Lessons Learned in Mediating Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians

I am reading The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process by Clayton Swisher. This is a modern history of the events in the Clinton administration from 1999 to 2000 concerning US attempts to mediate peace between Israel and Syria and Israel and the Palestinians. The conventional wisdom and media reported that the collapse of each of these mediations was due to the intransigence of Hafez al-Asad, the leader of Syria, and Yassar Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Authority. What Swisher portrays is something very different.

Swisher interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the mediation, including former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and other high level officials in the US, Syria, Israel, and in the Palestinian Authority. As the story unfolds, we begin to see that the fundamental problems were not the intransigence of Asad and Arafat. Instead, the problems were caused by the unskilled, unprepared, biased, and incompetent team of mediators fielded by the United States. Any experienced commercial or family mediator reading this book will cringe at the rookie mistakes made time after time by the U.S. mediators, including the sitting President of the United States. The ethical mediation principal of impartiality and neutrality was completely abandoned as we learn how Dennis Ross, the chief mediator on the US team, was grossly biased in favor of Israel. President Clinton, desperate for an opportunity to end his administration on a high note in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky affair, essentially misrepresented offers and counter-offers to the representatives of Syria and the Palestinian Authority in the hope that he could force a deal. The mediators misread the parties time after time, ignoring cues and emotional data that any reasonably competent mediator would have seen. The utter lack of transparency, authenticity, and integrity of the mediation process is breathtaking when one considers the stakes of the negotiation.

We are led to believe that the people in charge are mediating and negotiating international disputes, conflicts, and wars because they are the best, the brightest, the most experienced, and the most knowledgeable. The Truth About Camp David is a chilling wake-up call that when those in power have little professional expertise, knowledge, or experience in mediating  deep and intractable conflicts, bad things happen. This is a great book of how not to conduct any mediation and especially how not to mediate deep, serious, and difficult international conflicts.

As the Obama Administration again attempts to mediate peace between Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority, let us hope that it brings in skilled, experienced, competent mediators and not political hacks or diplomats using 18th century techniques and processes. What is needed is a modern mediation and negotiation approach based on best practices. Otherwise peace will be unattainable.

COP15 Will Fail Without a Different Process

The run-up to the COP15 Climate Change meeting in Copenhagen is illustrating the problem of using 18th century diplomacy for a 21st century problem. What is needed is an inclusive problem-solving process that is based on principles of interest-based negotiation, rather than distributive negotiation.

Diplomacy is based largely on representative negotiation through power projection. The Teddy Roosevelt aphorism, “Talk softly, but carry a big stick,” summarizes the concept. In diplomatic negotiation, the powerful generally get their way over the less powerful unless the less powerful help the powerful to create coalitions. For example, the U.S.-Israel coalition can be seen as protecting U.S. strategic interests (read oil here) in the Middle East. Thus, Israel may have influence in U.S. policy over and above its relative size, power, and resources. If an important small coalition partner becomes intractable on an issue (say, for example, the issue of West Bank settlements), the more powerful partner may be caught in a bind. This type of negotiation, involving economic, political, and physical security, is called distributive negotiation. In this type of bargaining, one person loses, while others gain. Generally, the person with more power tends to win, and terrorism can be seen from a negotiation perspective as a response to this power-based way of doing business in the world.
Power-based, winner-take-all negotiations is ill-suited to global climate change issues. Decisions will have to be made consciously, collectively, and carefully or mother Earth will make them for us. Thus, projecting power into the COP15 Conference may result in short-term protections for the powerful and long-term devastation for everyone. News reports in past few days already show that the conference is heading in this direction.


Yesterday, Jennifer Dloughy of the Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau reported that the Senate Finance committee, composed mostly of senators from extraction and heavy manufacturing industry states (read high carbon output states), took testimony from economists that carbon limitations would eliminate jobs and industries. She reported:

“Even so, manufacturing would sustain heavy job losses under the climate change proposal, predicted Margo Thorning, chief economist for the American Council on Capital Formation, a conservative think tank. Thorning estimated that even with new jobs created in “green industries,” there would be a net loss of 80,000 jobs in 2020, with more than half of them from the manufacturing sector.

