By Victor Kotsev
“We are waiting for the United States to give us [its] undivided attention,” Jordan’s King Abdullah said in an interview this month, speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “If we don’t get a clear mandate over the next month or so, I’m not convinced we will be able to move forward.”
The king’s words and a grim picture he painted of “decades of instability” as an alternative, added gravity to US President Barack Obama’s own assessment. Speaking to Time magazine, Obama last month voiced his dismay at the absence of brave
leaders among the Israelis and Palestinians. “I’ll be honest with you, this is just really hard,” he acknowledged. “If we had anticipated some of these problems, we might not have raised expectations as high.”
Rather than conceding defeat, Obama vowed to continue efforts to implement the two-state solution. Still, his words revealed deep frustration and even suggested grumbling – which, coming from the president of the most powerful country in the world and the most recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate, does not bode well for the Middle East.
On the one hand, some progress has been made in gaining concessions. US pressure persuaded Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to scale back security measures in the West Bank and to agree to the formula of two states for two peoples. In November, the Israeli government implemented a 10-month partial settlement freeze: a step condemned by the Palestinians as insufficient but nevertheless hailed as “unprecedented” by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the international community. As recently as December, US officials were voicing optimism and talking about the creation of a Palestinian state within two years.
Unfortunately, such projections could prove even less realistic than the inflated expectations Obama mentioned in the Time interview. The US administration faces an intractable situation on the ground. Netanyahu’s right-wing government, elected last year, doesn’t trust the peaceful intentions of the Palestinians and isn’t willing to make painful concessions. “It is not possible to reach a full agreement within two years,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned bluntly, quoted by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.
There are major disagreements between the Americans and Israelis, but despite Israel’s strong dependence on the US, Obama has been unable to impose his vision on Netanyahu and the Obama administration has made several miscalculations in the past year. Initially, Obama insisted on a full settlement halt, but backed down when it turned out that Israeli law did not permit a freeze on housing projects that had already been approved. His attempt to meddle with Israeli construction policies in East Jerusalem foundered when he was forced to face the fact that no Israeli prime minister could allow this and survive politically.
These reverses caused an uproar in the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to restart negotiations. American officials attempted to assuage the Palestinians by promising further pressure on Israel and further concessions once the talks resumed, but Abbas was adamant. By most accounts, the PA is currently too weak domestically to restart the talks.
Moreover, according to most analysts, upcoming US congressional elections are threatening to weaken US resolve to pressure Israel. With the specter of recent defeat in Massachusetts hanging over the Democrats, Obama is unlikely to enter into major confrontation with the Israeli government.
It is also increasingly likely that, in the aftermath of the elections, the Republicans will be able to use congress to influence foreign policy. “If Obama’s popularity continues to dive and the Republicans recapture at least one of the houses of congress in November, Netanyahu and his partners will be able to breathe deep and continue expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” Israeli political analyst Aluf Benn wrote in Ha’aretz. These considerations are likely an important part of what Jordan’s king also had in mind when he called for “undivided attention” from the US.
Matters were not helped at the weekend when Netanyahu announced plans to add two major religious sites in the West Bank to the country’s national heritage list. He said the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem would be included in a $107 million restoration plan. The PA warned the decision would “wreck” any peace efforts.
With respect to the Palestinians, it could be said that Obama’s major success in the past year was the avoidance of total failure. The Egyptian-brokered Palestinian reconciliation talks reached a dead-end a couple of months ago, and there continues to be no single representative for the Palestinian people as a whole: something that gives credence to Israel’s claim that there is nobody to talk to. Hamas refuses adamantly to recognize the Jewish state and to conduct final status negotiations, while the popular backing of the more moderate PA is alarmingly low. A month ago, representatives of Abbas’ Fatah party warned that a new intifada (uprising) may be imminent, only this time directed against the PA as well as Israel.
