, which “has defined and circumscribed nearly every aspect of Palestinian-Israeli relations from 1993 until the present.” That’s true, but it hardly recommends Oslo as a diplomatic achievement. Thrall’s occasional enthusiasm for the Accords (again he is contradictory) is puzzling in light of his preface, where he lists the sins of the U.S. and Europe: “quashing any hint of Palestinian confrontation, promising an imminent negotiated solution, facilitating security cooperation, developing the institutions of a still-unborn Palestinian state, and providing bounteous economic and military assistance”—in a word, Oslo. Perhaps he means that these measures, allegedly temporary, have become counterproductive, but critics at the time the agreement was signed were able to perceive clearly how it would function.

  These inconsistencies seem to derive from a view of any diplomatic development, however debased, as somehow positive, another stage in a teleological process moving inexorably towards the partition of Palestine, as the UN intended in 1947. So even if autonomy took fifteen years to bear fruit, it was justified by the territorial gains of Oslo; and if Oslo “allowed Israel not to end the occupation but repackage it, from direct to indirect control,” it nonetheless took “seemingly irresistible steps toward Palestinian self-determination.” This is diplomacy as a kind of Ponzi scheme, in which initial dividends come at the cost of no ultimate payout, and the truth is deferred with each round of investment by a new group of victims. The truth is that the Zionist project is an ideological zero-sum game: from the perspective of Israel’s governing elite, a Palestinian state would negate the Jewish one. It isn’t just that Israel prefers the status quo to a painful compromise; the country is still in the process of consolidating itself. The endpoint of state formation has yet to be reached. As Benjamin Netanyahu told a group of young supporters in 2013, “What matters is that we continue to head straight toward our goal, even if one time we walk right and another time we walk left.” (“When one of the Likudniks asked about peace talks with the Palestinians,” The New Yorker reported, “Netanyahu is said to have replied, as the audience laughed, ‘About the—what?'”)

  For the Palestinians, that leaves the U.S., which has mostly backed Israel in its weaponized diplomacy, with a few exceptions. Why should it be otherwise? One question Thrall never addresses is what interest the U.S. has in Palestinian self-determination. In the Middle East we prefer that (non-Jewish) populations be ruled by friendly despots (friendly to us and to Israel, that is). When we invaded Iraq to replace an enemy despot with democracy, we had in mind a client state with a veneer of popular accountability. Something like this is already in place in the West Bank; Thrall writes about it knowledgeably in the book’s third section, “Collaboration.” Gaza is a different story, but thanks to el-Sisi Hamas is contained, leaving only the sort of massive humanitarian disaster we’re perfectly willing to tolerate. Individuals up to and including John Kerry may wish to ameliorate this state of affairs, in part for their own prestige, but power is a system, and policy is an aggregate output of its components (the Pentagon, Congress, the “intelligence community”). The Palestinians have very little pull in this equation. Israel, on the other hand, has been treated as a strategic asset since the Nixon administration. Why force it to compromise with an enemy it considers existential?

  “There’s a view on the left that the U.S. is a totally cynical actor,” Thrall told Mondoweiss recently, “that it’s promoting the peace process literally with the desire of not concluding that process. I’ve just talked to too many sitting U.S. individuals to believe that.” Setting aside the value of self-interested testimonies, the question isn’t who wants peace, but what peace means. If the Palestinians can be compelled to surrender what’s left of their rights and live quietly under Israeli domination, that would be an ideal outcome for the U.S. It’s precisely what Bill Clinton tried to bring about in collaboration with Ehud Barak at the second Camp David summit, which Thrall barely discusses. (Robert Malley, who hired Thrall to work for the International Crisis Group, was a member of the U.S. team there.) If the Palestinians prove resistant, then Israel has the right to crush their resistance, using our most advanced military hardware, until they learn their lesson. It’s hard to imagine cynicism more total.

  Part of the problem is that Thrall underestimates U.S.-Israeli brutality. His account of how Ariel Sharon responded to the Second Intifada upon becoming prime minister is jaw-dropping:

  Contrary to all expectations of the man known as the father of the settlement movement—who had once demanded that a general be fired for saying that the First Intifada could not be defeated by military means alone—Sharon was prepared to make immediate concessions to halt the fighting. According to then US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, “Sharon offered a freeze on all settlement activity for six months if Arafat would make a serious attempt to stop the intifada violence.”

