Palestinian independence, borders, and Jerusalem

I’ve been thinking, based on many conversations over past years, about what constitutes the heart of the “independence” that Palestinian supporters of a two-state solution judge it is, that their independent state has to have.
Very evidently, no independent Palestinian state that emerges from anything like the current diplomatic arrangements or the current balance of forces with Israel, will be able to conduct anything like an independent military policy. Indeed, the Palestinian state will be substantially disarmed, and if it’s born at all will be born under a very stringent and long-lasting demilitarization regime.
There will be similar constraints on the ability of the Palestinian state to conduct an independent foreign policy.
To see why, you have only to look at the heavy constraints that the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan have concluded with Israel place on those two countries’ ability to conduct an independent military or foreign policy. And those are significant, pre-existing states! So there is no way that the Palestinians, from their current position of intense dependency and vulnerability, can win anything like even the pared-down, constrained militaries that those earlier treaties allotted to their Arab parties.
So if national “independence” is to have any meaning for Palestinians at all, it has surely to lie in two other key dimensions of the sovereignty of states: control over its own resources and borders, and freedom to conduct its own economic relations directly with the rest of the world economy.
Absent those two dimensions of sovereignty, the Palestinian state would have no independence that, I think, most Palestinians would consider worth having.
A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that is economically independent, and that has a free-flowing and internationally assured linkage between its two halves, can play many important– and potentially very profitable–roles in the regional and world economies. Interim PM Salam Fayyad is quite right to be concentrating on planning and building the infrastructure of this economically independent state: the airports, ports, and other nodes through which it can interact with its Egyptian and Jordanian neighbors, with other Mediterranean countries, and as an important entrepot for the region.
However, to protect its own economic space and its freedom of international economic action, this state would have to have firm and agreed borders with Israel, (which would presumably also want to preserve the independence of international economic links.) The two economies would almost certainly grow for a number of years in rather different economic directions and at different rates, since they start from such different base-points and have such very different international linkages, as well.
The Palestinian economy, once freed from the stifling constraints of Israel’s current total domination, could grow remarkably rapidly. The Palestinian people are very well educated. Diaspora Palestinians have lots of capital they could invest in a country whose independence and inviolability from foreign aggression could truly be assured. And the location of the country is strategic, indeed.
(Of course, if the Palestinian state is demilitarized, it would have to have iron-clad guarantees of its security from the UN Security Council or elsewhere. But the Palestinians should turn such demilitarization from a necessity into an economic virtue, like Costa Rica. Maintaining a heavy military is, after all, incredibly expensive and burdensome!)
Over the 42 years during which Israel has maintained its occupation over the West Bank and Gaza, there have been two major models for the economic relations between Israel and the OPT Palestinians. The first was one in which Israel forcibly imposed dependency on the OPT Palestinians. The occupation authorities intentionally suppressed the indigenous productive and economic capacities of the OPTs. The OPT Palestinians were thereby forced to work as very low-wage workers in the Israeli labor market; and to become a captive market for the products of Israel’s factories.
The First Intifada put an end to that. Afterwards, Israelis replaced the low-wage and few-rights Palestinian laborers with low-wage and few-rights migrant laborers imported from distant spots around the world, especially East Asia.
And in that second stage we had Oslo, and the PA, and all the fol-de-rol about Shimon Peres’s “New Middle East”, and Israel’s pursuit of an economic model in which– the needs of Palestinians were still completely subsumed to those of Israelis. The West Bank and Gaza are still captive markets for Israeli companies. But Israel’s power-that-be no longer want to have any Palestinian laborers crossing into Israel. So they have left Palestinians of working age simply to rot inside the large open-air prisons known as the OPTs…. And every so often (as with Netanyahu now), they throw them a few economic crumbs in the hope that Palestinians will be so busy rushing after the crumbs– and fighting each other to get them– that they’ll stop worrying about politics and the fight for national independence.
You have to admit, in Ramallah, some of those “crumbs” look pretty ostentatious and glitzy. But they still don’t represent anything like a functioning economy– let alone a functioning and independent Palestinian national economy.
So that is what is going to have to change, if there is to be any kind of a meaningful national independence for Palestinians. To put it plainly, Israel’s boot has to be lifted completely off the Palestinian economy.
Which means there will have to be a real border between Israel and Palestine. And not just the kind of fuzzy, one-way permeable, one-side dominated line we have seen until now (and which is still advocated over the long term by many Israeli proponents of the “New Middle East.”)
This question of the need for a real border impacts very directly on the question of Jerusalem.
I take as a given that if there is to be a viable, independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, then the Palestinians will have to gain/regain control over a substantial portion of currently occupied East Jerusalem. Yes, including three-fourths of the Old City.
So it occurs to me there would be two formulas for how this need for Palestinian economic independence (and thus a real border) could be reconciled with the political-geographic needs of reaching a politically viable settlement over Jerusalem.
Either the city would need to be once again physically divided between the two states, with a meaningful (and internationally monitored) barrier going through it. Or, the whole city should be designated as some kind of special, internationally invigilated “condominium” between Israel and Palestine, with real borders erected between this condominium and each of the two “parent” states.
Otherwise, how do you keep the two states and their economies separate? How would you prevent massive smuggling between them, through Jerusalem?
Neither of these formulas is ideal. But for the vast majority of those– Israelis and Palestinians– who have a direct stake in bringing peace and hope to Palestine/Israel, either of these formulas would be a whole lot preferable to the current situation.
All Palestinians, both those 250,000 people nowadays hanging on “by a thread” in their East Jerusalem homes and that vast majority of Palestinians who have been completely banned from visiting their nation’s capital city for many years now, are currently living with the deep wound of the separation of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.
There already are walls going through East Jerusalem: the Israeli government has been building those atrocious barriers for the past five years now.
There is no “peace” or “unification” in Jerusalem, as Israeli propaganda would have us believe. And there is a non-trivial number of Jewish Israelis who have already said they are ready to make concessions to the Palestinians over Jerusalem…
But can the international negotiators get their head around these ideas, I wonder?
Have they even started to think through what it would mean for the State of Palestine to have real economic independence and its own direct economic links with the rest of the world?
Have they thought through how this impacts on borders and the question of Jerusalem?
I hope so. Because if they take bold action and go after far-reaching and fair-minded ideas like the ones discussed above, then they might still have just a tiny glimmer of a hope of securing the two-state-based peace agreement.
But if they don’t– if they plan on (once again) fudging the idea of Palestinian economic independence, and fudging the question of securing access for all the peoples of the region to their holy places in Jerusalem, and fudging the whole issue of clear and accountable lines of governance in Jerusalem– then the two-state formula doesn’t stand a chance.
Regardless of all the fine words that Pres. Obama might say about his commitment to it…

