Can Obama Change the Game on Middle East Peace? Tony Karon

TIME

5/20/09

Can Obama Change the Game on Middle East Peace?

Tony Karon

No one should have been surprised that there was no meeting of minds between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at their inaugural summit on Monday. Although the two men proclaimed a shared commitment to having Israelis and Palestinians live in peace, their views on how to get there remain substantially at odds. Now, as Obama puts the finishing touches on a new peace plan to be unveiled shortly — perhaps when he addresses the Muslim world from Cairo next month — the question facing the Administration is how to pursue its strategy with an unenthusiastic Israeli partner.

At the White House, Netanyahu pointedly refused to endorse the principle of Palestinian statehood, a cornerstone both of the peace process and of U.S. Middle East policy. The Israeli leader made clear that he wants the Palestinians to govern themselves but added the caveat that self-governance would be "absent a handful of powers that could endanger the State of Israel." (Netanyahu believes Israel's security cannot tolerate the Palestinians having such typical features of statehood as sovereign control over their own borders, air space and defense and foreign policies.) And while he committed to holding talks with the Palestinian Authority, he added a new precondition for peace, requiring that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who will visit the White House next week, has thus far rejected that demand both out of concern for Israel's Arab minority and because the rights of Palestinian refugees have remained an issue on the negotiating agenda of the peace process up till now. Obama has relinquished the previous Administration's approach by prioritizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the first year of his first term, by showing a willingness to press the Israelis to live up to their commitments under previous agreements — particularly with respect to building settlements on land captured in 1967 — and by raising regional expectations that the U.S. will commit to pressing for a two-state solution. But how can Obama's resolve to move the process forward be turned into policy?

The approach adopted by the Clinton Administration — bringing Israel and the Palestinians together in bilateral negotiations facilitated and supported by the U.S. — is not likely to produce results today. The moderate Abbas, who really reigns only over the West Bank, now speaks for just a fraction of Palestinian public opinion, and Israel's security chief, Yuval Diskin, warned on Tuesday that Hamas (which controls the other Palestinian enclave, Gaza, outright) would win any Palestinian election held right now.

Meanwhile, Israel's government is built on a right-wing consensus at odds with such fundamentals of the peace process as Palestinian statehood, freezing and evacuating West Bank settlements, and sharing Jerusalem. But even when Israel was led by the centrist Ehud Olmert, Abbas reportedly rejected the best peace deal the Israeli leader was able to offer during last year's talks about talks — an offer that reportedly conceded more territory to the Palestinian state than the deal turned down by Yasser Arafat at Camp David. So the gulf between Israel's best offer and the bottom line of the most moderate Palestinian leadership appears to be too large to resolve in bilateral negotiations in which the Palestinians have no leverage but nothing to lose, while the Israeli public is able to live with the status quo for the foreseeable future.

Cynicism over the two-state solution has grown, meanwhile, on both sides of the divide. Robert Malley, a negotiator on President Clinton's team at Camp David and who later gave advice to candidate Obama, has written a thoughtful assessment of the declining prospects for the two-state solution, along with Palestinian academic Hussein Agha, a longtime adviser to the Palestinian leadership. They point out that right now, the two-state concept has stronger support abroad than it does among Israelis and Palestinians, both of whom have always seen it, even in the best of times, as a bitter compromise that the balance of forces would compel them to accept.

Malley and Agha have some blunt advice for Obama. Achieving success "won't be done by repackaging the peace process of years past. It won't be done by strengthening those leaders viewed by their own people as at best weak, incompetent and feckless, at worst irresponsible, careless and reckless. It won't be done by perpetuating the bogus and unhelpful distinction between extremists and moderates, by isolating the former, reaching out to the latter, and ending up disconnected from the region's most relevant actors. It won't be done by trying to perform better what was performed before." The mantras of the two-state solution have lost their appeal through endless repetition, most passionately by foreigners often deemed by one side or the other to be hostile to their aspirations.

Rather than finessing what Bush and Clinton started, Obama may be forced to change the game, working with his partners in the Quartet established during the Bush era (including the E.U., the U.N. and Russia) and with the Arab League to forge an international consensus on the parameters for a fair solution to the conflict. That would require outlining the borders between two states (the formula for doing so, based on the 1967 borders, is already enshrined in existing documents such as the "Roadmap"), how to share Jerusalem, the fate of West Bank settlements and of Palestinian refugee families who lost land and homes inside Israel in 1948. In such a scenario, the focus of diplomacy would shift to coaxing, cajoling and nudging both sides toward implementing such a solution.

Obama on Monday didn't press Netanyahu to reverse his position on the two-state solution, but the Administration has begun pushing insistently for Israel to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank. That practical step toward the two-state destination will likely be the focus, for now, but the Administration is hoping to persuade Arab states to help by offering Israel fresh gestures of recognition in exchange for doing so. To that end, Obama will meet with Egypt's President, Hosni Mubarak, next week. And when the U.S. President meets Abbas, his focus will be both on relieving Israel's chokehold on Gaza and the West Bank, encouraging resolution of the crippling stalemate in Palestinian politics (which is as much of an obstacle to the two-state solution as Israel's settlement expansion) and on helping the Palestinians assume their responsibilities to create security conditions to enable Washington to demand more progress from Israel.