Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (43 page)

T
hroughout the spring and early summer of 2009, I remained optimistic that we were on the brink of a breakthrough. There were reasons to believe that the Americans would roll out their peace plan soon. On June 4, three weeks after Netanyahu’s visit to Jordan, President Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver a major speech to the Arab and Muslim world. The president spoke about the urgent need to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, saying:

Yet as June became July, and July became August, the progress we had hoped for a few months earlier began to look ever more distant. The Israelis refused to commit to a total settlement freeze—a necessary element in the eyes of the Arab world for creating an environment conducive to serious talks. The Israeli position defied the direct demands of President Obama, the European Union, and the rest of the international community. But this almost unanimous international stand did little to change the position of Netanyahu, who would only go as far as announcing, on November 25, 2009, after much arm-twisting by the United States and very public confrontation, a ten-month partial moratorium on the building of new settlements in the West Bank. This moratorium excluded building in East Jerusalem and did not apply to twenty-nine hundred buildings already under construction.

The peacemaking efforts appeared deadlocked, and the hope of a breakthrough was fading. The credibility of Obama and moderate Arab leaders in the Arab world was dealt a blow. We were not working in a vacuum, and spoilers in the region did not waste any time in attacking the whole peace process as a faulty approach that was yet again proving ineffective in ending the occupation.

At one point there were indications that an American peace plan would be announced in late September when world leaders, including Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and Palestinian president Abbas, would gather for the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. At Obama’s urging, Abbas and Netanyahu held their first meeting since Netanyahu’s election six month earlier. But the meeting produced no results. The Israeli government would not do what was necessary to restart peace negotiations. In addition to the halting of settlement building, the Palestinians wanted the Israeli government to confirm that it recognized previous agreements. They also demanded a clear Israeli commitment to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967 with agreed-upon land swaps. Netanyahu was adamant that he could not change his position on settlements and he would not commit to previous agreements or to any terms of reference for the negotiations.

 

Ever since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, successive Israeli governments have approved the construction of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. There are now about one hundred and twenty settlements and around a hundred “outposts,” Israeli communities built in the West Bank by Israeli settlers without official Israeli authorization, as well as more than twenty settlements in Jerusalem—altogether housing more than half a million settlers, over two hundred thousand of whom live in Jerusalem. These settlements are illegal under international law, as they have been built on land from which the UN has repeatedly called on Israel to withdraw. A freeze on settlement building was an essential component of the road map of 2003. The Palestinians’ position has been that ending both the construction and expansion of settlements is a necessary prerequisite to successful negotiations. The problem is that the settlements are undermining the viability of a sovereign Palestinian state. Israel likes to present a settlement freeze as a major concession (and one that, so far, it has been unwilling to make), but in fact it would simply be abiding by international law.

In the weeks leading up to the UN General Assembly meeting in September 2009, despite intense American pressure, Netanyahu refused to agree to a total settlement freeze. In fact, new settlement construction was authorized. The problem these settlements presented to the Palestinians and their Arab supporters was obvious: How could Mahmoud Abbas sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with a partner who was daily creating new facts on the ground that were changing the demography and geography of the very land where the Palestinian state would be established? If the Israeli government were truly committed to a two-state solution, why would it continue to build settlements on land that would belong to a future Palestinian state? Was the Israeli government building free housing for the Palestinians? Not likely. Its refusal to halt settlement activity raised legitimate doubts about its commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state.

On September 23, President Obama delivered an important speech. In his address to the UN General Assembly, he declared:

In this speech and in that of June 2009, Obama set out U.S. policy in clear terms. We in Jordan describe this policy position as the “Obama terms of reference” for negotiations to reach a just and lasting peace that would be in the interests of Israel, Palestine, America, and the world.

As the hope of spring turned into the disappointment of fall, the American administration became preoccupied by a whole raft of urgent problems: Afghanistan and Pakistan; new developments in Iran’s nuclear program; health care reform, which Obama placed at the top of his domestic agenda; and the continuing global economic crisis. These remained the overriding concerns for the United States through the first months of 2010, preventing the administration from giving the peace process its full attention. By now we were facing a major crisis. As encouraging as Obama’s words had been, they had done very little to change the reality on the ground. Frustration replaced hope.

 

As this book goes to press, we are just one year short of the twentieth anniversary of a peace process that started in Madrid in October 1991. But the contrast between now and then could not be greater. We are in a far darker place than we were nearly twenty years ago. Then, Palestinians and Israelis met face-to-face to begin negotiating a shared future. Both sides looked to the future with anticipation. By any measure we have regressed when we no longer speak of direct negotiations but of “proximity talks,” as an intermediary (the United States) shuttles between Israelis and Palestinians.