Palestinian reconciliation update

There have been positive signals coming out of the Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks between Fateh and Hamas.
Al-Quds al-Arabi tells us that Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal, who met with Egyptian intel chief Omar Suleiman yesterday, signaled his agreement to the main compromise (on voting rules) being proposed by the Egyptians– and that he expects the reconciliation agreement to be completed “next month.”
Well, who knows? There have been so many false alarms before regarding the imminence of this agreement.
However, this time I think Suleiman and his prez may be more motivated than they ever have before to get this agreement completed. Previously, they were really a big obstacle in getting it completed. And Egypt does sit astride the only border Gaza has that is not 100% controlled by the Israelis– Gaza’s short border with Egypt is only around 99% controlled by Israel, under various agreements pursuant to both the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 and the Israel-PA ‘Agreement on Movement and Access’ of 2005… So Egypt also sits, in a very real way, astride the Hamas-Fateh nexus which is so central to lifting the siege of Gaza.
It’s not that, at this point, Suleiman and Pres. Mubarak suddenly want to see Hamas succeeding, or anything. But most likely they– like all Washington’s close Arab allies– are really upset by Obama’s slowness and mis-steps on the peace diplomacy and fearful of the regional explosion to which they might lead… So that may well lie behind their greater focus on succeeding in this mediation this time around.
Hamas also, pretty evidently, wants to see the reconciliation effort succeed. The pro-Hamas website PIC reported today Mishaal told a news conference in Cairo yesterday that, “there was a consensus on various issues between the Palestinian factions and the next round of the national dialog would only address some details.”
PIC also reported that a separate press release from Hamas on Monday,

    affirmed that the flexibility demonstrated by its leadership in Cairo did not mean in any way that Hamas gave up its priority represented in the release of all political prisoners from Fatah jails in the West Bank.

