Obama shouldn’t buy Mideast myths

President Obama kept his pledge to take action on the Middle East on “Day One.”

He called the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, and appointed George Mitchell as special envoy for Middle East affairs. Mitchell then set out for the region on Monday.

Israel’s war on Hamas, and the massive civilian destruction it wrought in Gaza, left Obama no choice but to do something — quickly. The repercussions of the Gaza violence will affect U.S. policy throughout the region.

But before wading into this morass, he should be aware of some of the myths that have built up around the decades-long peacemaking process. Buying into these myths is a guarantee of failure, before the process even restarts.

• Myth 1: The process is hopeless. Jews and Arabs have been at odds for a century in historic Palestine, so there’s no point in stumbling into this quicksand.

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitchell is an excellent choice of emissary to dispel this hopeless prognosis. He was a peace broker on Northern Ireland for President Clinton, helping to produce the Good Friday agreement, which ended a conflict that was centuries old. After he was named, Mitchell said: “I don’t underestimate the difficulty of this assignment.”

But he added that, from his experience in Northern Ireland, “I formed the conviction that there is no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings.”

Yes, I know that Northern Ireland is not Israel/Palestine. And we all know that the Mideast situation worsened over the past eight years. All the more reason to resurrect the peace process quickly.

• Myth 2: Focus on the diplomatic process or on humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, and kick the can of final status talks down the road.

This has been tried — by Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. It failed, and will fail again. If the United States doesn’t detail its vision of the end goal, new talks will go nowhere.

Of course, with Israeli elections coming up and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas weakened by the Gaza war, it isn’t possible to proceed directly to that endgame. So time must be bought, and Israelis and Palestinians must be convinced that two states are still possible.

There is only one way to do this: Halt all Israeli settlement construction, whether in new outposts or old, in return for greater Palestinian efforts to crack down on terror. This key precept of a 2001 Mideast report Mitchell prepared for Bush was never honored.

The continued building of settlement homes convinces Palestinians that a two-state solution is dead, which in turn boosts Hamas. The only way to strengthen the Palestinian Authority — to increase its ability to crack down on would-be terrorist attacks and buy time to work out details of a final status accord — is to freeze settlement construction. Mitchell must get Obama’s full backing to make that clear.

• Myth 3: Build up the economies of the West Bank and Gaza, and final status talks can be delayed indefinitely. This deep-rooted myth, which the Bush team bought into, ignores facts on the ground.

There is no way to build up those two Palestinian areas so long as there is no clear prospect of a political settlement. While occupation continues, violent resistance will flourish and Israel will then feel the continued need to close West Bank and Gaza borders and divide the West Bank into closely controlled territorial cantons. Under those circumstances, goods cannot move, investment will not occur, businesses die. The Palestinian economy will remain moribund and dependent on international aid.

• Myth 4: Solve the Palestinian problem by giving chunks of the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt. Forget it. Jordan has long rejected a “Palestinian solution” that would put disconnected cantons of West Bank land under its control with more than a million Palestinians who wanted their own state, not Jordanian rule. The Jordanian monarchy isn’t going to commit suicide. Similarly, Egypt — whose own economy isn’t doing well — is not going to accept more than a million desperate, impoverished Gazan refugees who don’t want to be there.

• Myth 5: The solution is one “democratic” state containing Israelis and Palestinians. Amazingly, the New York Times ran an op-ed last week by Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi promoting this idea, which he called for “Isratine.”

This idea is a non-starter. Both Israeli Jews and Palestinians want their own homeland, and putting them in one state would guarantee perpetual civil war.

So Obama is smart to assign Mitchell to restart the peace process, but that process will go nowhere unless Obama constructs a clear vision of the end goal and pushes for an Israeli settlement freeze in the meantime. He will also have to think of how the United States or NATO would guarantee Israeli security if two states were established.

We all know Obama will have to think big on the economy. Ditto for the Middle East.