U.S. to Push Peace in Middle East Media Campaign

By Mark Landler
NYT
August 2, 2009

WASHINGTON — George J. Mitchell likes to remind people that he labored for 700 days before reaching the Good Friday accord that brought peace to Northern Ireland. So the fact that Mr. Mitchell has shuttled back and forth to the Middle East for the last 190 days without any breakthroughs, he said, does not mean that President Obama’s push for peace there is stalled.

But while the negotiating has continued — mostly in closed-door sessions with few comments for the press, in keeping with Mr. Mitchell’s close-to-the-vest style — reports in Israel, in particular, have focused on the claim that the Obama administration’s pressure is alienating Israelis even while it is failing to sway Arabs.

“One of the public misimpressions is that it’s all been about settlements,” Mr. Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in a rare interview Friday after six months on the job. “It is completely inaccurate to portray this as, ‘We’re only asking the Israelis to do things.’ We are asking everybody to do things.”

Another misperception, he said, was that Arab countries had rebuffed Mr. Obama’s request to make moves toward a more normal relationship with Israel — a perception fueled by a Saudi official’s blunt public rejection of such incremental steps in Washington on Friday.

“We’ve gotten, over all, a very good response, a desire to act, some public statements to that effect from the crown prince of Bahrain, the president of Egypt,” said Mr. Mitchell, who returned last week from his fifth trip to the region, including stops in Israel, Egypt and Syria. Saudi Arabia’s negative public comments, other officials said, bear little relation to what it is saying in private.

In coming weeks, senior administration officials said, the White House will begin a public-relations campaign in Israel and Arab countries to better explain Mr. Obama’s plans for a comprehensive peace agreement involving Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world.

The campaign, which will include interviews with Mr. Obama on Israeli and Arab television, amounts to a reframing of a policy that people inside and outside the administration say has become overly defined by the American pressure on Israel to halt settlement construction on the West Bank.

“We’re at a crucial moment now,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. “There are only so many visits George Mitchell can make.”

In Israel, public opinion toward Mr. Obama, which was skeptical to start with, has soured because of the tension over settlements. In the Arab world, there is little evidence of a change of heart toward Israel.

Saudi Arabia, by all accounts the central player in developing a consensus among Arab countries, appears utterly unmoved by the American argument that “confidence-building” gestures can open the door to more substantive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Incrementalism and the step-by-step approach have not, and we believe will not, achieve peace,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said after meeting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Temporary security, confidence-building measures, will also not bring peace.”

Mr. Mitchell, however, insisted he was getting a very different message in his private meetings with more than a dozen Arab leaders, including the Saudis. Many, he said, were ready to consider new measures.
(Full article)
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