This evening President Obama will sit down for dinner with Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, marking the start of direct negotiations between the pair with the ambitious aim of agreeing a final settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within 12 months.
King Abdullah of Jordan and Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak will also be present at the dinner. Both are neighbours of Israel and adjoin the Palestinian territories and both are close allies of the US. The final guest will be Tony Blair, the envoy of the Middle East quartet.
The talks will start in earnest in Washington tomorrow and will move to the Middle East later this month. The first crisis is expected within weeks when a 10-month partial freeze on settlement building in the West Bank expires on 26 September. The Palestinians have warned that, without an extension, they will walk out of the talks; Netanyahu is under intense pressure from the right wing of his coalition to allow building to resume.
Netanyahu has said repeatedly that he will “surprise” the international community – this is taken to mean he may have decided that his historic legacy should be a peace deal with the Palestinians. Aluf Benn, a respected liberal commentator, suggested at the weekend that Netanyahu could be Israel’s Gorbachev, who presided over the dismantling of the Soviet Union, or Nixon, the rightwinger who reached out to communist China.
Others dismiss such notions as fanciful, believing that Netanyahu is not serious about negotiating the so-called final-status issues and is pursuing talks only as a means of deflecting US pressure. Netanyahu knows he cannot risk the serious and lasting wrath of the US, Israel’s principal political and financial sponsor. His rightwing coalition appears relatively stable for now, but the looming issue of the settlement freeze could threaten his government.
Avigdor Lieberman, the hardline foreign minister, last week publicly called for building to resume on 26 September, saying “we must not back down and punish our own citizens”. Other ministers agree. The settlers themselves have vowed to crank up the bulldozers and concrete mixers even before this deadline, regardless of the government’s position. This could lead to a difficult choice for Netanyahu between confrontation and turning a blind eye, both of which would bring him under political attack.
Some in the cabinet are pushing for a compromise. Dan Meridor, a deputy prime minister, has proposed allowing building to resume in the large settlement blocs that Israel expects will be on its side of any future border, while forbidding building elsewhere on the West Bank. Netanyahu has been reported to be both considering this option and to have ruled it out. One likely outcome is that there will be no announcement at all, but a tacit policy along the lines of the Meridor proposal, aimed at keeping both the talks and his coalition on the road.
On Sunday, Netanyahu identified “three principles as the basic components of Israel’s approach” to the talks: the recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people, the establishment of tangible security measures on the ground, and the end of the conflict.
The first goes beyond simple recognition of Israel, conceded by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation long ago. Supporters view the “Jewish state” demand as a straightforward affirmation of fact; critics see it as a way of deflecting Palestinian demands for the right of refugees to return to homes they were forced to abandon during the wars of 1948 and 1967.
On security, Netanyahu has focused in recent weeks on what would be the eastern border of a Palestinian state, the Jordan valley. Concerned about possible instability in Jordan in the future, he is insisting on Israeli troops being stationed there to prevent the import of arms to Palestinian militants or an influx of Jordanian-Palestinian fighters.
Looming over these talks is Iran – in Israeli eyes, a much bigger threat than the Palestinians. Israel wants action to halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. It is possible that Netanyahu may calculate that acceding to US demands to negotiate with the Palestinians may work in Israel’s favour if and when it comes to confronting Iran.
If there is a weary indifference among the Israeli public about these talks, among Palestinians the popular mood is one of hostility. A straw poll on the streets of Ramallah last week found not one expression of hope but much criticism of their leadership for agreeing to talk at all.
What’s happening about the Jewish settlements is the most urgent issue for the Palestinians, who insist their chances of a viable state diminish with the expansion of Israeli colonies in the West Bank. They refused to participate in direct talks without Israel imposing a freeze on new building, which Netanyahu reluctantly conceded as a temporary measure last November under enormous pressure from the US. The Palestinians resisted direct negotiations without assurances that the moratorium would be extended but, under similar US pressure, dropped this as a precondition.
The issue has not gone away. Saeeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, insisted at a press conference last week that his team would walk out of talks for two reasons: if the freeze on West Bank building was not extended indefinitely, and if an explicit moratorium on settlement building in East Jerusalem was not introduced. The danger for the Palestinians is that expectations are again raised, making any compromise look like a humiliating climbdown.
Israel’s own precondition, recognition of the Jewish nature of their state, has – so far – been rejected by the Palestinians, for whom it means relinquishing the central right of return for refugees and essentially renouncing the “nakba” (catastrophe) of 1948 when they were driven from their homeland. If Netanyahu insists on this before talks can progress, it will surely become another crisis point.
The elephant in the room – for both the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis – is Gaza. It is inconceivable that there can be any final settlement of the conflict that does not include this territory, and therefore the Islamic movement Hamas which rules it and which opposes talks with Israel. But neither party – the authority or Israel – appears willing to confront the complexities of the division within the Palestinian people and take constructive measures to resolve them.
What is clear to almost all observers is that Abbas is entering these talks in a position far from political strength, and that, even if an agreement were reached, there is no guarantee he could convince the Palestinian public to accept it.
President Obama is the key
to the success or failure of the talks that begin this week. If he is determined to push through a comprehensive settlement, he undoubtedly has the power to force the two sides to make the necessary compromises. Despite repeated assertions and off-the-record briefings that he is willing to drive through – and if necessary impose – a deal, there remains scepticism about the extent of his commitment and the implications for his domestic ratings.
US officials have hinted that the president extracted from Netanyahu earlier this summer some publicly unspecified evidence of the latter’s commitment to a comprehensive settlement, which is why Obama shows such apparent confidence that an agreement can be reached.
Whatever his desire for a lasting geopolitical legacy, Obama has short-term domestic considerations – namely the Jewish vote in this autumn’s mid-term elections and the consequences for his prospects of a second term. The calculation that he could be a one-term president might give urgent impetus to his drive for peace in the Middle East; equally it might encourage the regional players to sit it out until the next incumbent is in the White House.
Expectations in the early months of the Obama presidency soared sky-high among Arab nations and sank to an all-time low in Israel. That balance appears to have been at least partly reversed.
The US administration’s short-term goal is to keep both sides sitting at the negotiating table – a not inconsiderable task. But the talks will have to go beyond that; they will have to show tangible progress if Obama is not to become yet another president who failed in his ambitions to bring peace to the Middle East.
