Two-pronged approach to peace
AS GEORGE W. BUSH begins his first trip to Israel as president to follow up the international conference on Middle East peace in Annapolis, Md., he and his administration need to take into account a major dimension of conflict that all past efforts at forging an Israeli-Palestinian agreement have failed to consider. Their conflict is not only between the parties, but also within them, as recent fighting between Hamas and Fatah supporters in Gaza illustrates. Solving it, therefore, requires addressing this second level of conflict - within Israeli and Palestinian societies - and supporting activities inside both societies that might reduce internal conflicts, while fostering negotiations between their governments.
Both societies are deeply divided - left against right, religious nationalists against secularists. In Israel, this includes settlers and their supporters versus their opponents and the Israeli quiet majority. Among Palestinians, it is Islamic groups, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, against Fatah and the more passive majority. These internal conflicts reflect low social trust and limited, and sometimes prohibited, communication across loyalties. Thus, any push to negotiate an agreement at the government-to-government level generates reactions from hard-line elements on both sides. Peace initiatives have two contradictory results: changing government positions in a positive direction toward peace, while mobilizing the opponents of peace on both sides to intensify their opposition.
Without simultaneously working to reduce internal conflicts, peace initiatives will intensify Israeli settler activity, including their attacks on Palestinians and on Israeli soldiers trying to implement the closing of illegal outposts. Peace initiatives will also stimulate Hamas, the Al Aqsa brigades, and Islamic Jihad to redouble terrorism, including firing missiles into Israel.
Governments, including the United States, will not address these groups. Civil society organizations have proven records of success in a number of world conflicts by engaging citizens to address these internal conflicts organically. This is crucial to supporting diplomatic initiatives and creating an approach to peace that can succeed. These civil organizations' models of conflict resolution promote trust and reduce conflict by engaging citizens in sustained, personal contact - the only effective communication across loyalties that has succeeded in all regions of the world.
These lessons in Northern Ireland, South Africa, India, and other places are lost on the foreign policy community, but they must be pursued at sufficient scales to permit resolution of such issues as Israel-Palestinian peace.
Active, nongovernmental contacts with anti-peace forces may encourage them to consider nonviolent strategies. We are sympathetic to the unwillingness of the United States to interact with Hamas and other Islamic groups. But the choice is not between government contact and no contact at all.
The 1998 peace agreement in Northern Ireland illustrates how other forms of contact can accomplish major objectives of increasing trust and pacifying violent groups. Groups that had not renounced violence were excluded from the formal peace negotiations, but they participated in many informal engagements and dialogues that kept them within the communication system. This opened possibilities for peace that would otherwise have remained closed. As a result, when the peace agreement was signed, all of the major violent groups had given up their violence and participated in the agreement.
This must happen in the Middle East. Civil society must create dialogue between radical and more moderate groups on the Palestinian side to promote trust and reduce internal conflict.
On the Israeli side, we need to engage religious organizations that are not part of the settler movement and oppose their undermining of peace efforts. Again, the US government cannot do this. We must marshal our own religious civil society to work with Israeli religious groups to emphasize the powerful faith-based reasons for turning away from hatred and violence.
Experiences in India of conflict between Hindus and Muslims demonstrate that institutionalized connections build both trust and coping mechanisms that limit the appeal of radical religious groups.
At the same time that we vigorously pursue diplomatic approaches to reach a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must also help the Israeli and Palestinian governments mobilize religious organizations and nonreligious civil society organizations to so engage radical, anti-peace groups within their societies. Otherwise, they will undermine the Bush administration's efforts to resolve this conflict.
Increasing participation of local groups in defining the terms of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement will increase their ownership of the final agreement and their determination to implement it in good faith.
Stephen P. Cohen, a national scholar at the Israel Policy Forum and president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, is author of the upcoming "Beyond America's Grasp," a history of US involvement in the modern Middle East. A. Lawrence Chickering is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-director of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development. 