A Palestinian State – the Urgent Component of Blinken’s Shuttle Diplomacy
Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended his fourth marathon shuttle diplomacy tour. He visited eight countries in less than one week. His declared goals for this his fourth trip were, as in those that he has undertaken since the Hamas surprise attack of October 7, to demonstrate backing and strategic support for Israel, to restrain and reduce the harsh results of the destruction and killing of civilians in Gaza, to bring to an end the war with Hamas, to prevent the slide into a regional war with Hizballah and Iran’s proxy in the Middle East. But his fourth visit contained another element which was swallowed up in the noises of war and the impasse in Netanyahu’s cabinet discussions regarding the “day after”: the explicit urgent need for an independent Palestinian State and a return from the cold of peace and normalization with Saudi Arabia. These two elements are intertwined.
In his last visit to the region, Blinken arrived at a new phase of the US outline to end the war. The US presented its detailed two stage outline at the Tokyo G7 summit during the early days of Israel’s military ground operations in Gaza. The US outline recognized Israel’s right and duty of self defense while at the same time presenting a list of conditions that were in effect red lines for the achievement of Israel’s war goals: a prohibition on forcefully transferring and displacing Palestinians outside the Gazan borders, no to a renewed occupation of Gaza, an end to the blockade and siege (maritime and land), prohibition on a reduction of Palestinian territory in Gaza (no to “security zones” unlimited in time).
The first stage of the US outline was intended to pave the way for the second stage which would bring an end to the war and to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict i.e. Palestinian rule in Gaza (later on, President Biden added under “a renewed Palestinian Authority”). Already at the launching of the outline, Blinken had emphasized the immediate need to act with urgency “not tomorrow, not after the war, but today”.
After three months we have arrived at the final stage. It would appear that during Blinken’s fourth tour, the US estimated that Netanyahu’s ability to resist US policy had been reduced, and that the time had come to move on to the second stage – taking action to implement the outline. In my understanding, as in the stroke of the sword that cut the Gordion knot, the US decided to put an end to Netanyahu’s procrastination and his hiding behind the group of far right settler ministers who were blocking the way forward. Netanyahu would have to deal on his own with his ministers. This, I believe, is the explanation for the new political element that has been introduced into the picture: clear US statement supporting the establishment of an independent Palestinian State next to Israel. No longer amorphous statements couched in terms of a peace “vision” of two states but a concrete reference to a Palestinian state and the need for tangible and urgent steps to bring it into being. This is a dramatic statement that could transform the foot dragging with which we have had to contend for years. It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will have the courage to declare the territorial component which would be on the basis of the 1967 lines which are the recognized and secure borders of the State of Israel as noted in UN Security Council 242. This is the basis of the peace agreements which Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan.
We can learn about the US position and of the urgent need to end the war and establish an independent Palestinian state by analyzing the texts from Blinken’s press conferences during his tour last week. The term “Palestinian State” has never appeared so frequently in official US texts as in the coverage of Blinken’s latest diplomatic engagement. Moreover, there was also an emphasis on “tangible steps”. According to the US security concept that Blinken presented to Netanyahu, an independent Palestinian State is a doubly essential condition, both for the solution to the conflict and for the establishment of a regional framework led by the US against the Iranian axis. Israel will be integrated into a new regional framework and will receive security assurances from the US (no details were given) as well as commitments from the Arab states. Not for nothing, did Blinken repeat a number of times in his declarations that this is US Middle East policy. In this context, Blinken emphasized that following the October surprise Hamas attack and the Gaza war, Israeli leaders will have no choice, and will have to “make hard decisions”. Blinken’s points were emphasized by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in his speech at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Israel will have to take hard decisions to end the war in Gaza within the US and international community’s parameters (the list of “red lines”). Hard decisions will need to be made regarding a unified independent Palestinian State that includes Gaza and the West Bank. Hard decisions will need to be made regarding the State of Israel’s permanent borders which will receive international recognition and legitimacy. And there will also be hard decisions in the immediate term regarding the initiative for peace and normalization with Saudi Arabia which was the hottest item on the international diplomatic agenda during the summer months before the war, and here it is back again.
In his September 2023 speech to the UN General Assembly, just a month before the surprise Hamas October 7 attack, and in a series of interviews with the American media, Netanyahu declared in almost messianic terms that peace and normalization with Saudi Arabia were just around the corner. In his view, the negotiations then being held between the US and Saudi Arabia would in one fell swoop miraculously lead to a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states. Netanyahu was not afraid of the military items – a defense treaty between Saudi Arabia and the US and a nuclear demand for uranium enrichment on Saudi soil (a possible trigger for high military enrichment for nuclear weapons).
Netanyahu’s enthusiasm and hyperactivity regarding normalization with Saudi Arabia during the summer of 2023 derived from the third element of the story: in the normalization negotiations, Saudi Arabia agreed to remove from the agenda its old peace initiative of two states along the 1967 lines. Instead, it would make do with vague “cosmetic” concessions regarding the inclusions of a “significant Palestinian component” without any mention of a Palestinian State.
And now, following Blinken’s latest efforts to end the war, everything has been turned upside down. An independent Palestinian State has returned to the Saudi discussions, and even more strongly. From now on, it is a condition, and apparently a necessary condition, for normalization and peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia as can be learned from the Saudi Ambassador to the UK’s BBC interview following Blinken’s visit.
We do not know how things will develop. But, the time element is critical for Blinken. From my analysis of US diplomatic and security policy, it appears to me that for the US a Middle East war would create a window of opportunity of just a few months to move processes that had been considered taboo and had not been dealt with for many years. In this way, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger broke through the impasse in the Middle East through shuttle diplomacy during the Yom Kippur War thereby leading, at the end of the day, to the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. To take another example, Secretary of State James Baker knew how to exploit the shock of the first Gulf War and the Scud rockets that Saddam Hussein launched against Israel. During his urgent travels to the region immediately at the end of the war, Baker succeeded in overcoming Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s opposition to peace, and imposed a multilateral international peace conference in Madrid. There were also other examples of shuttle diplomacy which failed and did not bring positive results. An example, is Secretary of State John Kerry’s mediation trips during the Obama period. Perhaps, the latter did not succeed because they were not the result of the shock of war.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst