Going, Going, Gone
JERUSALEM — Among the minor fiascoes of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, the rapid White House-to-wipe-out course of Middle Eastern diplomacy in recent weeks rates high.
No U.S. president should invest his personal capital by inaugurating direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders when those talks are set to abort weeks later over an issue — Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank — that’s long been sitting there like a big truck on the road.
Yet that’s what President Barack Obama has just done, allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to snub a personal request that a 10-month moratorium on building in the West Bank be extended in the interests of negotiation. Palestine can’t get born if the land for it keeps eroding.
The amateurish air of desperation attending this unseemly sequence has now given way to the outright desperation of American-Israeli horse-trading over what concessions, guarantees, blandishments, military hardware et al. the United States might offer Israel in exchange for a 60-day extension of said moratorium.
The only positive note is that it seems nobody wants the process to unravel terminally. Arab states have given the United States until early November to barter; the Palestinians have pressed pause rather than stop; Israel is eyeing tactical advantage. If talks are to resume, and I expect they will, here are 10 key pointers:
1) The United States, in seeking to draw Israel back to the table, needs to be very careful not to give itself the opposite problem by crossing Palestinian red lines. The promise of U.S. support for a long-term Israeli security presence in the strategic Jordan Valley — one idea that’s been aired — would do that. As one senior European official said, “You can be incredibly creative about security provided Palestinians don’t wake up the day after they have a state and find they still have an occupation.”
2) If the Palestinians overplay their hand by opting for unilateralism they will add another big mistake to a long chapter of strategic errors. Abandoning talks in favor of seeking recognition of independence from international bodies like the United Nations for a Palestinian state would take Palestine-in-waiting down a blind alley. Such recognition, if attainable, would not open roads, deliver water, create ports or airports, enhance security, remove Israeli troops or usher Palestinians from unsustainable victimhood to viable sovereignty. It’s the “fix” that solves nothing.
3) Netanyahu’s push for up-front Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” is a non-starter. The Palestine Liberation Organization has recognized Israel; it’s not going to get into the state’s nature. In reality the “Jewish state” opening gambit is an attempt to settle the Palestinian refugee issue ahead of discussion of other final-status questions like borders. That can’t work. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, has said a peace accord would settle all “historical demands” — code for refugees and enough for now.
4) Netanyahu stands at Israel’s new political center, which is to the right of where it was five years ago. An iron-clad Israeli narrative exists: We removed settlements from Gaza and look what we got — Hamas rockets! That’s the prism through which withdrawal from the West Bank is viewed. You can dispute the narrative but it’s there. So Palestinians must deal with it. Their thirst for sovereignty is matched only in intensity by Israel’s insistence on security. Here lies the hinge of peace.
5) There are the facts on the ground and the political process. The former must buttress the latter. West Bank facts are very encouraging. Palestinians have gotten serious about their security forces and recognized that no state can exist without the rule of law — or with multiple militias. Israel needs to be much more proactive in expanding areas in which Palestinian security forces can operate, freeing movement and facilitating investment. That’s how to buttress the Palestine it wants.
6) Authoritarian Arab states have tilted away from seeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a useful steam-releasing distraction toward concern that it feeds a destabilizing Iranian-backed “resistance front.” They will not make the first move but will support a peace that sees Israel return to its 1967 borders with agreed land swaps.
7) A fuse is burning. All the Palestinian efforts in the West Bank are geared to statehood within about a year. A similar objective has been set by Obama and endorsed by major international powers. If the immense headway made in Palestinian institution-building is seen to be vain, anger could again overflow into self-defeating violence.
8) If there is enough momentum by the second half of next year to suggest Palestinian statehood is a train leaving the station, a majority of Palestinians in Gaza will board it. Then peace becomes a political dilemma for Hamas. Palestinians can resolve their internal differences but not if Israeli shortsightedness strips moderates of leverage.
9) There will be no Palestinian state without East Jerusalem as its capital. How “East Jerusalem” is defined remains to be seen. This may as well be said up front.
10) This is the last best chance for peace in the foreseeable future. It demands immense courage and some risk-taking on both sides. So it will almost certainly fail.
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