COUNTERPOINT: CAN PRESIDENT OBAMA BRING PEACE TO THE MIDDLE EAST?
Peace Is Still Possible
It is difficult now to remember how emotionally overwhelmed I was by a sudden wave of acute optimism when I watched President Obama reach out to the Muslim, Arab and Palestinian peoples in a historic speech at Cairo University in June 2009.
Nevertheless, I am not giving up on Obama or on the direct negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis that he has tried to revive.
Obama is above all a consummate politician – so it would not make sense for him to go to the UN General Assembly as he did about a month ago and devote one quarter of his 40 minute speech to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, if in his mind the talks were dead. Nor would President Obama have tolerated or perhaps even encouraged his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton to give the keynote speech only a few days ago at the annual gala dinner of the American Task Force on Palestine – a predominantly Palestinian-American think tank in DC devoted to pressing for Palestinian statehood within the two-state formula.
There are several issues which have side-tracked the forward movement of negotiations. The most immediate issue is settlements. Anyone serious about an Arab-Israeli peace deal knows it will be based on the principle of a return of land for peace. This is clearly expressed in the Road Map to Peace, which calls for a freeze on all settlement expansion. With this in mind, President Obama has called upon Israeli |Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend his own temporary and partial freeze on settlement construction. But I would suggest this quite valiant stand reflects a lack of understanding by Obama of the dynamics of Israeli politics, and the influence of the ultra-nationalists. Netanyahu does not have the political clout to support a settlement freeze at this time, and in order to soften the ground with the nationalists, has had to raise another equally distracting issue – the Palestinian acknowledgement of Israel as a Jewish state.
President Abbas has quite casually noted that the Palestinian Authority has recognized the state of Israel and how the Israelis chose to define that state is their own business. But some Palestinians are allowing themselves to be provoked when Netanyahu raises a long settled issue as something new that is quite likely to be an internal Israeli maneuver.
But in any case, the renewal of the settlement freeze will not change the terrible situation on the ground. Only a peace deal that finally establishes Palestinian and Israeli borders can end the expansion of settlements. Even if major settlements are annexed by Israel as part of a negotiated peace, that will only happen if the borders of a Palestinian state incorporate new lands that are at present part of the pre-1967 territory of Israel and transferred in exchange to the Palestinians, a point already conceded by Israel in past negotiations.
Netanyahu will need a concrete deal assuring the Israeli public that peace is at hand before risking the break- up of his present government and establishing a new coalition that would allow him to carry on. Stopping the expansion of settlements will be the result of a peace deal – not a pre-condition.
Abdallah Schleifer, Professor Emeritus at the American University in Cairo