| Chapter 1: | The Price of Failure |
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founder of the pro-peace movement Peace Now and, on a daily basis, the army took charge of policy and the tail therefore wagged the dog.
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), in a similar vein, has been spending most of his time maintaining the fragile Fatah coalition, which does not appear to have a plan on how to deal with Hamas. Fatah has split precisely on the question of Hamas, even though the majority continues to favor a power-sharing arrangement along the lines of the National Unity Government that was originally contemplated in 2006. The split authority structure is not only about Gaza. In the West Bank, Abbas is still trying to unify several militias under one umbrella, because, as has been stated repeatedly and correctly, without a monopoly over the use of force, it is nearly impossible to secure a sovereign state. It is very difficult.
Now, how does one respond to political disfunctionality? The obvious response is to start nurturing new coalitions, spending more time convincing partners on both sides that a two-state option is workable. In other words, it is necessary to engage in serious political maintenance. It may also be important to bring settlers into the process, to convince them of the importance of a two-state solution and to work on consolidating new interest-based coalitions. Benjamin Netanyahu's policy speech in June 2009 was intended to make some progress in this direction.
I have a lot of respect for political maintenance because unless one has backing, one is hesitant to move forward even if one understands that moving forward is the only way to solidify one's political base. This is one approach, and I would like to suggest some different, outside-of-the-box approaches. One possibility, which is extremely unlikely given the makeup of the present Netanyahu government, is for the head of the Palestinian Authority and the prime minister of Israel to start building a strategic coalition in order to help each other solve some of their internal problems. What I am suggesting is a thoroughly unusual approach to the political situation, but one that assumes a common interest in resolving the conflict. Such a joint objective may have existed in the waning days of the Olmert administration, but hardly it exists today.
This approach foresees a coalition of moderates devoted to a two-state solution; Israelis and Palestinians working together with a backdoor