Jeremy Pressman

Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba?

alysts have inaccurately portrayed the Israeli-Palestinian-U.S. summit at Camp David in July 2000 and subsequent negotiations. Based on this inaccurate portrayal, a number of observers have argued that a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conoict is not possible at this time. This article addresses the inaccuracies of this dominant narrative and offers a different understanding of Israeli-Palestinian relations in 2000 (and January 2001) that, in turn, suggests that the door to Israeli-Palestinian political talks is open. After the Camp David summit, Israel and some U.S. ofacials told a story about what happened that was widely accepted in Israel and the United States. According to this dominant version of the events at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a generous offer to the Palestinian negotiators who rejected it without even putting forth a counterproposal. At Camp David, Barak offered a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, shared control of the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem’s Old City, and a commitment to withdraw many Israeli settlements from the West Bank. The Israeli version continues that Palestinian leaders rejected Barak’s offer and the diplomatic route to a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conoict. Instead, they tried to destroy Israel by pressing throughout the Israeli-Palestinian talks for the return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel and by launching the second intifada, or uprising, in September 2000.1 Visions in Collision

Power without Influence: The Bush Administration's Foreign Policy Failure in the Middle East

The administration of President George W. Bush was deeply involved in the Middle East, but its efforts did not advance U.S. national security. In the realms of counterterrorism, democracy promotion, and nonconventional proliferation, the Bush administration failed to achieve its objectives. Although the United States did not suffer a second direct attack after September 11, 2001, the terrorism situation worsened as many other countries came under attack and a new generation of terrorists trained in Iraq. Large regional powers such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia did not become more democratic, with no new leaders subject to popular mandate. The model used in Iraq of democratization by military force is risky, costly, and not replicable. Bushs policy exacerbated the problem of nuclear proliferation, expending tremendous resources on a nonexistent program in Iraq while bolstering Irans geopolitical position. The administration failed because it relied too heavily on military force and too little on diplomacy, disregarded empiricism, and did not address long-standing policy contradictions. The case of the Bush administration makes clear that material power does not automatically translate into international influence.

Time and the Intractability of Territorial Disputes

what’s time got to do with it? Time seems integral to Hassner’s theory, creating intractable territorial disputes through three processes. First, conquered territory undergoes material entrenchment, as lines of transportation and communication link territory to the core of the state. Second, functional processes, such as mapping, make borders less ambiguous and less negotiable. Third, time creates symbolic attachments: as individuals aght, live, and die in conquered land, they construct myths to legitimate their territorial claims. Although Hassner’s arguments are intuitively plausible, it is unclear what effect time really has in his theory. Neither the duration of a territorial conoict nor a lack of settlement proves that disputes become more intractable over time. For example, territorial conoict could endure because initial conditions make it difacult to solve. Hassner claims that he controls for these conditions and that variables such as initial power and material value are unrelated to the conoict’s duration or resolution (p. 114 n. 19). But by his own account, it is initial perceptions of territorial value and cohesion that most affect the dispute’s entrenchment. If this is the case, it is not time but actors’ existing perceptions that make territorial disputes persist: conoict is not entrenched; it starts out as more difacult to solve. Hassner might respond that although initial perceptions explain variable rates of entrenchment, entrenchment occurs in all conoicts, even if the territory is initially perceived as worthless. Thus entrenchment is not reducible to initial conditions. This argument would be more convincing if Hassner provided evidence that disputes become intractable in the absence of initial perceptions. His two cases where initial perceptions of value are absent—Antarctica and the Spratly Islands—exhibit no entrench-

Rethinking Transnational Counterterrorism: Beyond a National Framework

Many offensive strategies that the United States currently relies on, such as sanctions or deterrence, that might be successful against national terrorist organizations are not as useful against transnational terrorists. They could actually make the problem worse.

Mediation, Domestic Politics, and the Israeli-Syrian Negotiations, 1991–2000

Why did Israeli-Syrian negotiations (1991–2000) fail to lead to a peace treaty? They came very close, but Syria insisted on an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights to the 1967 line. At crucial talks in January 2000, Israels prime minister decided against a deal with Syria because polls suggested a minority of Israelis supported a withdrawal to that line. His hesitance ruined the chances of an agreement in January and shaped the failed meeting in March 2000 between the U.S. and Syrian presidents. These negotiations suggest four lessons about mediation and negotiation: the hazards and benefits of a biased mediator; structural variables alone do not determine the outcome of negotiations; diplomatic ambiguity can be a destructive factor when the parties turn to implementation; and efforts to convince ones own constituents of the need for compromise are necessary though they may conflict with ones bargaining strategies. This article intensively focuses on the negotiating process and highlights the procedural decisions, substantive issues, and missed opportunities.

