Mideast peace talks: Opportunity or frustration?
By Max J. Castro
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, met in Washington last Thursday to resume direct talks after a 20-month suspension. The talks are the latest in a string of attempts to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — Oslo, Madrid, etc. — all of which have ended in failure. What are the chances that this time the outcome will be different?
Clearly, this effort is much more serious than the last-minute, hapless campaign mounted by the George W. Bush administration to create peace and a Palestinian state during the last year of his presidency. Unlike Bush, president Barack Obama appears fully engaged and committed to tackle the problem early in his administration. In addition, this administration does not quite carry the baggage of the previous one, which was an enabler of even the most reprehensible Israeli actions, especially the devastation of Lebanon.
In Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Senator George Mitchell, the United States has an able pair of negotiators who appear to be respected by both sides in the conflict. Finally, some observers have seen in the present context a “Nixon to China” moment, arguing that only a hard-line Israeli prime minister, such as Binyamin Netanyahu, would be able to sell the Israeli people on a peace deal that the Palestinians could find acceptable. Certainly, Netanyahu has been making all the right noises lately, declaring in Washington: “I came here today to find an historic compromise that will enable both our peoples to live in peace and security and in dignity.” The two sides agreed to continue to meet every two weeks to negotiate all the “core” issues, including Jerusalem, security, borders, and the settlements.
Yet it remains to be seen whether those fine words will be matched by comparable deeds. At the same time that peace talks were underway in Washington, Israel was making plans to resume full-fledged settlement construction once the temporary freeze (which Israel never fully observed) expires on September 26. On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel was unlikely to renew the freeze, at the same time saying the freeze “may continue in another form.” The seemingly confusing announcement appears to be an effort for Israel to resume settlement activities while appearing open to compromise in an effort to avoid blame for the failure of peace talks that is very likely to ensue if Israel expands its settlement activities in the West Bank or Jerusalem.
The resumption of settlement construction means that Israel would be continuing to, in the words of George W. Bush, “create new facts on the ground,” specifically reducing further the dimensions and viability of any future Palestinian state. It seems inconceivable that Abbas could hope to count with the support of his people if he decides to continue talks with Israel at the same time that Israel is gobbling up more Palestinian land. As it is, the legitimacy of Abbas as the representative of the Palestinian people is already open to question. It was Hamas, after all, not Fatah, the group led by Abbas, that won the democratic elections that Bush and Condoleeza Rice had so insisted upon, after which Israel, the United States and its allies set out to punish the Palestinian people for making the wrong electoral choice. Indeed, the elephant in the room is the exclusion of Hamas (labeled a terrorist organization), which controls Gaza and its 1.5 million Palestinians, from the peace talks. Can the Israelis and the Palestinians reach any kind of enduring agreement while excluding the party that won the only democratic election in Palestinian history?
Finally, there’s the role of the United States and the Obama administration. The difference in power between Israel and the Palestinians is so abysmal that it would require the United States — Israel’s only friend and benefactor (to the tune of $3 billion a year) in the world — to lean very heavily on Israel to achieve anything resembling a level playing field in order to attain a settlement acceptable to the Palestinian people. Yet it is evident that Washington is not ready to do any such thing. Remember that the Obama administration recently beat a hasty retreat after a ferocious reaction by Israel and the unconditional pro-Israel sector in this country (including in Congress) in response to very mild demands issued to Israel by Washington. How much spine vis-à-vis Israel can be expected from the Obama administration now that it is busy hunting for votes and looking for campaign contributions to avert an electoral disaster in November? To boot, the Republicans are avidly waiting to exploit any sign of a change in the United States’ virtually unconditional support for Israel to attract votes from the Jewish community, which in the past has voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
It would be nice to think that this time it will be different than all the other times. Yet it will take enormous courage and a diplomatic tour-de-force on the part of Obama worthy of his Nobel Peace prize to make it so.
