The Arab press has few good words for the US president Barack Obama’s recent performance on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Abdel Bari Atwan, the incomparable editor of the pan-Arab daily Al Quds al Arabi, wrote that it amounted to an outright surrender to the conditions of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of a meeting that brought the two men and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas together on Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Elsewhere, the tone is less venomous but the bitterness is unmistakable.
Sadly, there is truth to the claim that the Obama administration is backing down from its previous demand for a complete freeze of all settlement activity on Israel’s part to pave the way for a resumption of final status peace talks. In an otherwise impassionate call for visionary leadership, Mr Obama mentioned Israeli “steps to restrain settlement activity” in a positive light, a far cry from his secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s wish in the spring to “see a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions”.
A few months ago, after the appointment of George Mitchell as the US peace envoy and the declaration of the administration’s stance on Israeli settlements, some analysts, myself included, speculated that the Obama push for peace would put the newly elected Israeli leader in a tough spot, squeezed between US determination, Arab support and the Israeli public’s apprehension of deteriorating US-Israeli relations.
This simply did not happen. Mr Netanyahu has skilfully evaded the need to make significant concessions. True, he has been helped by the Arab refusal to make any concessions, however small or reversible, ahead of comprehensive peace. In fact, as Prince Turki Al Faisal, a senior Saudi royal, made clear in The New York Times a few days ago, peace as defined in the Arab Peace Initiative can only follow the handover of all Arab lands under Israeli occupation. And when Saudi Arabia speaks on such matters, pro-US Arab states fall in line.
The problem with the Arab position has always been one of tactics rather than principle: the intended audience for whatever move the Arab world makes should not be the Israeli leader, but the Israeli public, whose pro-peace inclinations are often overtaken by existential fears and diluted by a preference for military dominance. The US leadership also needs Arab flexibility to counter pro-Israeli pressure at home.
For Arabs and Palestinians alike, settlements are simply a land grab and evidence of Israel’s expansionist nature. Of course, the principle of land swaps adopted by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators during the Oslo process still holds, and smart Palestinian negotiating could compensate for giving up some settlement blocks by recovering areas within today’s Israel, but this will hardly reverse the humiliating loss of Palestinian land.
But there is much more behind Mr Netanyahu’s obstinacy. On the home front, he feels he is on solid ground with an approval rating of 65 per cent and considerable Israeli distrust of Mr Obama. On the US front, he calculates that the combination of Arab intransigence and an insidious campaign to portray the Obama administration as oblivious to Israeli strategic concerns, from the Iranian nuclear threat to peace with its Arab neighbours, will eventually sway the US Congress and key parts of the US public in his favour. How else to interpret his brazen statement yesterday that “in the Middle East, [the American people] don’t have that many friends, but we’re definitely right at the top of the list”? And what about the defamation of close Obama advisers as Israel-haters by right wing groups?
There is another motivation that explains Mr Netanyahu’s inflexibility. He is in the company of much of the Israeli public in taking false comfort in the sense that the Gaza war in January established a new, sustainable balance of power vis-a-vis Hamas. Mr Netanyahu may even think he has the best of all worlds. In a surviving but clearly constrained Hamas (“which wants to destroy us”, as he put it in a recent interview), he has an excuse to blame the Palestinian side for being incapable of reaching peace. But what about his Palestinian counterpart, Mr Abbas? The Israeli leader probably considers that whatever security and economic improvement is made in the Fatah-controlled West Bank is mutually beneficial, and that Mr Abbas has no interest in reversing such progress to put pressure on Israel, lest he lose the support of the international community and the little support he commands internally.
Mr Abbas’s presence at Tuesday’s meeting, however derided it was by Arab commentators, simply reflected the reality that international backing is crucial to his political survival and that his priority is internal consolidation. But these are facts that Mr Netanyahu manipulates at will for his own purposes.
Mr Obama is now taking stock of his failure to bend Israeli policy on settlements and is changing gears. Instead of focusing on preparing the ground, he now wants to rush into final-status negotiations. That was the meaning and substance of his tough statement before the trilateral meeting on Tuesday. Mr Obama is likely to dispatch Mrs Clinton and Mr Mitchell to the Middle East in coming weeks to sweet-talk and strong-arm the various players.
The problem is that, like Bill Clinton when he rushed the Camp David summit in 2000, Mr Obama may fall victim to his own agenda, and while his intentions may be deserving of praise, he could unwittingly end up creating a much worse situation. Unlike Mr Clinton, Mr Obama has at least three more years. But peace cannot come if he wants it more than the warring sides do.
In fact, Mr Netanyahu is already setting a trap for the Arab states. According to The Washington Times, he is preparing to offer “a partial freeze of settlement construction for six to nine months” but still wants to proceed with the construction of 2,500 housing units already approved. This by no means qualifies as a substantive concession, but it allows Mr Netanyahu to appear constructive at a time when the US president is clamouring for help. Of course, the Arab states will have none of this, and any concession now would look worse than it would have a few months ago when Mr Mitchell was travelling through the region in search of Arab backing.
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