  The background here is former senator George Mitchell’s report on the intifada, which called for a cessation of hostilities and a halt to settlement construction. For a realistic appraisal of Sharon’s reaction, we turn from Indyk the former AIPAC employee to Israeli military historian Ahron Bregman:

  The prime minister responded swiftly by declaring, on 22 May, a unilateral ceasefire, pledging that the army would only shoot in self-defense; Sharon probably concluded that the Palestinians would proceed with their insurgency anyway, which would enable him to blame Arafat for the violence. […] Indeed, although officially embracing the Mitchell Report, at the same time Sharon also advised the army’s Chief of Staff, General Shaul Mofaz, “to strike the Palestinians everywhere…simultaneously. The Palestinians should wake up every morning to find out that twelve of them are dead …”

  Bregman, a former captain in the IDF, adds that Sharon probably knew the uprising could not be suppressed by force, “and by demanding the army kill scores of Palestinians he gave them a green light to act fiercely which, he must have realized, would only feed the vicious circle of violence.” As the intifada continued, Sharon more than once broke a ceasefire by assassinating a Palestinian militant, resuming the sanguinary spiral in which he spent his entire career.

  Thrall thinks the Palestinians have notched significant achievements through violence. He makes the interesting observation that suicide bombings and bloody confrontations seemed to hasten Israel’s handing over of territory in the 1990s. But this contrarianism cannot overcome the Second Intifada. As Bregman points out, the IDF deliberately overreacted to the initial riots of the uprising, trying to draw return fire and pull the Palestinians into a battle they could not win. The strategy predated Sharon’s premiership, but he escalated the tactics, moving from helicopter gunships to warplanes and artillery. And it worked, with devastating effects on Palestinian society. The IDF established deterrence in the West Bank when it reinvaded like a vandal army in 2002. What did the Palestinians gain—the wall? After years as a war zone, Gaza is hopelessly isolated, a reverse Potemkin village displaying Palestinian life in its “natural” state, ostensibly uninhibited by Israeli occupation: immiserated, overcrowded, prone to violence, incapable of self-government. This was Sharon’s grand design, and though Thrall does call the Gaza disengagement a “maneuver…undertaken in order to avoid something worse”, he buries in a footnote the scandalous rationale offered by Sharon’s adviser, Dov Weissglas, omitting the worst part:

  The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians… we received [from the Americans] a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. The certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens—when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then and shalom.

  Weissglas did not need to add that military pressure and economic strangulation would prevent Palestine from ever becoming peaceful and prosperous.

  Sharon was the master builder of the status quo, and Netanyahu, who voted for the disengagement four times before publicly opposing it, is merely executing the general’s plan. Thrall dismisses the claim that this territorial reality represents a nascent single-state solution awaiting political reform: “In fact, Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from a single state than they have been at any time since the occupation began in 1967.” In terms of the two societies, he’s right: Rabin initiated the split, and Sharon completed it. He’s also right that Israel will never voluntarily surrender Jewish sovereignty. But he’s wrong that “Israel and Palestine have been inching steadily towards partition” ever since Begin’s autonomy “plan.” Those years of extended negotiation and deferred implementation were not idle: the Palestinians now inhabit a fragmented dystopia, policed by their own within and surrounded by others without, cut off from each other by settlements, bypass roads, and military bases. This isn’t partition, but apartheid. And it did not come about by accident. However good the intentions of certain officials, or bad their consciences after retirement, the U.S. preferred subsidizing this process to forcing its henchman into recognizing indigenous rights.

  The salient analysis of force in this conflict is that violence is essential to state formation and imperial management both. Israel developed as a settler colony under the umbrella of great-power protection. The British endorsed the Zionist project in 1917, broke Palestinian resistance during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, and stood by during the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Apart from strategic considerations, about which policymakers may disagree, there is a natural affinity between Western imperialism and a European colonization movement. More broadly, power sympathizes with power. Israel’s military strength soon drew interest from the U.S., which considered it a Cold War counterweight to Russian-backed Egypt and Syria. After most Arab countries joined the coalition against Saddam Hussein, the Bush Sr. administration deemed it necessary to coerce Israel into attending negotiations in Madrid at which the Palestinians would be present, as part of a joint delegation with Jordan. The withholding of loan guarantees that brought Yitzhak Shamir to the table “was the last time the United States applied pressure of this sort,” Thrall notes. It’s also the only example that directly involved the Palestinians, and it was a consequence not of concern for their rights but of an effort to organize the region by force.

