You are here

Result is commensurate with formula

Apr 08,2014 - Last updated at Apr 08,2014

As originally expected, the Palestinian-Israeli talks that were resumed in July last year ended in total failure.

There is no doubt that US Secretary of State John Kerry did his utmost to have the sides agree on something, even on a vision on how any future peace settlement would look like, but he failed every single attempt.

His desperate effort to extend the talks beyond the set deadline of April 29, in the hope that more time would help break the deadlock, proved equally difficult.

This is not the first time such efforts ended up this way. Without a single exception, every US secretary of state since William Rogers in the late 1960s tried, and all failed.

Obviously, the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel was exceptionally an historic achievement of president Jimmy Carter, but it did not lead to the envisaged comprehensive peace the parties had committed to at the time.

Neither did the Palestinian-Israeli accord of 1993, nor the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty of 1994, succeed in bringing the Arab-Israeli conflict to a peaceful end in its entirety.

In fact, the Egyptian decision to sign a separate peace at a time when the Arab states had committed to negotiate collectively, not individually as president Anwar Sadat had decided, in order to keep the Arab negotiating position strong and unified, was blamed for circumventing any other additional agreements ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights.

For Israel, distancing and neutralising Egypt, although that required withdrawal from Sinai, a price worth its magnificent political return, was carefully calculated to secure Israel’s permanent presence in the whole of Palestine and probably the occupied Syrian territory. So far, Israel was proven right.

There is no doubt that Kerry tried harder; he visited the region over 15 times in less than 12 months, he showed enormous amount of patience and acted with unquestioned sincerity.

But like his previous colleagues, he found himself confined to the narrow diplomatic space dictated by the traditional constraints that govern Israel-US relations, always on Israel’s terms.

As such, and despite any objective assessment of his — assuming there was some — he could hardly confront the Israeli government on any one of the issues that rendered his mission doomed.

All the so-called final status issues that need to be resolved as part of the desired peace settlement are taboo for any American mediator.

Kerry could not discuss an end to the Israeli occupation, the removal of the settlements that were built illegally on occupied land, in the same manner they were removed from Sinai and Gaza, he could not even discuss the Palestinian refugee problem other than in the context of settling them anywhere but back home, and he could not advise Israel that the Palestinians should fully practise their right to self-determination and statehood.

The maximum he asked, but never managed to get, was a settlement construction freeze. Otherwise he occupied himself with reshaping the Israeli position to make it acceptable to the Palestinians, still without any success.

In the meantime, Kerry could only comfortably lean on the weaker Palestinian side, but even that did not prove helpful for two basic reasons. One is that by the time it was Kerry’s turn, the Palestinians had already run out of any additional concessions to offer, after having been made politically bankrupt by previous peace brokers over the years.

That is not an approach that carries any chance of productive results.

The desperately sought extension was not going to change the rules of the game, therefore it was destined to end up in failure too even if it was left open-ended.

The other reason is that Kerry was not helped at all by the Israelis.

Every time he was close to some kind of understanding, the Israelis would rush to announce a new housing project on the occupied Palestinian land, as if to deliberately kill any seeming progress, however, trivial.

At the height of the crisis last week, when Kerry was relentlessly struggling to salvage the faltering effort, arriving in the region with a substantial gift for the Israelis — the release of spy Jonathan Pollard — to convince Netanyahu to release the already paid for last batch of the Palestinian prisoners, a new project was announced for building 708 housing units in the illegal settlement of Gilo, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, in the West Bank.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

We should not, therefore, blind ourselves to the fact that there were no serious negotiations anyway.

All that Kerry was trying to do, when every idea he raised was blocked, was to have the sides agree on extending the talks for another period. 

That would make sense if the parties were close to some kind of understanding and needed more time to finish a promising deal, but that was not the case here.

Both sides admit that there was no progress in the last eight months.

“For all Secretary Kerry’s unfathomable optimism eight months ago, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations had been going nowhere for months before they crashed this week,” wrote Times of Israel editor David Horowitz on April 6.

Responding to a related question, chief Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni could not offer a single example of any progress achieved by the talks over the past eight months of negotiations.

And that is what the Palestinians have also been saying all along.

Recently, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was reported to have bitterly complained to President Barack Obama during their last White House meeting that Israel built more than 4,500 housing units on the occupied Palestinian land while the negotiations were proceeding.

If the failure of the current talks was inevitable, is it not better for the failure to be admitted now rather than hide it for another 12 months?

It would definitely be better to face the stark reality of failure now. That way, the extension would not provide Israel with the convenient cover for building more settlements on the Palestinian land; it would save the peace makers time and effort; and it would mark the end of decades of self deception and sterile mock diplomacy.

Many warned that if the sides miss this opportunity they may not have another one again. That is not true.

No one in the region or in the wider international arena can afford to face the definite consequences of this conflict if left unresolved. We have seen much of that already and it is alarming.

This kind of opportunity had better be missed and not recur. What is needed is a serious endeavour that would make a fresh start revising rather than repeating failed worn-out peace projects.

Recycling tried many times over peace plans that proved useless (the Clinton parameters, Camp David 2000, Taba, Annapolis) is not going to bring the parties any closer to a meaningful settlement.

That is another reason for Kerry’s mission failure.

What is needed is a totally different approach. There must be a daring return to the international law, putting the conflict in its proper context and resolving it on the basis of legality, not power politics and whim.

up
37 users have voted.


Newsletter

Get top stories and blog posts emailed to you each day.

PDF