‘Humanly impoverishing.” That is how Palestinian intellectual Edward Said once described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting the despair with which many view the century-old struggle between two oppressed peoples over one tiny piece of coveted land.
The story of the South African transformation, by contrast, is “humanly enriching” to most observers. In 1994 South Africa overcame centuries of racial domination and strife to elect a new government on the basis of one person, one vote democracy. Its new Constitution, passed in 1996, provided a Bill of Rights more thorough than any other in the world.
And despite the enduring challenges the country faces, it remains a potent symbol of both freedom and forgiveness.
Not so long ago, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the South African struggle and the “troubles” in Northern Ireland were seen as equally irresolvable dilemmas. The end of the Cold War brought the softening of old antagonisms and inspired renewed efforts at peacemaking in all three cases. But while South Africa made the transition to democracy, and Northern Ireland stabilised somewhat, the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians eventually collapsed into violence.
Why? The Oslo peace process, inaugurated in 1993, was designed to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gradually, through a series of interim stages. The idea was to use each stage to build confidence and cooperation before moving on to the next. The negotiations were handled by a diplomatic elite; most of the bargaining was done in top-secret, back-channel talks. The hope was that the trust that slowly developed in this small circle would eventually radiate outwards to the rest of Israeli and Palestinian society.
Unlike the negotiations in South Africa and Northern Ireland, the Oslo peace process never provided for shared political institutions with members from both sides. In South Africa the government and 18 other political parties came together in 1991 to form the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa), in which they publicly formalised negotiations that had previously only taken place at the highest level. In Northern Ireland a series of joint multilateral forums paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the Northern Ireland Assembly that it created in Belfast.
In some ways these institutions were failures. The Codesa talks collapsed; the Belfast Assembly has lurched from one crisis to the next. Yet, critically, these problems did not precipitate a return to armed struggle in either case. By excluding groups that refused to stop violent acts, the public talks helped to marginalise extremist organisations and to set boundaries around what methods of political action would be considered legitimate.
Of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different from the others.
The likely solution is a partition of territory, not the creation of a unitary or a bi-national state. But the architects of Oslo realised that cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians would have to continue even after a “permanent” settlement was reached, possibly in the form of a political confederation like that of the Benelux nations in Europe.
The mistake was to put the creation of shared political institutions at the end of the peace process instead of the beginning. This reflected the pervasive Third Way politics of the era, which was optimistic about prosperity and progress but skeptical about creating new government bodies to achieve them. The emphasis in Oslo was on voluntary cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, speeded along by the hopeful prospect of regional economic development.
But seven years of diplomacy among a political elite and a handful of voluntary projects failed to change the adversarial relationship between the two societies. Peace was never represented by a public institution and therefore was never a political reality. Most discouraging of all were the mutual recriminations between Israeli and Palestinian moderates, which began even before the negotiations had collapsed. In a formal, multiparty dialogue, they might have joined together in an alliance or coalition; instead they, like everyone else, were left out of the process.
Formal negotiations will be on hold until new Israeli elections have been held and the confrontation with Iraq is past. But when United States President George W Bush’s proposed “road map” for Middle East peace finally comes to life, it should institutionalise multiparty dialogues between Israelis and Palestinians as an integral part of the negotiations.
A new Israeli-Palestinian forum need not exercise sovereign powers; even if it is just a debating society, it will help discourage violence and perhaps encourage cooperation as well. Crucially, participation should be limited to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, at least at the outset. History shows that when every country in the region is invited to the table at once — as at the 1991 Madrid conference — the Israelis are unfairly isolated and the Arab states goad each other into hard-line positions.
The South African experience teaches that no oppressed people can gain liberation unless it is also committed to reconciliation. Equally, it shows that no nation can achieve harmony until it redresses political and social injustice. And it warns that trust cannot be cultivated if it is left to top-secret meetings between elite emissaries. Only if the peace process goes public will the public embrace peace.
Rabbi David Hoffman is chairperson of the Cape Town Interfaith Forum of Jews, Christians and Muslims, and Joel Pollak is a freelance journalist