I-P: Borders first– and fast?

The usually well-informed Akiva Eldar has an important piece in today’s Haaretz, reporting this:

Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will resume next month on the basis of an understanding that the establishment of a Palestinian state will be officially announced in two years.
Palestinian and European Union sources told Haaretz that talks will initially focus on determining the permanent border between Israel and the West Bank.
… It is understood that this will be accompanied by a public American and European declaration that the permanent border will be based on the border of June 4, 1967. Both sides may agree to alter the border based on territorial exchanges.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to discuss Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees in the initial negotiation stages will not be allowed to delay the announcement of an independent Palestinian state.
Likewise, Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that the Arab world embark on normalizing ties with Israel, will not constitute preconditions to an “early recognition” of Palestine.

Eldar is also reporting that Netanyahu has expressed confidence that he’ll reach an “agreement” on some limited curbs on settlement construction with the Americans, very soon.
If Eldar’s report is accurate, which I assume to be the case, then I think this says some moderately good things about where Obama’s policy is heading.
I understand that Obama’s failure to win– or even, really to fight for– a complete settlement freeze has been very frustrating for the Palestinians But as I noted in this recent IPS piece,

some seasoned analysts of Israeli-Arab negotiations argue that the main focus for Obama and all others who seek a fair and durable peace in the region should now be not the settlement-building issue, but to start – and win speedy completion of – the negotiation for a final peace agreement (FPA).
From that perspective, any further prolongation of the fruitless tussle over the settlements can be seen both as a huge time-waster and as a growing drain on Obama’s political capital domestically and internationally.
These analysts point out that any FPA will necessarily include a demarcation of the final borders between Israel and the future Palestinian state.
Once those lines are demarcated, the issue of whether and where Israel can build new housing for its people is instantly transformed. After border demarcation Israel can presumably build freely within its own final borders, consistent with international law.
But outside those borders not only will it be unable to continue its building programmes, but Israeli citizens already living there will rapidly come under Palestinian law.
And as the FPA goes into effect there will be no more Israeli military occupation of either or the West Bank, and thus no remaining problem, under international law, regarding Israeli settlers in those areas.
Demarcating a final border for Israel in the West Bank is something that Netanyahu and many of his allies in Israeli’s rightwing government have long been opposed to. Netanyahu’s Likud party traditionally considered the whole terrain between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – and even a stretch of land east of the Jordan – to be part of the Biblical “Land of Israel”.

If Eldar’s account is accurate, here are the good aspects of what Obama seems to be planning:

1. Going for an agreement on those final-status borders first, and hopefully also fast.
2. Not getting sidetracked by either endless nickel-and-diming over an interim settlement freeze, or the terrible dead-end of a “Palestinian state with a provisional border,” or Israel’s demands that it needs to receive the Palestinians’ prior agreement to “recognize Israel as a Jewish state”, or whatever.
3. With regard to the interim settlement freeze idea– which seems as though it’ll go onto operation in only a very limited way– making no mention of any kind of mandatory Arab-state quid pro quos for that. (I see that Saudi Arabia’s very influential Prince Turki al-Faisal today reiterated in the NYT that the Kingdom is not prepared to engage in any normalization or or other peacebuilding measures until “after [the Israelis] have released their grip on Arab lands.” Absolutely no surprise there.)
4. Having the US and EU declare that the final border will be “based on the line of June 4, 1967”, though with mutually agreeable exchanges.

So, there seem to be much that is laudable and realistic in the plan as reported. Here, though, are one big thing and a number of slightly smaller things that we need to have spelled out before we express any enthusiasm for it:

One big thing:
The “borders first” approach will not work unless the border-line and any other necessary arrangements regarding all of Jerusalem are also spelled out in the broader border delineation exercise. This is the case, for two reasons: Firstly because “Metropolitan Jerusalem” now constitutes such a large and such a pivotally placed portion of the West Bank that you literally cannot know what Palestinian-administered area you’re talking about in the West Bank unless you know where the line is and what the supplementary arrangement are for Jerusalem. Secondly, Jerusalem is of crucial political importance to all Palestinians as well as to 1.3 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews around the world.
My view on what might work in Jerusalem, fwiw, is that the Israelis would get the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and some but not all of the settlement blocs in occupied East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would get the rest of the Old City and much but not all of the rest of occupied East Jerusalem, with the Palestinian concessions there being compensated with good chunks of land from elsewhere in 1948 Israel… Plus perhaps some kind of special international regime for some Holy Places.
Anyway, there needs to be a line through Jerusalem. We’re talking about two separate states with separate economies and different trading partners, etc. Over time, perhaps, the two states will want to cooperate, and Jerusalem will be a great locus for that. But for now, a clean divorce is so much better– in Jerusalem, as in the land of Israel/Palestine as a whole– than continuing in any form with the highly coercive and extremely damaging regime that has existed, including at the economic level, since 1967, and also, of course, since Oslo.

And here are the main other things that need to happen to make this path look good:

1. Obama still needs to spell out, repeatedly, that it is in the United States’ interest to see a sustainable peace agreement secured in a very speedy way… Enough with always trying to justify his diplomatic involvement on the basis that “it’s in Israel’s interest”, or “it’ll help make Israel more secure”, or whatever. Yes, those things will happen. But they will be by-products of him pursuing this final peace agreement for the two even more important reasons that (a) it’s the right and moral thing to do, and (b) it’s in the deeper interests of the US citizenry as a whole… And therefore, that even if the PM of Israel should disagree (shock! horror!) with what Obama plans to do, nonetheless he will proceed, undeterred by that opposition.
2. He needs to spell out that this whole approach is based on international law and international resolutions… And by the way, he needs to bring other countries/groupings into the “leadership process”, in addition to the US and the EU. This is not, and should not be seen as, a western/NATO project! It should derive its strength, clarity, and legitimacy from the United Nations, including from the resolutions of the UN Security Council.
3. Based on the preceding two points, he needs to make sure that the “model” of the negotiations is not just one in which “the Israelis and Palestinians get left in a room together to work things out between them.” That can never work. One side is, on the ground, a fearsome military and economic power that is occupying the land of the other. The other is a weak and oppressed (though numerous) group of people who’ve been living under the Israeli fist for many years. That is why both the US’s interest and the principles of international law need to be added into the equation to even things up. So that, for example, the negotiations “land swaps”, the refugee issue, or whatever don’t end up being completely– and over the medium haul, quite unsistainaby– resolved in Israel’s interest.
4. He needs, obviously, to find a way to include in the diplomacy in some way those parties that were not only excluded but also actively combated and opposed by GWB administration. That includes both Hamas and the five-million-plus Palestinian refugees. On Hamas, there is some modestly good news, in that the Speaker of the PLO’s ‘parliament’, Selim Zaanoun, is supposed to be in Gaza right about now, discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PLO… And of course, it is the PLO, not the Determinedly Interim Palestinian Authority, that under the Oslo formula is responsible for negotiating the final peace with Israel. (Even if Saeb Erakat does like to double- or triple-hat himself on occasion); and
5. Finally, this peace diplomacy on the Palestinian-Israeli track will be a lot more successful if it is seen as part of an intentionally synergizing push for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, that is, one that involves progress on the Syrian-Israeli track in tandem with– rather than, as in the past, in a considerably degree of competition with– the Palestinian-Israeli track.

Well, there’s my input into this. Let’s hope more than a few of the relevant power-that-be here in Washington listen to me, eh?