Radical Pragmatism - THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

From NY Times Digest

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The West Bank is an ugly quilt of high walls, checkpoints, Jewish settlements, Arab villages, Jewish roads that only Israeli settlers use, Arab roads and roadblocks. This hard and heavy reality on the ground is not going to be reversed by any conventional peace process. “The two-state solution is disappearing,”
said Mansour Tahboub, senior editor at the West Bank newspaper Al-Ayyam.
We are at a point now where the only thing that might work is what I would call a “radical pragmatism” that is as radical and energetic as the extremism that it hopes to nullify. Without that, I fear, Israel will remain permanently pregnant with a stillborn Palestinian state in its belly. The need is obvious: the business as usual course that Israelis and Palestinians are on right now does not have enough energy or authority to produce a solution.

They remind me of a couple who, after a stormy courtship, finally get married and one
year after they tie the knot they each cheat on the other: Israelis kept on building settlements and the Palestinians kept on building hate. When you cheat and have war after peace, trust vanishes for a long time. The trust deficit is exacerbated by the fact that after Israel quit the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Palestinians, instead of building Singapore there, built Somalia and focused not on how to make microchips but on how to make rockets to hit Israel.

With the wall that it has erected around the West Bank, Israel has so shut down Palestinian suicide bombers that the Israeli public feels no sense of urgency, especially with the economy booming. The West Bank behind the wall might as well be in Afghanistan. “Today, you have neither the romanticism of the peace process before Oslo fell apart nor a visible disaster knocking at the gates of Israel’s consciousness,” noted the Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit. The political system in both Israel and among the Palestinians is so internally divided that neither one can generate the authority to take a big decision. Only the U.S. can overcome this diplomatic brownout by offering some radical pragmatism, and the logic would be this: If the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, does not get control over at least part of the West Bank soon, he will have no authority to sign any draft peace treaty with Israel. He will be totally discredited. Radical pragmatism would say that the
only way to balance the Palestinians’ need for sovereignty now with Israel’s need for a withdrawal now, but without creating a security vacuum, is to enlist a trusted third party, Jordan, to help the Palestinians control whatever West Bank land is ceded to them. Without a radically pragmatic new approach, any draft treaty will be dead on arrival.