Kenneth Green, a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank, said the proposed cap-and-trade program “will cause significant economic harm and will kill and export jobs, for little or no environmental benefit.”

At the same time, the less powerful nations coming away from the Barcelona talks, are demanding that the developed industrial nations pay 1.5 percent of their gross domestic economic output to finance carbon free industrial development in under-developed nations. The declaration states:

“{We}Call upon developed countries to provide public money amounting to at least 1.5 percent of their gross domestic product, in addition to innovative sources of finance, annually by 2015 to assist developing countries make their transition to a climate resilient low-carbon economy. This grant-based finance must be predictable, sustainable, transparent, new and additional – on top of developed country commitments to deliver 0.7 percent of their gross national income as overseas development assistance.”

Here we have the problem of global warming framed as a distributive problem: Loss of jobs and payment of money from the rich to the poor. As a mediator and peacemaker, I predict total failure at COP15 unless the question is reframed and the process redirected.

An interest-based process would look quite different. First, skilled and experienced mediators should be retained to develop and manage the negotiation process. Diplomats like to think they are good negotiators, and truth is that even good negotiators need the help of neutral outsiders to help them. Second, the parties to COP15 should commit to problem-solving processes rather than winner-take-all negotiations. The current debate is positional (loss of jobs) rather than interest-based (economic security and certainty for constituencies and stakeholders). Once positions have been broken  down into interests (e.g., what are the interests that underlie a position), the parties would be asked to engage in problem-solving processes. The identified interests are seen as the universe of the problem and must be satisfied for good agreements to be reached. All of this would be done under the control and management of mediators. Parties would never be asked to give up power. They would only be asked to participate in good faith in the process. Ultimately, each nation would have to decide for itself whether the proposed agreements and solutions make sense. However, by following an interest-based process, the orientation shifts from “I win-You lose” to “We have a joint problem that we can solve together so that all of our needs are met.”


COP15 is a crucial test of global cooperation for the benefit of all beings and life on this planet. If business is done as usual, the test will be failed. I urge the attendees at COP15 to step away from old processes that have failed us in the past to try something different. Only then will there be a chance cooperative change on climate issues.

California Constitutional Convention - No Politicians Please

Gavin Newsom, among others and including California Forward, are calling for a constitutional convention to rewrite, simplify, and change the way California government operates. In principle, this is a good idea and long overdue. The devil is in the details. For the past 20 years, California governors have been unable to govern and the legislature has been in effective deadlock. As a result of term limits, special interests dominate decision making. Gerrymandering legislative districts has insured highly partisan ideologies to dominate in public debate. State and local employees (prison guards and teachers in particular) diligently and rabidly protect their own at the expense of everyone else. Fiat by initiative funded by special interests or narrow political groups is the order of the day. In the face of this mess, all of it protected by the First Amendment right to free speech and the freedom to petition government, one wonders how a constitutional convention could possibly succeed.

Although the convention process is far from being decided or even outlined, it seems to me a few fundamental ground rules ought to be in place. First, no elected officials past or present should be part of the constitutional convention. There are plenty of really intelligent people in California not in politics who could be drafted as delegates. Politics should be as absent from the convention as possible. Second, every delegate should be trained in collaborative decision making, interest-based negotiation, conflict resolution, and fundamental principles of emotional intelligence. These classes should be mandatory to teach people the social and negotiation skills necessary to deal with sharply devisive issues. Third, the regions of the state should be represented by more than population size. Two thirds of California is rural and looks more like the midwest and, of course, is under represented in the political structure. The interior portions of California hold all of the natural resources, especially water, and therefore should have a pretty hefty say in the process. Fourth, there should be some advisory process in place to legally test constitutional provisions provisionally. Even if a constitutional convention creates a new document that is approved by the people and the legislature, it faces decades of challenges by interest groups unhappy with the inevitable loss of power, protection, and privilege.

I am sure that there are other fundamental procedures and ground rules that will be thought about and debated. I would like politicians like Mayor Newsom to elaborate on how they see the process developing and unfolding so we can judge whether their ideas of a convention make sense. The cry for a California constitutional convention will be come louder in the next year. Let's ask for details early and not let the process be decided in a cloakroom out of the public eye.