  This ongoing imperative is why Barack Obama showered Israel with money and weapons after Netanyahu spent eight years defying him on the Palestinian question: Israel remains central to U.S. planning in a region in flames, set alight by our militarism. Given these dynamics, it isn’t enough to speak of “conditioning aid on changes in behavior, a standard tool of diplomacy that officials deem unthinkable in this case.” We have to ask why this is deemed unthinkable. “Through pressure on the parties,” Thrall argues, “a peaceful partition of Palestine is achievable.” That’s been true since the 1970s, when the U.S. started vetoing Security Council resolutions calling for just this outcome. The problem is that force—in its pure sense, not diplomatic pressure but organized violence—is, if not the only language we understand, certainly our native tongue.
  About Eamon Murphy

  Eamon Murphy is a journalist in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @epmurph.

  Other posts by Eamon Murphy.

  Posted In:
  Middle East

• The Electronic Intifada
  https://electronicintifada.net/content/half-century-pointless-peace-talks/21446
  Word count: 1462

  A half-century of pointless peace talks

  Tom Sperlinger The Electronic Intifada 21 August 2017

  The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine by Nathan Thrall, Metropolitan Books (2017)

  Over the last few years Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank, has been an influential commentator on the Israeli occupation for publications including The New York Times and the London Review of Books.

  His essays, some of which appear in revised form in this book, address both larger historical trends and recent events, including Israel’s 2014 military offensive in Gaza and Barack Obama’s presidency in the US. Thrall writes with persuasive rigor and his tone is always measured, even when citing horrifying evidence and statistics.

  The Only Language They Understand opens with a 70-page essay that gives the collection its title. Thrall explains that it is a phrase he has heard many times:

  Whether uttered by a Hamas leader sitting amid the rubble of his Gaza home destroyed by an Israeli F-16 or spoken by a West Bank yeshiva student mourning the loss of neighbors stabbed to death by Palestinian assailants, the phrase means one thing: talk is pointless, because the enemy will be persuaded only by force.

  Thrall seeks to correct a tendency in American policy and public opinion, since at least the late 1970s, to see Israel as an ally that needs to be gently encouraged to behave differently. As summarized by Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel: “American presidents can be more successful when they put their arms around Israeli prime ministers and encourage them to move forward.”

  This theory ultimately became a guiding principle of policy in the Obama years but, Thrall suggests, “the opposite is true.” He argues that “Faced with the threat of real losses – whether human, economic or political – Israelis and Palestinians have made dramatic concessions to avert them.”

  It is a limit in his approach that the key terms “force” and “concessions” are not more clearly defined.

  Thrall writes in the introduction that force includes “but [is] not limited to violence” and he cites as other examples: “economic sanctions, boycotts, threats, unarmed protests, and other forms of confrontation.”

  The use of one umbrella term to describe such different approaches is unhelpful, not least as it implies an equivalence between parties with very different levels of power.

  Thrall’s definition of “force” encompasses US tactics such as withholding economic or military aid to Israel, which have seldom been used; Israeli state warfare against Palestinians; and violence by individuals, whether they be Israeli settlers or Palestinians resisting the occupation.

  Thrall himself acknowledges that “forcing Israel to make larger, conflict-ending concessions” would require “more power than the Palestinians have so far possessed” or than the US has been willing to use. But he persists in using “force,” rather than “power,” as his defining term.
  Pressure on Israel

  In Thrall’s account, Jimmy Carter emerges as a surprisingly shrewd and incisive figure.

  Carter, Thrall suggests, “applied extraordinary pressure on Israel,” unlike any subsequent US president, in an attempt to end the occupation through the 1978-79 Camp David accords. He quotes Moshe Dayan, Israel’s foreign minister at the time: “Though Carter spoke in a dull monotone, there was fury in his cold blue eyes, and his glance was dagger sharp.”

