Unlikely partners, prospects in newest Middle East peace process

In the film "Dumb and Dumber," Jim Carrey's character of Lloyd Christmas, upon being told by his love interest that their chances of a relationship were not "one in a hundred," but instead "more like one out of a million," responded: "So you're telling me there's a chance ... YEAH!"

While it might seem odd to use a sophomoric comedy to analyze the complexities of geopolitics, the best expectations to have about the Middle East are low ones, so as to avoid almost certain frustration. Even so, there remains a tiny chance for something really unlikely: peace.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once allegedly said: "You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria." The Obama Administration appears to be testing this maxim, with a major push for Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

This effort, at a time when Syrians are in full-scale civil war and the Egyptians embroiled in a violent dispute between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, might nonetheless have a small chance of achieving success.

Some have noted that what is important in the Middle East is not a successful conclusion to talks, but that they are occurring in the first place; by that measure, the Obama Administration already has succeeded. At the risk of jinxing the whole effort, perhaps we can hope for just a little more.

Outside observers have noted that the most breakthroughs in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations have occurred when Israel is strong, the Palestinians are weak, and the Arab states distracted. That does seem to be the case these days. While Israeli's fractious politics can make it seem as if Jerusalem is a capital city in turmoil, these fights can be deceiving. Israel continues to be the region's most vibrant democracy, with the strongest economy and military, from North Africa to the Pakistani border.

Israel's Palestinian negotiating partners continue to suffer under divided government, with the Hamas-led statelet in the Gaza Strip perpetually impoverished due to their embrace of violence against Israel as the only solution.

The situation on the West Bank is more complex. Israel and the Palestinian Authority have successfully cooperated in security and economic development over the past few years, despite mutual mistrust, achieving improvements in standards of living and public safety.

Even as endemic corruption and Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence continues, daily life on the West Bank is better now than at almost any time over the last few decades. Even so, the Palestinian Authority, operating under an expired electoral mandate, is weak. Its shaky hold over the territory, constrained by Israel, is bolstered by the lack of viable alternatives, with the patent failure of Hamas unattractive to the population of the West Bank.

As far as the other Arab states, the uncertainties for Syria and Egypt have driven their focus to internal matters. For the Gulf States, the existential threat that a nuclear-armed Iran poses makes Israel seem a secondary issue. The vitriol used by Iranian leaders directed at Israel, the United States and the West is echoed in Tehran's denunciations of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and other states in the region. Even more, these Sunni monarchies have endured active subversion by the Iranian government.

In the context of the 100,000 dead from the Syrian Civil War, a re-energized Iran, and the two regime changes in Egypt since 2011, Israel seems almost a quaint strategic concern for Arab states in the Middle East. Recent Arab support for land swaps, exchanging areas of Jewish settlements on the West Bank for Palestinian and Israeli Arab zones within Israel, have now gained more support than inflexible insistence on the 1967 borders.

Ironically, demographics are now beginning to work in Israel's favor. Palestinian leaders used to claim they would eventually overwhelm Jews merely through having more children. In recent years, however, Israeli birthrates, led by the rising population of Orthodox Jewish families, have steadily increased. In contrast, live births among Palestinian families have declined. With the argument of inevitable victory via census no longer clear, there is far more of an incentive for Palestinians to negotiate a two-state settlement while they can.

Will Secretary of State John Kerry succeed where every U.S. administration since Truman has failed, bringing a final territorial and political settlement to fruition? It seems unlikely, given the many regional actors, from Iran to Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood, dedicated to spoiling this effort, and the underwhelming results so far from the Obama administration's foreign policy elsewhere.

In terms of conditions, however, we may be in the most favorable environment since the early and mid-1990s, when the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton nearly nudged the two parties to make real peace; it was chiefly the intransigence of Yasser Arafat that scuttled those promising efforts.

Given its fiscal and strategic health, especially in light of the changing demographic picture, Israel does not need final peace with the Palestinians to survive. One can only hope that the Palestinian leadership will take this opportunity, supported by the engagement of the United States, to agree to the best deal possible for its people.

None of the issues is irresolvable if both sides operate in good faith; unfortunately, that commodity has been far less abundant in the region than perhaps anywhere else in the world.

Wayne Bowen, a U.S. Army veteran, received his Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University. He resides in Cape Girardeau.