That was necessary because the pro-US faction in Fateh recently carried out the arrest/”kidnapping” of a significant Hamas figure from the West Bank called Abdelbasset Al-Haj.
The current Egyptian proposal seems to stipulate a postponement in the holding of PLC elections. Instead of being held in January 2010 as currently scheduled, the new round would be held “sometime in the first half of 2010.” Ma’an has a lot of other details about the Egyptian proposal, here.

MP3 audio: Who Speaks for the Palestinians?

For those who want to hear what I said in my talk on this topic September 24 at the Middle East Institute, you can now listen to it here.
Thanks to MEI President Wendy Chamberlain and vice-pres Kate Seeley for hosting the discussion– and to the other MEI staff members who worked it and then got this up onto their website so quickly.
(Can live-streaming be far behind?)

Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam?

There’s a rapidly growing discussion here in the US about “what to do in Afghanistan.” Some of it is thoughtful, well-informed, and serious. Like this piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in today’s WaPo, which argues that the two best options look to be “Go all-in, or fold.”
(Actually, that’s only one choice, since the US citizenry and budget are quite incapable of doing what would be needed to “go all-in” in that very distant and logistically intimidating country.)
I note that one aspect of the way path forward that just about nobody in the US discourse has yet started talking/writing about is the idea, that I consider crucial, that it does not have to be, indeed should not be, the US that dominates all decisionmaking and international action regarding Afghanistan, going forward.
Members of the US commentatoriat are so US-centric! It still boggles my mind. I suppose that right now, this is still part of the legacy of the 1990s, when the US was the sole and uncontested Uber-power in the world…
Anyway, that caveat notwithstanding, Frank Rich had a fascinating piece in today’s NYT in which he noted a new aspect of the strong relevance the Vietnam precedent has for the decisions Obama currently faces over Afghanistan.
Rich noted that George Stephanopoulos recently blogged that the latest “must-read book” for members of Obama’s “war team” is Lessons in Disaster, a book published last year about a guy called McGeorge Bundy and “the path to war in Vietnam.” Bundy was John Kennedy’s national security adviser.
Underscoring the book’s relevance, Rich notes that when it came out last year, no less a person than Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s chief emissary for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reviewed it (in late November) in the NYT.
Holbrooke’s review is well worth reading. He gives some helpful info about the background to the writing of the book. He also refers to a much earlier essay he himself had written about Bundy that he had titled, ““The Smartest Man in the Room Is Not Always Right”, noting that, having known Bundy a little bit, he had had him in mind when he wrote it.
Holbrooke concluded the review with this:

    Bundy never believed in negotiations with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese. This, coupled with his enduring faith in the value of military force in almost any terrain or circumstance, were his greatest errors. They contributed to a tragic failure. With the nation now about to inaugurate a new president committed to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and succeed in Afghanistan, the lessons of Vietnam are still relevant.

These two little insights into the mind of Richard Holbrooke belie an awareness of the limitations of being “the smartest man” and of the value of military force that I, for one, find a little reassuring.
Much of the current analogizing between the US in Vietnam and the US in Afghanistan focuses on the decisions Kennedy faced in 1961. Other commentaors have focused on decisions faced by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, in 1964.
Last week, I had a couple of good conversations with Dr Jeffrey Record, a very thoughtful guy who teaches at the US Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, who has written a lot of good studies of the big mistakes the Bush administration made in Iraq.
Record has also studied the US performance in Vietnam very closely. As we talked last week, he explored the 1964-2009 analogy a bit. He noted that in 1964, Johnson faced much the same kind of “big” decision Obama now faces– whether to increase the US force commitment substantially, or find a way to ramp it down…
And like Obama today, Record said, Johnson was concerned both about trying to win some serious, big-picture reforms in domestic social policy and about the possibility of a political backlash inside the US if he should be seen as “backing down” from the confrontation in Vietnam.
In 1964, Johnson made the fateful decision to escalate. Rather than investing his domestic political capital in defending a decision to de-escalate in Vietnam, he invested it in pushing through a number of important “Great Society” social reforms at home, instead.
Later, the Vietnam part of that decision would come back to haunt him badly…
On balance, then, it seems good that Obama and his people are all reading what sounds to be an excellent study of the decisionmaking of those earlier years.

