New US peace proposal

US President Barack Obama seems to be considering ideas that could facilitate a deal between the Palestinians and the Israelis, not while still in office, as time is running short for that, but for the benefit of his successors.

“Middle East peace initiatives have long had appeal for late-term presidents,” said a New York Times article on the subject on March 6, 2016, adding that “Ronald Reagan opened a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organisation during his final months in office” and that “Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush both made last-ditch attempts to broker peace deals in their last years in office”.

The “Clinton parameters” remained essential for subsequent discussions aiming at reaching a Palestinian-Israeli settlement long after president Bill Clinton had left office.

So far, all efforts to bring the Israeli-Arab or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a peaceful end have failed.

Since he assumed his duties at the White House, Obama’s commitment to peace in the Middle East was affirmed beyond anyone’s doubt.

He did sincerely try during his first presidential term and he tried harder during his second. 

And yet, his endeavours, like those of all his predecessors, were met with the same Israeli obduracy that blocked every attempted avenue no matter how accommodating of Israel’s maximal demands were the proposals.

The relentless work of US Secretary of State John Kerry, which started right at the beginning of his State Department assignment over three years ago, is recognised as unprecedented.

He dedicated most of his time and travelled regularly to the region, he left no stone unturned in his search for peace and utilised all his diplomatic skills with passion and patience in trying to close gaps and cut deals between Israelis and Palestinians.

In the end, his great work yielded nothing.

While the Palestinian Authority was clearly positive, forthcoming, flexible and malleable, the Israeli government was contemptuous, rigid and audacious.

Not only did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reject every proposal Kerry introduced to facilitate talks between the two sides, he also routinely embarrassed the state secretary by announcing, at a moment meant to snub the secretary, new plans for building additional illegal settlements on the very occupied land meant to embrace the envisaged Palestinian state under the two-state formula.

As such, the most sticking point was Israel’s outright refusal to temporarily only freeze, not halt, settlement construction on Palestinian territories even when that meant the total collapse of the US-sponsored peace initiative.

Not once did the peace ideas of the Obama administration include novel elements that would cause the Israelis any specific concern.

As has been the case for years, indeed for decades, the peace proposals remained the same even when frequently rephrased and cosmetically rehashed in the hope of breaking the monotony.

Not once did any new proposal, coming from Washington, from other Western capitals or from anywhere else, not even the 13-year-old Arab Peace Initiative, exceed the perimeters generally assumed to be perfectly suitable for Israel’s terms, and yet, Israel was never willing to agree to any of them.

Once a list of standing Israeli demands is met, a new one is instantly served.

The Israeli government always made sure to present the other side with prohibitive conditions while at the same time loudly emphasising its readiness to continue to negotiate to reach peace.

The Palestinians have been persistently blamed for complaining about the pointlessness of negotiating the liberation of their land that Israel continues to expand on and colonise.

There is some sort of international unanimity, however, that a Palestinian-Israeli settlement should be mainly based on the two-state solution that broadly grants the rise of a Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders, which implies “minor” border alterations to the June 4, 1967, demarcation lines. 

The idea of those minor alterations was meant to allow Israel to annex large settlement blocks built illegally in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

That has been the easier alternative to demanding Israeli compliance with the rules of international law, which demand the removal all illegally constructed settlements on Palestinian territories, as they were removed from Sinai and Gaza.

The proposed border alterations will not be minor anymore as most of the West Bank and Jerusalem is now covered with Israeli colonies that house no less than 600,000 Jewish settlers.

While specific details are hardly addressed in repeated peace proposals, for fear of provoking additional Israeli renunciation, the international community assumes that Palestinian demands like the right of return and the removal of settlements, and the Palestinian insistence that the capital of the envisaged Palestinian state would have to be in East Jerusalem have to be forsaken.

On the Israeli side, however, the international community’s assumption is that Israel would be recognised as the state for the Jewish people, a concession with disastrous implications for the Palestinians and their historical rights.

Moreover, unlimited guarantees for Israel’s security, as designed and detailed by Israel itself, would also have to be fully addressed, even if that may end up compromising the viability and the symbolic “sovereignty” of the would-be Palestinian state.

Obviously any new set of ideas would have to be formulated along such lines, and yet there is no guarantee that Israel would tolerate such moves even if coming from Israel’s most stalwart ally and supporter in Washington, but particularly if the Obama peace proposals were to be presented to the UN Security Council for endorsement.

According to the above referenced New York Times article, Israeli officials have already reiterated “their long held position that the only way to reach agreement with the Palestinians was through bilateral negotiations not international organisations”.

Limitless open ended negotiations with the Palestinians have so far been the best cover for the quiet implementation of Israel’s steady colonial expansion, as well as for enlarging the size of the settler community in Jerusalem and the West Bank to render the creation of a Palestinian state a practical impossibility as President Obama and his state secretary are beginning to realise.

It is unlikely that a new President Obama peace plan would change the status quo. 

It may even complicate the situation further if a new Security Council resolution would further blur, if not altogether dilute, what legal instruments are left for the Palestinians to hold on to.

Only bold proposals that could exit the arena of appeasement and hesitant approaches may shake the status quo, put the Israelis before their responsibilities and enable a return to legitimacy and rule of law.