  Yet Thrall is damning about both Camp David and the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s. He concludes of the latter: “Oslo allowed Israel not to end the occupation but repackage it, from direct to indirect control.”

  Thrall details the many issues that both sets of negotiations left unresolved:

  Neither demanded a withdrawal of settlements nor even a halt in their expansion; neither stated that Palestinians would have a capital in any part of Jerusalem; neither suggested how the refugee problem would be resolved; neither described what Israel’s borders would be or whether there would be a withdrawal to something close to the pre-1967 lines; neither indicated that the Palestinians would eventually achieve self-determination; and, most critically, neither specified what would happen if negotiations on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza did not successfully conclude.

  Peaceful resistance

  Thrall’s primary argument – that only force, not negotiation or compromise, has moved the situation between Israel and the Palestinians forward – is recapitulated in a minor key in perhaps his most compelling essay, “Not Popular Enough.” It demonstrates how overwhelmingly peaceful the resistance by Palestinians has been.

  It is a quietly heartbreaking chapter.

  Thrall notes for example that “more than 93 percent of Palestine’s land remained outside Jewish hands at the outset of the 1948 war” and he details how “only a few thousand” Palestinians fought in that conflict or later ones.

  He shows that “the four most notable acts of Palestinian rebellion” – the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, the general strike of 1976, and both the first and second intifadas – all began “in nonviolent protest.”

  Thrall undercuts American and Israeli rhetoric about Palestinian violence. He notes that, despite the severity with which such incidents are treated, “not a single [Israeli] soldier has died from a thrown stone” during the conflict.

  He quotes former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak: “The Palestinians are the source of legitimacy for the continuation of the conflict, but they are the weakest of all our adversaries. As a military threat they are ludicrous. They pose no military threat of any kind.”

  Thrall’s implication is that the Palestinian resistance may not have achieved more of its aims in part because it has been so peaceful. He notes that it has been “much less deadly than struggles against foreign occupiers elsewhere in the world.”
  A male world

  Thrall’s criticisms are mostly of US policy makers, who seem to be one of his intended audiences. It is striking that he describes an almost entirely male world, aside from cameos from figures such as Condoleezza Rice and Golda Meir.

  The book suffers from the lack of a feminist perspective on its own language of “force.” Scholar Carol Cohn has narrated her encounters with US defense intellectuals, concluding: “The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard.”

  Thrall wishes to reverse the conventional wisdom about when it is “rational” to use force. But he is not willing to challenge the terms of the debate, nor does his book substantially change which voices are heard within it.

  This may be why Thrall’s analysis is more persuasive than his conclusions.

  He provides a devastating account of former US Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed efforts toward a two-state solution, which he notes “had no established terms of reference” and “went nowhere.”

  Thrall concludes that Kerry “did not come close to resolving the 1967 issues, much less the 1948 ones” – Israel’s settlement enterprise and military occupation, on the one hand, and the original dispossession that has rendered millions of Palestinians refugees, on the other.

  Yet Thrall suggests that: “Through pressure on the parties, a peaceful partition of Palestine is achievable.”

  He does not entertain the possibility that Kerry and others have been wrong about the ends, as well as the means. There is almost no discussion of other possibilities, such as a binational or federal state.

  This book is designed to be provocative for an American audience, including policymakers, and its description of the illusions of would-be US peacemakers is cogent and powerful.

  However, it is likely to frustrate those more familiar with the situation.

  The Only Language They Understand ends with a downbeat assessment of Obama’s “legacy,” which Thrall suggests many Palestinians saw as “disappointing, unjust and ineffectual” and yet “perhaps still the best they were going to get.”

  It is hard to argue with the first part of this assessment, and much of Thrall’s analysis, which is the major part of the book, will be useful even to those who disagree with his conclusions.

  Nonetheless, Thrall’s book itself points to the fact that another language than “force” is needed, in order to speak not only of what the Palestinians can get, but of the justice they are due.