The proximity talks initiative emerged in early 2010, following a nearly yearlong effort by U.S. Middle East special envoy George Mitchell to launch direct negotiations. Thus far, his efforts have not produced the necessary progress, as Netanyahu has essentially maintained his uncompromising position on settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and continues to refuse to resume negotiations on the basis of the agreements the Palestinians reached with previous Israeli governments after the Oslo Accords.

All Arab states backed the Palestinian leadership’s participation in the proximity talks as an alternative to no talks at all, with the hope that they would soon transition to direct and serious negotiations. But we knew we were grasping at straws. We supported proximity talks because we believed a vacuum in peace efforts would only benefit hard-liners, who would exploit the failure to revive the negotiations to push their extremist agendas. And Netanyahu would benefit most from a Palestinian decision not to engage in proximity talks. As he came under increased American and international pressure for continuing to build settlements and thereby blocking the resumption of negotiations, he was eager to provoke the Palestinians and Arab countries into withdrawing from the peace efforts, so that he could once again claim he had no negotiating partner.

In April 2010, I traveled to the United States and met with President Obama in Washington. Again, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was at the center of our discussion. We were both disappointed and concerned that more progress had not been made in the last year and hoped that the proximity talks would soon pave the way to direct negotiations. After the meeting, it was clear to me that the United States was not yet ready to roll out its plan to push the parties toward a final settlement. The administration wanted the parties to begin proximity talks and would then assess the situation at some point before throwing its own ideas into the negotiations.

I came out of the meeting assured of the president’s continued commitment to resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But I knew that it would be some time before real progress could be achieved, given Netanyahu’s intransigence. Accordingly, I felt that our task would be to keep the hope alive until America was ready to bring its full weight to bear on the parties to resume serious negotiations with the intention of advancing toward a settlement. The region could not afford to lose hope yet again. That would mean war.

Back in March, right when U.S. vice president Joe Biden was visiting Jerusalem, the Israelis announced plans to build sixteen hundred new settlement homes in occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli move embarrassed and angered the vice president and effectively challenged American authority. George Mitchell canceled his next trip to the region and Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu to lodge a formal complaint. Harsh exchanges followed between Washington and Tel Aviv. The diplomatic row came on the heels of a very public disagreement between the U.S. administration and Israel the previous fall over the question of a settlement freeze, amid increased international criticism of Israel for derailing the peace process. The European Union was particularly vocal in slamming Israeli settlement policies and their impact on peacemaking efforts. On December 8, 2009, during the Swedish presidency of the EU, its Foreign Affairs Council expressed serious concern about the lack of progress and called for the urgent resumption of negotiations that would lead “within an agreed time-frame to a two-state solution with the State of Israel and an independent, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.”

The council said that “settlements, the separation barrier where built on occupied land, demolitions of homes and evictions are illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible.” It urged the government of Israel “to immediately end all settlement activities, in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank and including natural growth, and to dismantle all outposts erected since March 2001,” as required by phase one of the road map of 2003.

The council noted that it had never recognized Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, emphasizing that “if there is to be a genuine peace, a way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states.” In subsequent statements, the EU strongly condemned Israel’s announcement of new settlement plans.

In April 2010, former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni lamented Israel’s deteriorating standing in the international community. “The world today,” Livni wrote in an article, “does not, at best, know what the policy of the Israeli government is, and, at worst, does not trust its intentions.”

Shortly before my trip to Washington, I attended an Arab League Summit meeting in Sirte, Libya. The summit reiterated its support for the Arab Peace Initiative, but with every passing day that sees no progress, pressure builds to abandon negotiations as a means to solve the conflict. Tensions in the region are running high on more than one front. Gaza continues to be a virtual prison, with its more than one and a half million people living in desperate conditions. Jerusalem is a tinderbox and Israel is playing with fire by trying to change its identity and empty it of its Christian and Muslim population through house demolitions and evictions, and by refusing to allow Arabs to build in the city. Further afield, on the Lebanese-Israeli front, we appear to be on the verge of witnessing another confrontation as Israel continues to occupy Lebanese territory in the south and Hezbollah develops its military capabilities. In the background of all of this is the crisis with Iran and its implications for regional security.

 

Proximity talks were officially launched in May after a number of visits by Mitchell to the region. Abbas went into the talks with the support of the Arab League, whose ministerial committee on the Arab Peace Initiative met on May 1 and said it would reconvene in four months to assess progress. The hope was that these talks would agree on terms of reference for direct final status negotiations.

We supported these talks, as they seemed to be the only alternative to complete disengagement, which would have been a dangerous blow to our decades-long efforts to achieve peace. The hope was that the talks would bring the two sides close enough for them to resume direct negotiations. And yet by July, no agreement had been reached on the terms of reference for direct negotiations. Jordan’s position was that failure was not an option, and we continued to work with all parties to ensure that progress was made to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.