Throwing stones in social science: Non-violence, unarmed violence, and the first intifada

Social scientists treat stone-throwing as a non-violent act or argue that protest movements may be primarily non-violent despite stone-throwing. However, this study of an iconic example, the first intifada (Palestinian uprising, 1987–1993), demonstrates that stone-throwing is better characterized as unarmed violence. Definitions of violence underscore that throwing rocks is a violent act. Moreover, informed observers and data collected on stone-induced injuries during four years of the intifada illustrate the bodily harm caused by stones. The throwing of stones was central to the intifada and its identity and definition. Stone-throwing was the most visible tactic Palestinians used in the first intifada. Lastly, most scholars emphasize the protestors’ perceptions when it might be that the targets’ perceptions matter more for understanding definitions of (non-)violence and subsequent policy changes. These findings challenge important social science work and the mainstream Israeli and Palestinian narratives about the first intifada.

The Primary Role of the United States in Israeli-Palestinian Relations

Like its predecessors, the new administration of George W. Bush faced a central question: should the United States use its special relationship with Israel to advance diplomatic efforts at ending the conflict? In answering this question, some administrations have favored using American leverage while others have been more willing to follow Israel’s lead.1 While the Bush administration has tended toward the second approach, U.S. interests would be much better served by the first approach. If the United States is willing to use its leverage, Washington either supports Israel at the negotiating table or prods a reluctant Israel to (re)open talks with the Arab side. In other words, given a desire to use U.S. leverage, the manner in which the United States exerts itself depends on the negotiating policy of the Israeli government. When Israel itself is seeking a peace agreement such as during the Oslo process of the 1990s, the United States can use its leverage to support and reinforce the Israeli effort. But the United States may also use its leverage to push a reluctant Israel to negotiate. When the administration of President Gerald Ford was disappointed with Israel’s commitment to bargaining in the spring of 1975, the United States moved to “reassess” U.S. Mideast policy and, implicitly, relations with Israel. When Israel itself is not pursuing negotiations, the use of U.S. leverage is likely to be more confrontational. A second possibility is that the United States decides not to use its leverage and instead lets Israel set the agenda. In saying that further U.S. involvement would not be productive, the initial impulse of the Bush administration was to respect Israeli policy. “We shouldn’t think of American involvement for …

Horizontal Inequality and Violent Unrest in Jerusalem

ABSTRACT In 2014 and then again in 2015-16 in Jerusalem, some Palestinians attacked Israelis and others, including through stabbings and vehicular attacks. A case study of Israeli rule of Palestinians in Jerusalem highlights the causal role of horizontal inequality or inter-group disparities in cultural, economic, political, and social realms. Palestinians are shortchanged in each realm, and this helps fuel the violence in the city. The case also adds further nuance to some of the supporting arguments put forward by scholars in the horizontal inequality tradition. Miodownik & Nir’s focus on perceptions suggests the possibility of a gap between reality and perceptions, but in East Jerusalem, Israeli policy and Palestinian perceptions appear in synch. The spontaneous grassroots violence with only limited organizational support contrasts with other cases where violence was the result of the interaction between elites influenced by political inequality and masses motivated by economic inequality. Lastly, Stewart’s policy recommendation of more aid to reduce economic inequality assumes that the rulers will provide more aid or allow others to do so. In East Jerusalem, Israel has not provided sufficient resources but also has blocked the most likely substitute, the Palestinian Authority, from freely operating in East Jerusalem.

Sarah E. Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War

may not remain enemies, friends may not stay friends, salvage benefit even when wrong. They amount to a recognition that uncertainty – Clausewitz’s ‘fog of war’ – cannot be made to go away. Suppose, instead, that intelligence become truly Clausewitzian: consequence would be deemed as important as likelihood. In that process, intelligence would, in effect, produce a probability distribution in which consequential outcomes would receive attention not just as excursions, even if their probability was low or could not be assessed very clearly. The process would not change the fact that policy-makers derive images of the world from their preferences, and it might simply befuddle. But it would put the attentions of both intelligence and policy where they should be – on assessing consequences for the nation’s interests, not engaging in an ultimately futile attempt to predict the future.

American engagement and the pathways to Arab–Israeli peace

This close empirical study of decades of US efforts to bring peace between Arab states and Israel helps reflect on Arild Underdal and Oran R. Young’s leadership typologies. Distinguishing between coercive leadership based on the incentives and sanctions that robust capabilities make possible and instrumental leadership focused more on talking, skilled mediation, and policy innovation is useful. However, this US mediation demonstrates that the two are not wholly distinct as previously suggested. The narrative of US efforts from Richard M Nixon to William J Clinton, including 22 cases of US involvement in Arab–Israeli mediation, suggests successful US mediation has been based on four factors. US involvement has led to breakthroughs when the US administration was highly engaged and kept at the problem after an initial diplomatic setback; benefitted from an exogenous event; managed that event to the US advantage; and dealt with strong Arab and Israeli partners.