Committee of the Outside?

Over at The Occasional Dissident, Alan suggests the creation of a Committee of the Outside, loosely modeled on the Committee of the Whole during the US Constitutional Convention, to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue:

I propose that a “Committee of the Outside” be formed to negotiate an agreement—a report in the Constitutional Convention model—for a permanent peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. By “Outside” I mean former officials, academics, cultural leaders, and citizens from all walks of life who are outside of, and willing to remain unconnected to, their governments. These two groups, one Israeli, one Palestinian, should self-elect their members, permitting anyone willing to engage in the process for the entire duration, say, up to three years, to add their name to a list of candidates. Each candidate could then be offered three votes to cast for candidates other than themselves. The top twenty-five candidates from each list would join the Committee. These members would take an oath to remain removed from the political proceedings of their governments, would commit themselves to working solely within the proceedings of the Committee, and would swear to keep the proceedings secret until a final report is approved and released.

Alan's basic argument is that committees can work as an institutional arrangement to negotiate and resolve sensitive and problematic issues, as the Committee of the Whole demonstrated. This seems compelling, but I fear misses something important.

First, the analogy falls apart when you realize that the American states already recognized themselves as part of a United States, and so you had members of one nation debating about how to organize the nation to which they'd already agreed to be a part. When in the Middle East question, you have one state and one potential, nascent state, which means two different states. Second, the religious, racial, and cultural issues were not present or at least not on the scale that they are in the Middle East question. Third, despite Alan's proposed process for selecting members, I'm not sure they'd have legitimacy. Fourth, while the idea that the members would stand separate, and presumably somehow untainted, from political proceedings of their respective governments is appealing, I question whether this is possible or even desirable. This is similar to complaints or ideas that politicians are cause of political problems. That somehow if we could just remove the politicians, then the problems would go away. When in fact the divisions among politicians are mostly reflecting political divisions among the populace. Sure, politicians can rile up the folks and exploit division, but they don't create the division out of thin air. They make use of an existing issue. In this case, there are definite, tangible, long-standing issues that separate the two sides that produce the political tension.

All told, I don't think it's a bad idea. It's certainly worth a shot. If a simple institutional change can resolve or improve the situation, then fine by me. If this institutional structure can mitigate the fourth point, the rhetoric emphasizing division, then perhaps it will do some good and I can't see how it would hurt.