  Tom Sperlinger is the author of *Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation, which is published by Zero Books.*

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-only-language-they-understand
  Word count: 560

  The Only Language They Understand
  Nathan Thrall

  Metropolitan Books 2017
  337 Pages $28.00
  ISBN: 978-1-62779-709-2
  amazon indiebound
  barnesandnoble

  Review by Bob Goldfarb

  Readers of the New York Review of Books and other intellectual publications know Nathan Thrall to be one of the best-informed, most insightful, and least polemical analysts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book’s title announces his bold conclusion: that the status quo will remain in place indefinitely unless the two sides are forced to change it—and no one is prepared to exert such force.

  It’s been tried, but not since the 1990s. As Thrall recounts, President Jimmy Carter confronted Israel repeatedly and unrelentingly, threatening at one point to terminate U.S. military assistance. The president briefly had to backpedal in response to accusations that he was “selling Israel out,” but the outcome was the Camp David Accords of September, 1978. In 1991 James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of State, withheld a $10 billion loan guarantee and brought Israel to the negotiating table in Madrid.

  Without pressure, however, neither Israel nor Palestine has much incentive to upset the existing conditions, as Thrall sees it. Israel’s position has only strengthened since the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s. It has greater control of more of the West Bank, including an extensive security barrier, some of which it would have to give up in a peace agreement. Palestinian Authority leaders recognize that foreign aid, and their own jobs, would be at risk if there were a comprehensive peace deal. And their relation to Israel has profoundly changed, “transformed from a protector against an occupying army into an agglomeration of self-interested businessmen securing exclusive contracts from it.”

  World leaders may claim that time is short, but as Thrall ruefully remarks, “Claims that peace is within grasp are as overstated as warnings that the perpetually closing window for a two-state solution has nearly shut, or that the occupation of the West Bank will make Israel an international pariah.” Meanwhile, Israel has become a regional power and cordially works with Egypt and Jordan, and quietly with Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Emirates.

  Beyond the title essay, this volume updates several important pieces which first appeared in periodicals. Nathan Thrall’s brilliant deconstruction of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land painstakingly documents the shortcomings of Shavit’s history of Israel and the flaws in Shavit’s reasoning, as well as dissecting the book’s ecstatic reception by American Jews.

  Thrall’s acid critique of John Kerry’s diplomatic ministrations—what he calls “faith-based diplomacy”—is also required reading. “Kerry,” deadpans the writer, “found a formula to launch new negotiations: he made inconsistent promises to each side.” He then gives a point-by-point account of the failures of the Obama Administration’s approach, which yielded “not a single achievement.”

  Other essays consider the intifadas and other Palestinian protests; the increasing Israeli dominance of East Jerusalem; Hamas; and the growing skepticism about the “two-state solution.” All of them are meticulously documented, hugely informative, and persuasively argued.

  Nathan Thrall’s The Only Language They Understand brings unparalleled clarity to the dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian relations, and is an essential guide to the history, personalities, and ideas behind the conflict.

• Middle East Monitor
  https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20171005-the-only-language-they-understand-forcing-compromise-in-israel-and-palestine/
  Word count: 1197

  The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine
  October 5, 2017 at 4:58 pm | Published in: Asia & Americas, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Review - Books, Reviews, US
  Book Author(s) :
  Nathan Thrall
  Published Date :
  May 2017
  Publisher :
  Metropolitan Books
  Paperback :
  336 pages
  ISBN-13 :
  978-1627797092
  Mustafa Fatih Yavuz
  @fthyvz7
  October 5, 2017 at 4:58 pm

  Ever since Jewish migration to Palestine started between 1882 and 1903 as part of the Zionist project, conflict between Arabs and Zionists has been prevalent in discussions of literature on Palestine-Israel. Wars between Arab countries and Israel have been followed by peace treaties being signed by Israel with Egypt and Jordan; they were welcomed by those who believe that the Palestine-Israel issue can be solved by peaceful means.

  However, the question of how the main problem can be solved without bloodshed still puzzles researchers, analysts, diplomats and politicians. Nathan Thrall is one of those analysts, and he has been covering events in the occupied Palestinian territories since 2010 on behalf of the International Crisis Group. Looking at the past five decades of occupation, he suggests in this easily-read book that the only way to reach a peaceful agreement is to coerce the parties involved directly in the issue; as he puts it, to “force compromise”.