In the past months, Abbas has repeatedly threatened to resign and his senior aides have called for drastic unilateral measures ranging from the dissolution of the PA to a declaration of independence as per the example of Kosovo. “The EU [European Union] recognized the state of Kosovo before other official channels supported its claim, and the same should be done for the Palestinians,” Abbas’ chief negotiator Saeb Erekat claimed last November.
Either one of those moves would be fatal for the peace process in its current shape and would constitute a major setback for Obama. The dissolution of the PA would imply a Palestinian civil rights struggle to integrate into Israeli society; it would pose a demographic challenge to the Jewish character of Israel and would be undermined by the fact that most Israelis and Palestinians are hostile to the idea of sharing a state. On the other hand, a unilateral declaration of independence along the 1967 borders (including a claim on East Jerusalem), if backed by the United Nations Security Council, would automatically put newly created Palestine into a state of war with Israel – and provoke unilateral Israeli into measures such as annexation of territory.
The Obama administration repeatedly propped up the PA in hopes of avoiding a collapse of the peace process. On a day-to-day level, the removal of numerous roadblocks from the West Bank made life easier for Palestinians, winning some popular approval for the Western-backed PA. The Americans played a vital role in making possible the first Fatah convention in 20 years, in which re-election as party leader further returned Abbas some legitimacy.
In addition to pressuring Israel to accept Palestinian demands, Obama increased American financial aid to the PA (to $900 million in 2009, from $600 million a year earlier). He extended the term of US General Keith Dayton, who is currently in charge of training PA security forces, by two years, and delivered a historic address to the Muslim world in Cairo in which he promised that “America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own”. All in all, with the support of American allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Obama thus far managed to dissuade the Palestinian president from taking actions that would be fatal to the peace process.
Despite these efforts and small successes, the Middle East peace process is stalled, and time is running short. After special envoy George Mitchell’s latest failure to bring Abbas back to the table a couple of weeks ago, the American administration started pushing for indirect talks, with Mitchell shuttling back and forth between the sides.
There is no clear answer from the PA yet, but even if Abbas agrees, indirect talks would be a poorly masked retreat for Obama and a further signal that a peace agreement is not close at hand. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the partial Israeli settlement freeze, and elections are coming up in the summer for the Palestinians. So far, Abbas has insisted he will not run. Unless something changes there is a serious danger that the next Palestinian president will be from Hamas, which would destabilize the West Bank and finally put an end to the peace process.
To cap this grim outlook, the growing sense of frustration on both sides is marked by deepening military tension in Gaza and violence in the West Bank. Two knife attacks against Israeli soldiers in the West Bank resulted in the deaths of a soldier and a Palestinian. In Gaza, rocket launches against Israeli cities and exchanges of fire between militants and the Israeli army have become routine. Warnings have increased that another flair-up might be imminent.
“We are facing another round in Gaza,” claimed former Israeli army chief for Gaza, Major General Yom-Tov Samia, who played a key role during last year’s operation Cast Lead – the three-week conflict in the Gaza Strip. “I am very skeptical about the chance that Hamas will suddenly surrender or change its way without first suffering a far more serious blow than it did during Cast Lead.”
The rhetoric has hardened on both sides, with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warning Hamas to “watch your step” over rocket fire and Hamas supreme leader Khaled Meshal threatening that the “next war with Israel will be a regional conflict”.
It is an historical axiom that outlooks are sometimes deceptive. Even at the peak of violence, researchers of conflict argued there are hidden forces at work to set the foundations of lasting peace, and sometimes these forces prevail before much blood is spilled.
In theory, all the problems in the peace process could be solved in two years. In practice, however, this seems like a miracle worth more than a Nobel Peace Prize. Obama’s first year is unconvincing, large obstacles loom and time is running short. According to a more practical historical rule of thumb, such intractable conflicts take many years to resolve, and Obama’s optimism is likely to prove unrealistic.
Victor Kotsev is a freelance journalist and political analyst with expertise in the Middle East.
Mohammed Abbasi 