Iran sanctions and– Jerusalem

As the Obama administration prepares for next Thursday’s important P5+1 meeting with Iran, the prospects for mounting a successful sanctions campaign against Iran are being seriously undermined by the actions of the Israeli government and government-backed Jewish extremists in Jerusalem.
Today, Israeli police battled Muslim worshippers in the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary; also known as the Temple Mount) after the worshipers tried to block the entrance into the Haram of a Jewish group of unclear intentions.
The situation of the 250,000 Palestinian residents of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem has deteriorated rapidly in recent months, and has for some time been in imminent hazard of exploding.
The latest clash may be a spark that ignites much wider tensions between Israel and Palestinians who have become increasingly frustrated over the complete lack of progress in Obama’s peace effort. One Hamas spokesman responded to the latest incident in Haram by calling on all Arabs and Muslims to “urgently act to save the holy Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem from repeated Zionist attempts to desecrate and control it.”
But even if today’s crisis is contained, the grave and continuing threats faced by the Jerusalem Palestinians, most of whom are Muslims, anyway threaten to undercut the western nations’ ability to enroll into their anti-Iran effort the many Muslim neighbors of Iran whose cooperation is essential to the success of any stepped-up sanctions.
I was recently given that warning, in just about exactly those words, by a senior diplomat from a strongly pro-US Arab nation.
“It is Iran’s neighbors who will have to implement most of the sanctions,” this envoy said. “We can’t do this if we are still arguing about Jerusalem.”
… Yesterday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani stated quite clearly he “did not think” sanctions would work. He was also adamant that, “”Iraq will never permit any country to use Iraqi land or sky in any war and any aggression.” (HT: Paul Woodward.)
Iraq has a very lengthy land border with Iran.
And it’s not just Arab countries. Yesterday, too, prime minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, another Muslim country that shares a land border with Iran, urged caution about stepping up the sanctions on Iran. He said that sanctions “won’t bring about anything good for the people (of Iran). So I think we have to be careful.”
Turkey is currently a member if the Security Council and is emerging as a powerful actor throughout the whole Middle East.
Now, it is true that neither Talabani nor Erdogan expressly mentioned the situation in Jerusalem as contributing to their wariness regarding the anti-Iran campaign.
But if the western nations and the pro-US governments in the region want to make a convincing case for tightening the screws further on Iran then– as the Arab envoy I talked to said quite clearly– their ability to do so is significantly weakened so long as the Israeli governmental and non-governmental bodies continue their attacks on the Palestinian community and the Palestinian Muslims’ sacred places in Jerusalem… And so long as the US government does nothing to rein in or punish Israel for those actions, which are highly prejudicial to the chances of the two-state peace to which Obama has said he is committed.
Information about the assaults that Jewish-extremist settler groups are making on the fabric and viability of Palestinian life in Jerusalem is readily available.
Haaretz’s Nir Hasson tells us today that the settler group Ateret Cohanim recently announced in a brochure that it has six properties in the Old City to sell to 22 Jewish families, “which would bring the number of Jews living in the Arab quarters of the walled city to 1,000.”
In line with the town-planning models in many Islamic cities, Jerusalem’s walled Old City has for centuries had separate “quarters”– almost literally laid out as four quarters– designated for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Armenians. Immediately after Israel conquer East Jerusalem in 1967, it evicted all non-Jews from the traditional Jewish quarter of the Old City, replacing them with Jews.
Now, as Hasson makes clear, the next step for the settler extremists– in the Old City as in the newer (though often centuries-old) neighborhoods around it– has been to implant settlers into the heart of very long-established Palestinian Christian and Muslim neighborhoods.
The Israeli organization Ir Amim (“City of the Peoples”) has a lot of information about the situation of East Jerusalem on its website, and on the blog its supporters contribute to Huffington Post.
In one recent post there, Yizhar Be’er noted that the rightwing Jewish group Elad has been undertaking extremely incendiary excavations– under the guise of “archeology”– in extremely sensitive parts of the city including Silwan and the Old City:

    In several places, digs are being run just dozens of meters from the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Handing over the administrative keys to one of the most sensitive and volatile sites in the entire country, and possibly the world, to a political, extremist organization [like Elad] is akin to deciding to hand over the keys of the nuclear base in Dimona to Ahmedinejad and friends.
    … Thousands of Jews identify with the movement to rebuild the Temple. They gather around Succoth in the national convention center and swear to “remove the abomination” (i.e. the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem and one of the holiest sites of all of Islam) from the premises.

