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JERUSALEM — Preventive diplomacy, by its nature, doesn’t usually result in splashy headlines for the practitioner.
In his almost six years as the highest United Nations envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian battle, Nickolay E. Mladenov labored quietly behind the scenes to assist preserve the Gaza Strip from boiling over, protect the opportunity of a two-state resolution and construct assist for Israeli-Arab normalization as a vastly preferable various to the Israeli annexation of West Bank land.
But he did notch at the very least one achievement that qualifies as eye-catching: He earned the respect of nearly everybody he handled, a lot of whom view each other as enemies.
“A very honest broker,” Rami Hamdallah, a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, known as him.
“I personally depended on him,” mentioned Moshe Kahlon, a former Israeli finance minister.
“A man of integrity,” mentioned Jason Greenblatt, the Trump administration’s former Middle East envoy.
“We are proud to have known him,” mentioned Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy Hamas chief in Gaza.
Mr. Mladenov, 48, whose final day on the job was Thursday, is returning to his native Bulgaria, having abruptly bowed out of one other high-profile project, in Libya, to cope with what he described as a critical well being drawback.
In a two-hour exit interview, he recalled being stunned at how irrelevant he initially felt upon arriving in Jerusalem in 2015 as U.N. particular coordinator for the Middle East peace course of — a put up created in 1999, when there nonetheless was a peace course of.
His predecessors had by and enormous functioned as gadflies, consultants mentioned, firing off statements that tended to criticize Israel however seldom venturing from the sidelines. Israelis dismissed the U.N. — “Um” in Hebrew — with a tart “Um, shmum.”
“This mission was very much isolated from any sort of high-level interaction,” Mr. Mladenov mentioned. “Nobody took it seriously. Basically, one side expects you to just repeat what they say, the other side expects you to go away, and that’s it.”
He did neither.
In 2016, he wrangled the Middle East Quartet of mediators — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — into issuing a groundbreaking report on concrete steps that, with little hope of a breakthrough, may at the very least protect the opportunity of a two-state resolution.
Taking motion within the absence of negotiations ran opposite to diplomatic doctrine on the time, which held that resuming peace talks was paramount and the best way to unravel every thing.
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Mr. Mladenov mentioned. “You can have the best deal in the world,” however so long as Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza are at odds, he mentioned, “good luck with implementing it.”
His strategy has since gained widespread acceptance.
One Quartet suggestion, urging Israel to halt its West Bank settlement enterprise, was hardly novel. But one other — calling on the Palestinians to “cease incitement to violence” and condemn “all acts of terrorism” — required “a shift in everyone’s position,” he mentioned.
It required much less of a leap for Mr. Mladenov. As Bulgaria’s international minister, he had labored with Israeli officers within the aftermath of a 2012 suicide bombing in Burgas that killed a bus driver and 5 Israeli vacationers, an assault attributed to Hezbollah.
As the U.N. envoy, he caught flak over his bluntness. “I don’t talk about this conflict in the usual way,” he mentioned. “You cannot go into a restaurant in Tel Aviv, shoot at people and tell me later that that’s legitimate resistance. No, it’s not.”
Mr. Mladenov was equally unsparing when Israeli settlers burned a Palestinian household alive. And after Israeli troopers killed a 15-year-old Gaza boy throughout border demonstrations in 2018, he tweeted, “Stop shooting at children.”
“If you as the U.N. are not clear where you stand on these things, you can’t be credible,” he mentioned. “And I suppose that being critical of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, where I felt that they’ve done things wrong, and welcoming them when they’ve done things right — I think that’s a novelty in this frozen conflict.”
He additionally quietly received issues finished.
In Gaza, a territory perennially on the point of one other struggle, he made it his mission to keep away from one.
In 2018, the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, was making an attempt to strangle its archrival Hamas, which controls Gaza, into submission by withholding cash for Gaza’s energy plant and slashing its Gaza payroll. Gaza’s economic system was on the breaking point. Then got here waves of violence between Gaza and Israel — border killings, arson balloons and rockets.
Yet with Egypt mediating, Mr. Mladenov did an end-run across the Palestinian Authority, arranging for the Qataris to produce very important financing to maintain the lights on and cash flowing in Gaza — whereas retaining Israel and Hamas kind of on the identical web page.
Nimrod Novik, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator, mentioned that Mr. Mladenov noticed the right way to body his arguments by way of every social gathering’s pursuits. “You can say to the Israelis, ‘Look, life in Gaza is so miserable,’” Mr. Novik mentioned. “Or you can say, ‘Gaza’s about to explode in your face, but if we do one-two-three we can gain quite a few months of tranquillity, so help me help you.’”
Mr. Mladenov mentioned he feared that one other Gaza struggle would have let the world revert to its “usual talking points about this place,” doomed any hope of peace talks, left a “Somalia on Israel’s doorstep,” drawn condemnation of Israel from throughout the Arab world and deterred donor nations from paying to rebuild Gaza the best way they did after the 2014 struggle.
It would have been a lot simpler to “sit on the sidelines and preach,” he mentioned, however “preaching never gets you anywhere.”
“I come from the Balkans,” he mentioned. “We’ve changed borders. We’ve fought over holy places, languages, churches. We’ve exchanged populations, for 100 years, if not more. And when you carry that baggage, it does help you see things a bit differently. This is not a conflict where you can come in and just draw a line. It’s emotional.”
“I know from my own experience that when the quote-unquote foreigners come and tell you what to do, you just shut them off. You’re like, ‘Thank you very much,’” he added. “You can’t preach to these guys. Remember, they’ve been it at it for half a century.”
Last spring, insiders say, Mr. Mladenov was among the many first officers to conclude that no deterrent would cease Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel from making good on his guarantees to annex West Bank territory, however that it is perhaps attainable to induce him to drop annexation for an even bigger prize: normalization with Arab states that had lengthy shunned Israel.
The annexation plan “was gaining momentum,” he mentioned. “And were it to happen, it would be terrible for Israel.” Forget about one other Gaza cease-fire, he mentioned. Imagine the worldwide condemnation.
“My thinking was: If this is the wrong way to go but you can see why it would be appealing to certain parts of the population, what would be appealing to a larger part that is not destructive but actually constructive?”
He didn’t declare credit score for the offers Israel struck. But he labored to construct a constituency for the thought of utilizing normalization as a carrot to reward Israel for dropping annexation.
“There were some people who were very much caught off guard by this,” mentioned Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, who headed the White House Middle East group. “He saw what we were doing. We confided in him, and he would give us constructive feedback.”
The Palestinians noticed these offers as a catastrophic betrayal, however Mr. Mladenov argued that normalization would show helpful for them, too.
“OK, now it’s very emotional, the Palestinians are super angry,” he mentioned. “But put away those emotions and think: Who’s most effective when they try to push Israel to do certain things? Egypt and Jordan. If four, six or 10 Arab countries have embassies in Tel Aviv, you’d want them to be on your side, right?”
“You now have a treaty,” he added. “That’s a big thing. Neither Israel nor the Arab countries will want to ruin it. That gives certain countries leverage in Israel. If you’re the Palestinians, you’ll really want to explain to your Arab brothers and friends what your positions are, and bring them back to the table on your side of the conversation.”
Mr. Mladenov was no fan of the Trump peace plan. But he mentioned that the modifications underway had been creating thrilling potentialities for his successor as U.N. envoy, the Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland.
“It’s a different world,” Mr. Mladenov mentioned. “And you know, for all its faults, it might actually be a better one.”
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