  The book consists of articles that he wrote for the New York Review of Books, and he focuses mainly on diplomatic perspectives of peacemaking in a critical way. He sets out why he thinks that the involvement of the US in Palestine-Israel peace negotiations is not going to end Israel’s occupation due to the absence of coercion on both sides. This was the main reason that he chose “The Only Language They Understand…” as his book’s title; he has heard it said many times from both parties. His main argument follows this connotation with an extra critical view of the diplomatic efforts of the world powers which neglect the importance of forcing sides to compromise to reach a deal and focusing solely on peace. Indirectly, he asks whether peace can be achieved in peaceful ways.

  Thrall has structured the book with five categories, starting with a historical perspective from the time of former US President Jimmy Carter’s involvement in the issue. Carter, he says, was the most influential president in terms of outmanoeuvring Israel towards compromise. However, his efforts were in vain and not welcomed by the Israelis, who claimed that Carter was, ‘’Imposing a Palestinian State on Israel.’’ (p19)

  Read: A story of Palestinians without Palestine

  The reviewer’s approach does not ignore the domestic dynamics of America in line with US-Israel politics. He cites Carter’s meeting with Moshe Dayan to force Israel to accept compromise as an example of how inner dynamics can even force the president of a superpower to cancel decisions and focus on a political career instead.

  Of all the US Presidents involved during the period in question, Thrall is most critical of Barack Obama. He points out that although his predecessors Carter, Reagan, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush couldn’t achieve peace, they at least inched the parties towards an understanding of a solution or compromise. Obama, though, gave up his demand for a settlement freeze in 2009 and his envoys instead put pressure on the Palestinians to accept inconsistent preconditions for negotiations: during the talks Israel could continue building illegal settlements in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and Palestinians had to refrain from exercising their right to join multilateral institutions. The US said it would consider the latter to be an act of ‘’bad faith’’ unlike, it must be said, Israeli settlement construction. (p213)

  Thrall is critical of Fatah’s failed initiatives. According to him, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has been made easier by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority’s security collaboration with Israel. In 2009 alone, for example, Palestinian and Israeli forces took part in almost thirteen hundred coordinated activities, most of them against Palestinian groups. Together they disbanded the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades; attacked Islamic Jihad cells; and eliminated Hamas social institutions, financial arrangements and military operations in the occupied West Bank. (p114) Such collaboration has been the main tool used to break the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist occupation in the territory. The reviewer cites Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency’s report praising collaboration as the main proof of this.

  Read: ‘Ten Myths About Israel’

  He is also critical of America’s hypocrisy towards the democratic process in occupied Palestine. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s electoral victory over Fatah in 2006, US Security Coordinator Lieutenant General Keith Dayton saw his job change overnight from reforming the Palestinian Authority security forces to preventing them from being controlled by the new Hamas-led government. What’s more, the US put pressure on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to rule by cabinet and make appointments limiting the new government’s ability to operate, especially on security matters. (p116)

  In Thrall’s view, it is clear that the US does not want reconciliation or national unity between Hamas and Fatah. According to the ‘’End of Mission’’ report by Peruvian diplomat and UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace process Alvaro de Soto, the violence which erupted between Hamas and Fatah could have been avoided had the US not strongly opposed Palestinian reconciliation; indeed, the US pushed for a confrontation between the two movements.

  The reviewer’s use of quotes from some of the main personalities involved in “peace talks” is revealing. The most shocking for me were the words of former Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir who attended the Madrid Peace Conference and is accused of being the main reason for the collapse of the talks. “I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years,” he said, “and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria [the Zionists’ term for the occupied West Bank].” (p179) Thrall thus demonstrates his realistic perspective and awareness of what Israel really wants to achieve with the West Bank; in fact, the number of illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem now stands at more than 800,000. He also points out that regardless of the dynamics of US domestic politics, both Democrats and Republicans support Israel, right or wrong. That explains the weakness of successive US administrations in the face of Israeli intransigence, and Nathan Thrall’s idealism regarding the need to coerce both sides into making compromises.

  Can we ever expect the US to push Israel towards compromise while decision-makers in Washington are not only Zionists themselves but also surrounded by pro-Israel advisers? Sadly, probably not.
  Categories
  Asia & AmericasIsraelMiddle EastPalestineReview - BooksReviewsUS
  Creative Commons License This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For permissions beyond the scope of this license, please contact us.

Word Count