Applied to the Middle East, linkage takes two forms. An older, more outlandish one, that claims that the Israel's actions cause all the region's problems from Afghanistan to Morocco and, by implication, that those problems will only be solved when Israel does what one demands of it. The newer, more reasonable version, which I first heard from Martin Indyk in 1996 when he was U.S. ambassador to Israel, holds that solving the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to making progress elsewhere in the Middle East. I have documented many expressions of this view.
Both versions are deeply flawed. This weblog entry, in contrast, collects notable arguments against the notion of "linkage."
Martin Kramer elegantly refutes this view in "The Myth of Linkage." (June 12, 2008)
Feb. 24, 2011 update: Danny Ayalon, Israel's deputy minister of foreign affairs, writes about "The Death of Linkage."
Mar. 19, 2013 update: This idea has acquired central importance in the Obama administration's foreign policy; I document this today in "Explaining Obama's Fixation with Israel." I look closely at a statement by James L. Jones, Obama's national security adviser, and explain it resulting from "of a strange belief mainly on the Left, rarely stated overtly, that this issue is key not just to the Middle East but to world problems." Other top administration officials quoted in this article include Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and David Petraeus.
Aug. 4, 2013 update: In a highly unusual and excellent analysis, "Israeli-Palestinian riddle won't answer Middle East's wider woes," Crispian Balmer of Reuters disagrees with the prevalent obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict. His article is worth quoting at length:
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which once transfixed the Arab world, has lost much of its resonance in a Middle East riven by religious strife, political upheaval and economic woes. News that the two sides had resumed peace talks last week after a three-year halt was largely overshadowed by turmoil in Egypt and the Syrian civil war, which has set Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims against one another.
U.S. officials still hope that resolving the decades-old confrontation will help to unlock the region's wider problems, but analysts say it no longer lies at the strategic heart of a troubled Middle East. "That was probably the case before the Arab uprisings, but a number of other struggles have now joined it, such as the Sunni-Shi'ite struggle and an intra-Sunni conflict," said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center think tank. ...
Few people could deny that a resolution of the conflict is long overdue. However, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's devotion of so much energy to the issue, which has been drained of much violence in recent years, has raised some eyebrows given the fires raging elsewhere. ...
A review of thousands of U.S. classified documents posted on the WikiLeaks website suggests that in private, Sunni officials were indeed more interested in discussing Iran and other topics than the fate of the occupied Palestinian Territories.
In public, Muslim leaders have traditionally railed against Israel, happy to fan ordinary Arabs' sincere anger about the plight of the Palestinians - and perhaps deflect criticism of their own failure to make badly needed reforms. Arab leaders can no longer get away with this. The uprisings of the last 2-1/2 years have shown that domestic problems cannot be swept under the carpet. These include a deep economic malaise that a peace deal would do nothing to heal. ...
A deal would also not end all anti-Western sentiment in the region. True, it would empty one important reservoir of poison from the relationship, but suspicions of U.S. and European dealings go much deeper than simply their close ties to Israel. This was laid bare by a 2011 survey conducted in Muslim nations by Pew Research, which showed that a median of 53 percent thought that U.S. and Western policies were one of the top two reasons why Islamic nations were not wealthier. Likewise, the median saying Westerners were selfish, violent, immoral and arrogant exceeded 50 percent, while there was no Muslim nation in which even 30 percent could accept that Arabs conducted the 9/11 attacks on U.S. cities in 2001.
Aug. 25, 2013 update: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu eloquently refuted the Jones thesis today:
there is something very deep and very broad in the turmoil in the Middle East. We see the entire region from Morocco to Afghanistan in turmoil, in convulsion, in instability. And that's an endemic instability that is not rooted in this or that conflict but in the rejection of modernity, in the rejection of moderation, in the rejection of progress, in the rejection of political solutions.
This is in fact the core of the problem in the Middle East. It's something that threatens everyone, threatens moderate regimes, threatens Israel, threatens the West and threatens all those who don't believe in the doctrinaire dogmas that guide the extremists. I say that because for too long people believed that the root cause of this instability in the Middle East was the Palestinian-Israeli problem. It is not the root cause; it's one of its results. It's one of the results of the regional turmoil, and in fact it is merely a manifestation of one of its many problems.
