Reading the Conflict: The Lost Years

Last week, APN's Noam Shelef called on President Obama to "get peace unstuck," referring to the new Americans for Peace Now policy recommendations for the President. These come as the Obama Administration appears to be trying, like so many Administrations before it, to manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict toward some kind of murky solution, rather than genuinely grapple with it, in all its complexity.

Which in turns makes this a particularly good time to remind ourselves of the disasters of past inaction and American missteps -- because if President Obama is going to get the peace process right, it will only be by not allowing the past to repeat itself.

In The Lost Years: Radical Islam, Intifada, and Wars in the Middle East 2001-2006, French-Israeli journalist Charles Enderlin thoroughly details the conflict and the failed peace process at their most disheartening. Though his earlier book, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, suffered from a strikingly ineffective translation from the original French, The Lost Years is both compelling and accessible to the non-expert.

The disastrous failure of the 2000 Camp David negotiations led Israelis to elect as their prime minister Ariel Sharon, a man who had (Enderlin reminds us) fought the peace process since its very inception, shared much of his worldview with American neoconservatives, and had also learned (along with his advisers and political cohort) a particular kind of discretion: "It is easier to let talks stagnate," as Enderlin writes, "than to oppose them."

The Lost Years chronicles the ensuing ebb and flow of raw violence, from Israeli airstrikes and assassinations, to Palestinian suicide bombings and rockets, in the years prior to the narrow election of Hamas, subsequent blockade of Gaza, and Palestinian civil war, all well before the 2008/2009 war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead.

What becomes abundantly clear is that a handful of Sharon-supported military thinkers guided Israeli government policy, and no quarter was given, or even honestly offered, to Yasser Arafat -- or even his Prime Minister (now President) Mahmoud Abbas, who publicly opposed armed resistance. Israeli military and civilian intelligence agreed that Arafat was incapable of controlling the violence (in part because Israeli restrictions and military operations severely checked the Palestinian security services' efficacy), but Arafat refused to admit as much, thus freeing Israel (with American backing) to blame the Palestinian Authority for endless failures to achieve a ceasefire.

Meanwhile, "anguish was palpable in the Israeli streets," Enderlin writes, while in the Palestinian territories -- kept under increasingly harsh curfews and closures -- the situation was catastrophic. Catastrophic, that is, even before the blockade that is now in place.

After nearly 300 pages, Enderlin concludes simply: "Could this have been possible to prevent? Certainly! If there had been a serious peace process."

As you urge President Obama to undertake a serious peace process, please read The Lost Years.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli freelance writer who has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s, and is an active member of a Chicago-area Conservative congregation. She blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and can be followed on Twitter. She also crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles (despite being only an Angry Lady and not at all Black) and atheist-interfaith blog NonProphet Status. All recommendations are entirely her own.