Weekly Commentary: Lessons from the stand off on settlement freeze

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
24 September 09

It wasn't too long ago that President Obama's team and the various radical Israeli Leftists advising them were convinced that they could force Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into an open ended all encompassing settlement freeze.

They were convinced that they had a winning combination: an issue that American Jews didn't relate to, deceptively designed published partial Israeli polling data indicating support and a prime minister viewed by his detractors as having serious orthopedic problems (spineless).

But that's not how it played out.

Once again we see that when Israel makes it clear what its red lines are - and sticks to them - even the President of the United States of America has to back down.

What happens now?

Despite his best efforts, President Shimon Peres' anarchistic proposal to create a sovereign Palestinian state before we reach an agreement appears thankfully to be dead in the water.

And while the Palestinian plan to get their act together over the course of the next two years so that they would appear ready for a state has been cited by some Israeli Leftists as reason enough for cutting whatever deal the Palestinians might accept already today, most elements of the program can be seen as framework for autonomous as much as sovereign state building.

Will there be a crippling stalemate?

On the one hand, Mahmoud Abbas, with his eyes on elections in 2010, may be hard pressed to avoid being seen as engaging in final status talks with Israel in the absence of the encompassing freeze the Obama team originally demanded. But while such negotiations might be counterproductive for Abbas and Fatah at the Palestinian polls, the ongoing improvement in the quality of life in the West Bank - a development that requires continuous Palestinian-Israeli contacts at all levels - could help bring him and his party a victory.

And then what?

Take note of Prime Minister Netanyahu's phrase: "The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel."

State? Perhaps under certain conditions.

A sovereign state?

".all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel."

You can spell that A U T O N O M Y.
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