That's what Aaron David Miller suggests the US needs to be, in looking for peace in the Middle East. He has seven pieces of advice for Barack Obama - 'observations gathered from almost 20 years of traveling the negotiator's highway'. Here are the first two of them:
First, keep in mind that there are no deals to be done on the cheap. In the Clinton administration, we never really understood what was required to reach a deal. Nor were we forthright enough with the Arabs and the Israelis about the price they'd have to pay. If Obama wants to succeed, he must free himself from any illusions that Israel can give much less than the West Bank and all of the Golan Heights, or that the Palestinians and Syria can evade their responsibilities when it comes to offering Israel meaningful peace and real security.
Second, keep the process honest. Arab-Israeli peace may not be the administration's top priority, but if it wants a chance to succeed, it better make clear to Arabs, Israelis and to their domestic supporters that it won't be pushed around or taken for granted. Neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush ever got this quite right. Obama should make it clear that his administration will not be part of a phony or self-destructive process in which Israeli settlement activity or Palestinian incitement, violence or half-hearted security efforts undermine the environment for negotiations.
It's strange; I don't have any years of travelling the negotiator's highway, but these two things I would have just taken for granted from the off. The report here is also apposite.
Also apropos is this review of a new book by Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, defending the Zionist idea:
Mr Yakobson and Mr Rubinstein are both Israelis, the former a historian, the latter a professor of law who served in the cabinet of Yitzhak Rabin. In rebutting the arguments of Mr Judt and others [that the Jewish state is an anachronism], their aim is not to whitewash Israel. They strongly oppose the colonisation of the West Bank and admit that, in practice, Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens has fallen far short of the standard that should be demanded of a liberal democracy. But however deficient the practice, they say, there is no reason in principle why Israel cannot be both a Jewish state and a democracy whose non-Jewish citizens enjoy full civil equality. On the contrary, they insist, it is those who do not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state who undermine the principle of equality, by denying to the Jews the right of self-determination they extend to others.
.....
Some say it was preposterous of the UN in 1947 to bring into being a Jewish state on the basis of a mystical land claim stretching back thousands of years. But this, as Messrs Yakobson and Rubinstein explain, is not what the UN did. Its decision was based hardly at all on the Bible and mostly on the political realities of the time: the actual presence in mandatory Palestine in the 1940s of two peoples whose equally authentic national aspirations seemed impossible to fulfil except by partition. The UN also noted that hundreds of thousands of displaced Holocaust survivors were desperate to leave Europe and they were welcome almost nowhere else.
(For the last of these links, thanks: NP.)