If we have peace with the Palestinians, the centrifuges will not stop spinning in Iran, the turmoil will not stop in Syria, the instability in North Africa will not cease, the attacks on the West will not cease. We want peace for its own sake. We want peace because we want peace with our Palestinian neighbors, because we want to live in peace, and anybody who's been at war know the consequences of not having peace. But this will not put an end to the region's problems. They are far too deep, they are far too many, they require much more complex solutions, but they require solutions.
Sep. 23, 2013 update: Douglas Murray makes mincemeat of the linkage thesis today at "Favorite 'Key Issue' Fizzles Out." Excerpts:
The idea that solving the Israel/Palestinian question is the key to unlocking the problems of the region was what everyone who wanted to sound as if they knew what they were saying was most delighted to say: "What was that about Yemen? Well of course the real problem we need to solve is the Israel/Palestinian issue." Rarely in diplomatic history has so much been got so wrong by so many people for so long.
Murray offers Tony Blair as a foremost example of this mentality:
Blair boasted in his memoirs of his determination to persuade George W. Bush that the quid pro quo for support for the war in Iraq must be a boost to the Israel-Palestinian peace process. Blair's belief in the centrality of the issue was endless—as it remains. Then, as now, it was confirmed by a particular type of politician on the ground. Blair recalls a meeting with the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora in September 2006 in which Siniora stressed that there could never be peace in the region until "Israel/Palestine" was resolved. "With it, everything is possible; without it, nothing is," he said. Blair clearly nodded this through, "I pledged again to do what I could to get the U.S. president to refocus our efforts on it."
Elsewhere Blair recalls another period of mulling on the Israel/Palestinian issue. "With that [the peace talks] stalled, all manner of bad things were going to happen." This idea was not just the pet theory of the Prime Minister. It permeated the Foreign Office establishment as well as Blair's disciples and heirs in Parliament. David Miliband, his former Foreign Secretary was still talking about the centrality of the dispute just last year when, by then in opposition, he used a television interview on something else entirely to talk about that this dispute being the one that was "key" and most in need of addressing.
Other British politicians take after him in this regard:
This is not, however, just a Labour party problem. The Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has repeated the same theme ad nauseum. And so has the Foreign Secretary William Hague and every one of the current political establishment with barely one exception. ... Catherine Ashton—the lamentable EU Foreign Minister—has spent her time in office even since 2009 parroting the "key to the region" motif. She has shown a remarkable ability to hold this thought in her head even as her period of office has seen the Middle East fall apart almost everywhere other than in the Israel/Palestinian areas. Even the former head of the British domestic intelligence service, MI5, has said that the "grievance" over the Israel/Palestinian issue is a factor we must address for domestic security reasons.
Yes, there is hope:
With the civil war in Syria grinding through its third year, Egypt descended into ethnic and inter-religious barbarism, and the American Secretary of State reduced to promising "unbelievably small" action by the world's only super-power, it is hard to find any chinks of light. But one, perhaps, exists. It is that we may finally have seen the explosion of one of the most embedded and central myths of our time: the idea that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the "key" to sorting out the problems of the Middle East.
That's because
In three years of uprisings, overthrows, revolutions and counter-revolutions, barely a protestor in any country has come out onto the streets to express their irritation at current housing arrangements in East Jerusalem. In every instance they have come out to demand a say in their future or to demand work, fair pay, opportunities or simple amenities such as food. The demands of the Palestinian people and their propagandists in the West have not even been at the bottom of the list of demands in a single one of the Arab uprisings. And just as Israel has played no part in their revolutions, so it has played less-than-no part in their ensuing civil conflicts.
