After 25 years of laboring to advance Middle East peace, advising six secretaries of state, Aaron Miller, 53, is leaving the State Department to head Seeds of Peace, a 10-year-old private organization that fosters ties between young people from Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds, as well as between Indians and Pakistanis. His departure comes at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more violent than at any point in recent decades and when a new peace initiative drafted by the United States and Europeans has yet to get off the ground.
Last week, Miller sat down with The Sun’s diplomatic correspondent, Mark Matthews, to talk about his career change, the Middle East and American policy. Following are excerpts:
Why are you leaving now?
I’ve been offered … the chance to run an extraordinary organization, which has been remarkably successful in changing perceptions and attitudes among Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis. [This is] combined with my belief that the time line for a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been extended. It’s going to take a hell of a lot longer to resolve this problem than we had anticipated. The point that connects the two is my concern that the [conflict is damaging] an entire generation of young Israelis and Palestinians. There’s very little hope; there’s a lot of despair, and there’s a loss of faith in two realities: that there is a solution to this problem and that the way to do it is through negotiations.
What’s your view of the Bush administration’s [Middle East] policy?
They were confronted with an extraordinarily difficult challenge. The consequences of the intifada [uprising] left the administration with probably the worst set of circumstances that I have seen in 25 years. … This administration has done some things, capped by the president’s June 24 [2002] speech, which, frankly, have been unprecedented. That speech created a new normative baseline: two states living in peace and security, an end to terror and violence, [an Israeli] settlements freeze. This is a very important commitment. … Sooner or later, if progress is going to be made in turning this situation around, the United States will have to play a greater role. The timing is not right now. Nobody is listening now. You have Israeli elections set for Jan. 28. You have the prospect of a major military confrontation in a war with Iraq on the horizon. Trying to do Arab-Israeli peace in this kind of environment is not going to happen. There may well be opportunities afterward. … Even in those negotiations where the parties themselves initially took bold and historic steps—Egypt-Israel, Israel-Palestinian and Israel-Jordan—the U.S. role became extremely important. Without the United States it’s impossible to sustain any meaningful process of peace. We have never played the role of judge and jury. I’m talking about a U.S. role in a very intimate, involved way as a friend, as a supporter, someone who can keep the parties focused on the important issues. Without a more determined American role – under the appropriate circumstances and at the right time—it’s going to be very difficult to unwind this. … There are no quick fixes anymore. It’s going to take a huge effort to get out of this.
Many Israelis and Palestinians accept the idea of two states divided roughly along the 1967 lines. What makes it so hard to build on that?
What is impeding a solution is not the problems that have to be resolved at the negotiating table—I believe there are fixes for each of the four or five core issues—it is the politics and the psychology: domestic politics, politics of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship and the psychology. This is something we paid very little attention to over the course of the last 10 years. … The various ways in which Israelis and Palestinians looked at a resolution of the conflict were in some respects completely divergent. Those different narratives have become so fundamentally opposed right now. One side sees it totally in terms of terror and violence, the other totally in terms of occupation. Next time, the process has to have a much more solid basis of public support in order to sustain the kind of choices leaders need to make at the negotiating table.
Did [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat reject a generous offer from [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak at the negotiations hosted by President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000?
Arafat’s transgression at Camp David, the Palestinian transgression, was not that he didn’t accept what Barak put on the table. I think it would have been impossible for him to accept [the offer] in toto. His transgression was his passivity, his lack of responsiveness and his refusal to credit Barak and in doing so create a sense that he had an Israeli partner who was serious. Arafat’s experience was shaped by his perception of what Sadat got [in 1978, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat received all of the Sinai peninsula in negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin]. Arafat’s analysis was also shaped by what Barak was prepared to give [Syrian President] Hafez Assad, essentially, all of the Golan Heights [and] his perception, and I would say his anger, over the Israeli-Syrian negotiations over the [previous] eight months.
I think the Israeli position was deeply flawed on tactical grounds. One of the reasons we didn’t succeed at Camp David was because of the focus on Syria because by focusing on Syria they left very little time to conclude an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. [The Syrian talks also] so elevated the June 4, 1967, border to a level of prominence that—what kind of flexibility could the Palestinians have?
What we had to do was give much more thought to the consequences of not reaching an agreement and ensure that if the summit did not succeed, neither Arafat nor Barak would go out and blame the other and that we would continue. Even if you had to envision passing [the peace process] on to the next administration, we needed to make that judgment clear in our own minds and in the minds of the Israelis and the Palestinians. [But] nobody, including me, wanted to go into a summit giving either side a sense that we wouldn’t succeed.
Why is it so important to end the conflict?
If there is no solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and you straight-line this out to the future, and you look at the numbers and the demography [the rapidly expanding Arab population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean], and you look at the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and you look at the hardening of attitudes and extremes in both societies, you can only reach one conclusion: There will be no winners. The terms of that confrontation will [get] that much more deadly and much more threatening.