I see that yesterday, Hillary Clinton urged Arab states to “provide political backing for the Palestinians to begin peace talks with Israel even if a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank is not in place.”
She held a meeting in New York yesterday with high-level representatives from the six GCC countries, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan.
Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman told reporters afterwards, “We don’t want to have the perfect be the enemy of the good… We’re not going to wait for the perfect package before we start negotiations.”
Nobody’s asking for perfection! But people everywhere who yearn for a decent and viable end to the Israel-Palestine conflict do want to see a modicum of fairness and even-handedness in the positions adopted by the US, which still aspires to the role of lead mediator of this tragic conflict.
Clinton reportedly told Reuters that the meeting with the nine Arab state reps had been “positive and productive.”
Maybe she hadn’t been listening to Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, when he said in his address to the General Assembly,

    Unfortunately, no real results or notable signs of progress have been achieved in spite of the commendable endeavors of the United States of America (and) the evident personal desire of President Barack Obama and his team to further the peace process…
    If all of this international concern, all this international consensus and all these international endeavors have so far failed to induce Israel to honor the commitments to which it previously bound itself under the Road Map, how can we be optimistic?

Earth to Clinton and Obama: We need to see action to stop the settler-driven destruction of East Jerusalem… and we need to see it now!

Rahm Emanuel’s disturbing view of US role

Key Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel said this about Israeli-Palestinian peace and the US role in securing it, to Charlie Rose on Wednesday night:

    You can’t want this more than they want it. They have a responsibility to their people if they want to make peace and have… a two-state solution that’s based on the principles of past Israeli governments and past American presidents regardless of party have endorsed, as have past Palestinian leaders.
    They have a responsibility. We don’t have — we can’t want this more than they want it.

It’s on p.2 of the transcript there. HT: Akiva Eldar.
In terms of tired, inaccurate, and distinctly counter-productive cliches that get mouthed about Palestinian-Israeli issues, that’s not all, either. Emanuel drags out that ghastly, demeaning, and racist quote Abba Eban coined about “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
To Charlie Rose’s credit, he does try to push Emanuel a little at a couple of points. But Emanuel generally gives only evasive answers. Here’s an example:

    CHARLIE ROSE: And we have influence with the Israeli government on the settlements question and they’re listening to what we say?
    RAHM EMANUEL: We have a very deep relationship with the government of — not just this government of Israel, but the country of Israel as it relates to its security…
    CHARLIE ROSE: Has the Netanyahu government disappointed you about what it…
    RAHM EMANUEL: No. The president was clear about the issue of the settlements.

Well, if the Prez gives much of a hearing at all to Emanuel on Israeli-Palestinian issues, which I assume he does, then this is really bad news.
Earth to Rahm Emanuel: Yes, the American people can care more about Israeli-Palestinian peace than the parties themselves. And we have a strong and direct interest in this peace process succeeding. Please stop giving a complete veto over our policy to Israel’s Likud government.
Footnote: How come, in a White House that’s usually renowned for its message discipline, Rahm Emanuel even gets to speak publicly about foreign policy issues that are not his direct responsibility?
I am very glad indeed that Emanuel gave Charlie Rose this interview, as it provides us an important window into the kind of advice he is presumably giving the president on a whole range of foreign policy issues. But in international affairs, words publicly uttered words by government officials have major consequences.
These ones certainly should.

