27 February 2013
Israeli and Palestinian officials have been in
Washington laying the ground for President Barack
Obama's visit to Israel and the West Bank, scheduled
for next month and the first since he took office four
years ago.
Topping the agenda, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has said, will be efforts to restart the
long-stalled peace process. Last week Palestinian
officials said they had urged the White House to
arrive with a diplomatic plan.
The US president began his first term on a different
footing, ignoring Israel and heading instead to Cairo
where he made a speech committing the US to a new era
in relations with the Arab world. Little came of the
promise.
Now he apparently intends to start his second term --
as Netanyahu resumes office too, following last
month's elections -- with an effort to engage with
Israel and the Palestinians that is almost as certain
to prove an exercise in futility.
The prospect of reviving the peace track between
Israel and the Palestinians is not one that is
appetising for either Obama or Netanyahu. Both are
bruised from locking horns over a settlement freeze --
the key plank of the US president's efforts -- during
his first term.
But equally, it seems, the price of continuing
inaction is high too. The Palestinians have repeatedly
embarrassed Obama at the United Nations, not least by
isolating the US in November as it opposed an upgrade
in the Palestinians' observer status. Inertia also
looks risky given the growing unrest in the West Bank
over hunger-striking prisoners.
Ahead lie potentially even bigger headaches, including
the doomsday scenario -- from Israel and Washington's
perspective -- that the Palestinians approach the
International Criminal Court to demand Israel be
investigated for war crimes.
The perennial optimists have been searching for signs
that Obama is readier this time to get tough. Neither
of the president's recent major appointments -- John
Kerry as secretary of state and Chuck Hagel, nominated
as defence secretary -- has been welcomed in Israel.
US determination has been buoyed, it is argued, by
what is seen as a tide change in Israeli public
opinion, highlighted by the surprise electoral success
of centrist Yair Lapid and relatively poor showing by
Netanyahu's Likud party.
Netanyahu's officials sense similar motives,
complaining that Obama's visit so soon after the
election is direct "interference" in
coalition-building. The centrists, they fear, will be
able to extract concessions from Netanyahu, who will
not wish to greet the US president as head of an
extremist government.
Israeli officials, meanwhile, look eager to mend
fences: they have hopefully codenamed the visit
"Unbreakable Alliance" and announced an intention to
award Obama Israel's highest honour, the presidential
medal.
The more hopeful scenarios, however, overlook the
obstacles to a diplomatic solution posed both by
Israel's domestic politics and by the Palestinians'
inability to withstand Israeli bullying.
Not least, they ignore the fact that Netanyahu's
Knesset faction is the most rightwing in Likud's
history. He cannot advance a peace formula -- assuming
he wanted to -- without tearing apart his party.
Equally, there is nothing in Lapid's record to
indicate he is willing to push for meaningful
compromises on Palestinian statehood. On this issue,
he occupies the traditional ground of Likud, before it
moved further right. A recent poll found half his
supporters called themselves rightwing.
Last week Netanyahu signed a coalition pact with
another supposed centrist, Tzipi Livni, a former Likud
leader who now heads a small faction called Hatnuah.
The goal, as one Likud official cynically put it, was
to use Livni to "whitewash the Netanyahu government in
the world's eyes".
In other words, Netanyahu hopes a Livni or a Lapid
will buy him breathing space as he entrenches the
settlements and pushes Palestinians out of large areas
of the West Bank under cover of what the Israeli
newspaper Haaretz termed a "booby-trapped diplomatic
process".
What of the Palestinians? Will they not be able to
mount an effective challenge to Israeli intransigence,
given an apparent renewed US interest in diplomacy?
Here is the rub. Netanyahu already has a stranglehold
on the politics of his potential peace partners. He
can easily manipulate the fortunes of the Palestinian
leader Mahmoud Abbas on the two biggest tests he
faces: the "peace process" overseen by the
international community, and reconciliation talks with
the rival Palestinian faction Hamas.
The latest talks between Hamas and Fatah broke down in
Cairo this month, even though unity, in the view of
most Palestinians, is a precondition of their seeking
viable statehood. The talks' failure followed the
"arrest" by Israel of 25 Hamas leaders in the West
Bank, seizures that Palestinian human rights groups
and Hamas warned were intended to disrupt
reconciliation.
Meanwhile, Israel has repeatedly undermined Abbas's
rule, and kept his PA close to collapse, by turning on
and off one of its major sources of income -- tax
monies Israel regularly collects on behalf of the
Palestinians and is supposed to pass on.
As a result, Abbas is trapped between various
pressures impossible to reconcile: the need to keep
Israel happy, to maintain legitimacy with his own
people and to foster a shared political agenda with
other Palestinian factions.
The sticks that Israel wields force Abbas to keep the
door open to negotiations even as most Palestinians
recognise their utter pointlessness. Likewise, his
constant need to appease Israel and the US serves only
to widen differences with Hamas.
The Palestinians are stuck in a political and
diplomatic cul-de-sac, unable to move forward either
with the development of their national struggle or
with talks on viable statehood. Whatever Obama's
intentions, the reality is that this will be another
four years of diplomatic failure.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize
for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and
"Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair" (Zed Books). His website is
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