Global Issues
MIDEAST: Hope Now Advances to Autumn
Much of the world is side-tracked into the summer holiday mood, but the Obama Administration consistently stresses it won't allow its Middle East peacemaking effort to be side-tracked: We'll soon be hitting full stride, is the constant White House message.
Still, the protagonists, Arabs and Israelis, remain to be convinced that U.S. President Barack Obama means to see his peace effort all the way to the finish line.
In the Israeli mindset, that may not be all that bad a thing.
On Monday, just a couple of weeks into his new job, Michael Oren was again hastily summoned from 3514 International Drive NW Washington across town to 2201 C Street NW. It was the second time the Israeli ambassador had been called in to receive a dressing-down from the State Department over what the U.S. calls Israel's 'provocative' and 'unacceptable' action in East Jerusalem - this time the eviction of Palestinian families to make way for Jewish settlers.
Oren is a political hybrid. He has his roots in left-wing Zionist ideology that strives for accommodation with the Palestinians and the Arab world. In his historical writings, he has cleaved loyally to the traditional Israeli narrative on which side has failed to make that accommodation work. Now he has aligned himself with the most nationalist right-wing government Israel has ever had.
Back in May, down the road at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Oren was present at the difficult encounter between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Oren, then ambassador-designate, was nonetheless upbeat: 'I will be representing a government that I am convinced means what it says when it says it wants peace. And I believe there's no reason for the showdown with Washington that everybody is forecasting,' he told IPS at the time.
The U.S. isn't quite so convinced of the Netanyahu government's peace intentions. Denouncing Israel's actions in East Jerusalem as 'deeply regrettable', Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. would not recognise any unilateral changes to the status quo in East Jerusalem.
From a quarter century, from November 1967 until September 1993, Israel was able to point to the three resolute 'No's' of the Arab world coined at Khartoum: No negotiations, No recognition, No peace. The Khartoum Resolution of Sep. 1, 1967 was issued at the conclusion of a meeting between the leaders of eight Arab countries in the wake of the Six-Day War when Israel annexed vast territories of Arab land.
Gearing up to give Middle East peace a new momentum, the concern is that Israel is now the prime Nay-sayer, with its own three No's: No give on Jerusalem, No total freeze on West Bank settlements, No to final status talks of a projected peace agreement.
It's not quite accurate that the Israeli 'No's' are absolute: Under pressure from the White House, Israel has at least agreed to negotiate the terms for limiting drastically its settlement building.
But the thrust of Benjamin Netanyahu's policy seems to rely not on saying Yes to Obama, but on hoping that the Arab world will say No to Obama's parallel demand that they agree to begin normalising relations with Israel as a quid pro quo to the brake on settlements.
In advance of the Fatah convention which opened in Bethlehem on Tuesday night, Israeli officials have consistently pointed to the fact that while they talk of their readiness for peace, Palestinian leaders have not abandoned the armed struggle.
They note the address of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the opening of the convention in which he stressed that Palestinians have a legitimate drive to engage in 'resistance against Israel'. Though Abbas added, 'We must not stain our legitimate struggle with terror', Israeli analysts were quick to point out that 'resistance' is the term usually employed in Palestinian discourse for all forms of violent actions as well as non-violent protest.
Beyond this question of who's to blame for thwarting peace efforts with their 'No's', the incipient Obama peace bid risks running into an old bugbear of U.S. peacemaking of the past decades - which side has to move first to break the logjam?
Even as they already point accusing fingers at each other, Israel and the Arabs share one common view about Obama's intentions - both judge the President not only on what he says needs to be done to resolve their conflict, but by what he has done on other conflicts, both in the region and beyond it.
Both Israelis and Arabs wonder whether Obama's fortitude as a Middle East peacemaker will be served if his powers of persuasion have been found wanting in areas like Iran and North Korea where the U.S. is much more than an outside broker, and is itself an active component of the dispute.
Not swayed from the criticism, the Obama Middle East team seems to be looking beyond the August hiatus. September, it is suggested, is now the target date for the unveiling of a full-scale Obama Middle East plan for peace.
But, given the diminishing credit which Obama enjoys in the region, the White House may soon discover that there is but one practical way that could enable him to break clear of the old vicious circle of 'who's-to-blame-for not-going-first'.
Sceptical Israelis and Palestinians have little doubt that Obama's trademark powers of persuasion will include at least two key conceptual ingredients - that peace is possible, and that the lives of people on both sides would improve dramatically were peace to be achieved.
What they are less sure of is whether the President will depart from the fruitless efforts of his predecessors and go beyond the broad principles of a peace plan to state in stark and simple terms that a peace agreement can only realistically be achieved if it has at its basis an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.
Hearing this sine qua non of peacemaking from the President's lips is what has been absent in previous, and ultimately barren, U.S. peace bids. That single phrase would be more 'historical' than the whole of Obama's much- heralded Cairo speech, Palestinians argue.
What the Arabs are waiting for is precisely what Israel fears.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service