Failure has a bad name; it is associated with negative images: refusal, inability, and, well, failure. Under certain conditions, however, failure can be seen as a more complex concept. Failure to achieve a predefined objective; or failure in one’s efforts to meet certain obligations can be traumatising experiences. But it can also be an opportunity to learn from one’s failure. In this context failure has the potential of being a valuable learning experience, which may improve the odds of doing even better than previously anticipated. Failure in this context not only is a potential learning experience, but it is also a promoter of a certain strength of character. Not everyone has the courage to undertake a venture which carries with it a risk of failure and loss.
One should note however, that the learning opportunity inherent in failure is not endless. If using the same tools, proceeding from the same assumptions, and employing the same methodology produce failure after failure, then repeating the same experiment and expecting it to yield different results will not be an act of courage but rather a demonstration of foolhardiness. As someone observed upon hearing that the legendary comedian Mickey Rooney, who died a few weeks ago, had married for the 9th time: This must be the triumph of hope over experience. Scientists and medical researchers learn not to draw any conclusions from scientific experiments unless they can verify and demonstrate the reliability and the validity of the experiment.
Social scientists are generally expected to follow scientific models. But if one persists in repeating a failed experiment without any modifications of the basic assumptions, one must question the intellectual integrity of the experiment and the bankruptcy of its assumptions.
And this describes the US-based peace process: It simply lacks intellectual integrity. It is void of a universal and commonly agreed upon definition of peace. It uses the wrong frame of reference: It relies on the concept of balance of power, which hugely favours the powerful (Israel), at the expense of the weaker party (the Palestinians). It foolishly makes peace dependent on the perpetration of the present asymmetry of power: Under these conditions the prospect of achieving a just and lasting peace are more elusive than ever. The peace process is simply not designed to accomplish what it claims to be seeking to achieve.
Perhaps the most insurmountable of obstacles resides in the absence of will and intention on the part of various Israeli leaders to live in peace with the Palestinians.
Former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir infamously justified his refusal to go to the Madrid Peace Conference sponsored by the US by saying: no to recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); no to negotiations, and no to self-determination for the Palestinians.
Shamir eventually was dragged to the Madrid conference after US president George Bush senior suspended $2 billion of loan guarantees to Israel.
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Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon distinguished himself as a killer of Arabs from the Queba massacre in 1954 to the invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. As a prime minister his views did not substantially change. One of his senior advisors, Dov Wiseglass, is famous for having admitted in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in October 2004, that the disengagement from Gaza was a ploy to freeze the political track and put an end to the negotiations
“And when you freeze that process,” he told Haaretz, “you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and [occupied] Jerusalem.”
The present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no different, except that he is in fact, more hypocritical and more manipulatively deceptive. Recently the Television and the press in Israel broadcasted secretly taped admissions made by Netanyahu. Boasting and using a self-congratulatory tone on film, Netanyahu tells a family of colonists he was visiting that he deceived then US president Bill Clinton by pretending to be implementing the Oslo Accords, when in fact, he was consolidating the occupation. He tells how he is able to deceive and manipulate the American public. And he credits himself with destroying the Oslo Accords. His current strategy of lies and half truths to block the peace process is attested to by his reneging on the agreement to free Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and by announcing that more colonies are to be built in occupied East Jerusalem — a fail-safe strategy to derail and block the peace process
In the face of the repeated failures of the peace process, its principal sponsor, Washington, should have asked why and should have learned some lessons. The fact that the same process, methodology and assumptions bring only failure without in the least disturbing the principal sponsor suggests that we must look for the cause in the answer to the question: Why nothing changes? The inevitable answer is because the process lacks integrity.
The New York Times, supported the peace process and often warned of the danger of not learning lessons from the failures of the process. But last week, the New York Times finally noticed that the process lacked integrity and advised the Obama administration to give up and focus on other pressing issues. In an editorial entitled The Middle East: Time to move on the influential paper is right in finally concluding that the process has come to a dead end, but it is wrong in arguing that the parties are to blame because they are not ready.
The peace settlement can only come from Washington — the principal financier of the colonies and the principal backer of Israel. In the absence of a determined stand by Washington, Israeli leaders will not move. And, why should they? The status quo is comfortable and there is no obvious ticking bomb. The so-called demographic bomb threatens the democratic character of Israeli society but not Israel itself, especially if the insistence on a Jewish character can be used to justify all sorts of discriminatory practices.
Adel Safty is distinguished visiting professor and special adviser to the rector at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His book, Might Over Right, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky and published in England by Garnet, 2009.
