Professor Malley speaks on Arab-Israeli relations

Robert Malley, who served as special assistant to the president for Arab-Israeli Affairs during the second Clinton term, spoke yesterday about the failure of recent attempts at reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The speech, which took place in front of an audience of more than 100 people in Frist 302, was sponsored by the Near Eastern studies program.

Currently a senior policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Malley said that recent statistics reveal pervasive pessimism among both Israelis and Palestinians resulting from the failure of the November 1999 Oslo peace talks and then the December 2000 peace talks at Camp David.

Many more Palestinians now support violence than three years ago, Malley said. He noted that for Israelis, "the central historical paradigm is no longer reconciliation but [instead] the 1948 war."

He added that both sides now see Oslo "as a process of unilateral concessions" and said that this has led to an "unhealthy closing of the ranks" with the goal now being victory instead of ending the conflict.

Malley blamed the failure of the Camp David talks primarily on the distrust between the two sides. "We hoped that we could force through an agreement despite this lack of trust," he said.

Expressing some dissatisfaction with current U.S. policy, Malley said that the "United States has adopted a hands-off attitude with the hope that both sides will tire of the conflict . . . with the irony being that the only ones who were tiring of the conflict were Americans."

He suggested that the United States must be more engaged in the process in order for it to succeed. "At some point for the Americans to put an agreement on the table is the only way that this is going to work," he said.

Malley also discussed the effects of the Sept. 11 attacks. He said that Yasser Arafat "has made a greater effort to clamp down on terrorism" because he understands that Palestinian violence will now be seen in the "prism of conflict against terrorism with a global reach."

The Sept. 11 events will not strongly affect American-Israeli relations, according to Malley. "It may change in the short run . . . but I don't foresee a major damage or change in the nature of that relationship," he said.

He reasoned that the United States has a special opportunity as a result of recent events. "The U.S. has greater leverage than it had before Sept. 11th," he said. He added that ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "is an essential ingredient in the war against terrorism."

Malley concluded by saying that although the past year's conflict has seriously damaged the peace process, he remains optimistic about the possibility of a future agreement. "The basic outline of an agreement is there," he said.