When Peace Is Not a Priority

P. David Hornik
Frontpagemag.com
25 January '10

U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell is here in Israel again, and it’s not stirring much excitement or even interest. On Sunday he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the latter saying Mitchell had “interesting ideas” on how to get Israeli-Palestinian talks going again but not saying what the ideas were.

On Friday Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas reiterated to Mitchell his refusal to talk with Netanyahu absent a total ban on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and East Jerusalem. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the fact that Israel had positions at all—on not giving up every inch of the West Bank, on the demilitarization of a future Palestinian state—made negotiating with Israel impossible.

Based on his statements to Time magazine’s Joe Klein last week, it can be surmised that President Barack Obama is not all that surprised by Mitchell’s inability to get anything moving.

“This is just really hard,” Obama told Klein.
“Even for a guy like George Mitchell…. Both sides—the Israelis and the Palestinians—have found that the political environment, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation…. From Abbas’ perspective, he’s got Hamas looking over his shoulder and, I think, an environment generally within the Arab world that feels impatient with any process.
“And on the Israeli front—although the Israelis, I think, after a lot of time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, they still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures….”

It is easy to poke holes in Obama’s evenhandedness here: the fact that while Netanyahu has been ready at all times to negotiate with Abbas, with not even his most right-wing coalition partners objecting to negotiations per se, it is Abbas who has stonewalled; the fact that it was not “after a lot of time,” but very quickly—in a matter of months since taking office—that Netanyahu made quite bold gestures of reversing his lifelong opposition to a Palestinian state and then announcing an unprecedented ten-month settlement freeze in Judea and Samaria, none of which has sufficed to lure Abbas back to the table.

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