Oct. 6, 2013 updates: (1) Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu disputed linkage in a talk today, as translated from Hebrew by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
we are interested in bringing the conflict with the Palestinians to an end. ... In order to bring about an end to the conflict, the root of the conflict must be understood. I bring this up because, in my opinion, in all the discussions regarding the conflict with the Palestinians, at least one thing has been achieved and that is that whoever believed that it was the core of the conflict in the Middle East – well, now it is difficult to say such a thing without sounding absurd. It is not the core of the conflict – not what is happening in Libya or Tunisia or Algeria or Egypt or Yemen or Syria or Iraq and so on and so forth. But for years they told us that the core of the conflict in the Middle East was the Palestinian matter and how shall I put this? That sacred cow is one of the victims of the Arab revolution.
Comment: Netanyahu here addresses the older, absurd linkage theory, that everything wrong in the Middle East in some fashion. results from Israel. It does not address the newer, more reasonable version that addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict will render other issues in the Middle East more solvable.
(2) Gilad Sharon echoes Netanyahu's critique of the old argument as he disputes Obama's United Nations statement today in the Jerusalem Post:
Is our dispute with the Palestinians the source of the clash between the Islamic Brotherhood and the secularists in Egypt? Are we the reason millions of Egyptians from both sides have been pouring into Tahrir Square and slaughtering one another? Is it our fault Syrians are killing one another with both conventional and unconventional weapons? What does the bloodshed in Sudan have to do with us? Or the fighting between the Islamists and the secularists in Algeria? Were we to blame for the Iran-Iraq war? Was Egypt's intervention – and use of chemical weapons – in the civil war in Yemen in the 1960s motivated by the Arab-Israeli conflict? Did Saudi terrorists crash planes into American buildings on 9/11 because of Israel?
Sharon ends on a high note: "Instability is the natural state in the Middle East. The fact is, we [i.e., Israel] are the only stabilizing force in this part of the world."
Nov. 8, 2013 update: Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon bluntly rebuffed linkage: "Unfortunately, [some] tie the Iranian issue to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They tie anything to this conflict. We say, 'Enough, this region is unstable not on account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'."
Dec. 26, 2014 update: Gabriel Scheinmann published "Copernicus and America's Blame Israel Problem," in The National Interest.
Dec. 6, 2015 update: Here's a real surprise. Martin Indyk, whom I informally ascribe the linkage thesis to, has come out four-square against it.
It's time to stop pretending that solving I-P conflict will resolve region's problems. Arab leaders need to get their own houses in order.
— Martin Indyk (@Martin_Indyk) December 6, 2015
Perhaps this change of heart signifies a wider shift in opinion.
Aug. 27, 2017 update: Gregg Carlstrom finds that "no one believes" in linkage anymore at "How Israel Won the War and Defeated the Palestinian Dream," in Newsweek:
Western policymakers once promoted a theory of "linkage," the idea that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would bring peace to the Middle East. No one believes that anymore, not with the entire region in flames. Quite the opposite: Even Arab states, from Egypt to the Gulf, are eager to establish closer ties with Israel, which they see as a useful partner in the fight against both terrorism and Iran.
Sep. 8, 2017 update: A former deputy commander of CentCom told me today that, in contrast to the old days, when Arab leaders invariably started any discussion by bringing up Israel and linkage, now they have more urgent concerns, so Israel and the Palestinians tend to get forgotten.
Dec. 18, 2017 update: The National Security Strategy of the United States of America:
For generations, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been understood as the prime irritant preventing peace and prosperity in the region. Today, the threats from jihadist terrorist organizations and the threat from Iran are creating the realization that Israel is not the cause of the region's problems.
Nov. 19, 2020 update: Here's the most stunning turn-around yet of linkage, as summarized by a headline in Israel Hayom: "Bahraini FM: Israel ties 'will pave the way to a dawn of peace for the entire Middle East'." In other words, there is linkage, but it works opposite from the traditional understanding: making peace with Israel leads to other peaceable relations. Specifically, Bahrain Foreign Minister Abdellatif al-Zayani said:
We will soon witness the reciprocal opening of the two countries' embassies. It is through such foundational context that we begin to nurture and build the networks of investment, business, tourism, culture, and so much more that can further solidify and add value to our joint efforts. I am therefore confident that this emerging cooperation between Bahrain and Israel will pave the way to a dawn of peace for the entire Middle East. The peace we are pursuing will be a warm peace that will deliver clear benefits to our peoples.