Obama’s peacemaking pledge– to the world

Where he said it was as important as what he said.
Today, in his debut appearance as US President at the UN General Assembly, Barack Obama vowed,

    I will… continue to seek a just and lasting peace between Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world. We will continue to work on that issue. Yesterday, I had a constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas. We have made some progress. Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security. Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians. As a result of these efforts on both sides, the economy in the West Bank has begun to grow. But more progress is needed. We continue to call on Palestinians to end incitement against Israel, and we continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. (Applause.)
    The time has come — the time has come to re-launch negotiations without preconditions that address the permanent status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees, and Jerusalem. And the goal is clear: Two states living side by side in peace and security — a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people. (Applause.)
    As we pursue this goal, we will also pursue peace between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and a broader peace between Israel and its many neighbors. In pursuit of that goal, we will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation, alongside bilateral negotiations.
    Now, I am not naïve. I know this will be difficult. But all of us — not just the Israelis and the Palestinians, but all of us — must decide whether we are serious about peace, or whether we will only lend it lip service. To break the old patterns, to break the cycle of insecurity and despair, all of us must say publicly what we would acknowledge in private. The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians. (Applause.) And — and nations within this body do the Palestinians no favors when they choose vitriolic attacks against Israel over constructive willingness to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and its right to exist in peace and security. (Applause.)
    We must remember that the greatest price of this conflict is not paid by us. It’s not paid by politicians. It’s paid by the Israeli girl in Sderot who closes her eyes in fear that a rocket will take her life in the middle of the night. It’s paid for by the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has no clean water and no country to call his own. These are all God’s children. And after all the politics and all the posturing, this is about the right of every human being to live with dignity and security. That is a lesson embedded in the three great faiths that call one small slice of Earth the Holy Land. And that is why, even though there will be setbacks and false starts and tough days, I will not waver in my pursuit of peace. (Applause.)

This is is a good start.
It is still not enough. He needs to pledge himself not just to the pursuit of peace, but to its securing. He probably needs to move beyond the mouthing of inaccurate and formulaic “parallelisms”: equating Israel’s settlement-building with alleged Palestinian “incitement”; or the US’s previous neglect of Palestinian claims with the alleged “vitriol” of verbal attacks launched by the UNGA against Israel; etc.
Most of all, he needs to act. We need to see him throwing the whole weight of US national policy behind this vigorously pursued search for attainment of the final-status peace.
But at least, yesterday’s comments after the three-way with Netanyahu and Abbas and today’s even more significant UNGA speech are, as I said, a good start.

Obama: Peace in US interest

Finally, he said it!
Just as I and some others have been urging him to do for some time now, today Pres. Obama said this about getting a final Israeli-Palestinian peace:

    It’s not just critical for the Israelis and the Palestinians; it’s critical for the world. It is in the interests of the United States. And we are going to work as hard as necessary to accomplish our goals.

Here’s why this is important. Under both Clinton and George W. Bush, the (Dennis Ross-inspired) mantra from the White House was always “We can’t want peace more than the parties themselves!”
That gave a complete veto to whichever of the two parties wanted to block or delay the peacemaking. Which in practice was nearly always the Israelis, as they continued their drive to steal the land from under the Palestinians’ feet and implant their own settlers on it (with generous continuing subsidies from the US taxpayer, no less.)
So now, finally Obama is saying not just– as he has said for so long– “We think this is in Israel’s interest” but also “It is in our interest, as Americans!”
Which means that next time the Israeli government tries to stall and say, “Oh, we can’t do this”, or Oh, we can’t move forward because we’re concerned about that”, Obama and his people can say, “We hear your concerns. But sorry, buster, we’re pursuing our own compelling interests in this peacemaking too, and this is how we need it to proceed!”
Shocking? Not really. I mean, haven’t you heard just a few times the Israelis telling us they’re going to pursue their own interests in the peacemaking?
Now, it is true that Obama only slid that line about peace being in the US’s own interests in at the end of the remarks he made today after the “three-way” with Netanyahu and Abbas, rather than putting them more prominently at the beginning.
And it’s true that for Abbas to agree to the three-way– and even more so, to agree to send his negotiators to start the negotiations in Washington next as Obama asked him to do– marks a significant concession on his longheld previous position, given that Israel’s land-grabbing policies in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank continue apace.
But still, as I have written a number of times, it is crucial for the final peace negotiations to get started– and even more crucial for them to get speedily and successfully finished.
And if that is to happen, then the US President needs to not only declare but also single-mindedly pursue the US’s own interest in seeing them concluded in a timely and sustainable fashion.
So today’s declaration was a good (though long overdue) start in that process.