Israel and Palestine-Could the peace dove fly again?
A more flexible Arab League is trying to bring a wider array of mediators
together to revive the peace process. But not all the principals want to
take part
May 9th 2013 | JERUSALEM |
<
http://www.economist.com/printedition/2013-05-11> From the print edition
IN THE wake of the Arab spring and amid a worsening crisis in Syria, the
moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process has languished in the background
of international diplomacy. But on April 29th an Arab League delegation
representing 22 countries tried to bring it back to the fore by revising the
plan they first proposed over a decade ago.
Speaking after a meeting with America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, the
Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who headed the
delegation, conceded that, whereas the 2002 peace initiative called for
Israel’s complete withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, an eventual deal would
probably involve minor land swaps. The Qatari statement, in the Arab
League’s name, thus implied that some Jewish settlements built on occupied
land in the West Bank could remain part of Israel. The delegation included
the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Palestine, the Arab
League’s secretary-general, Nabil al-Araby, plus senior Lebanese and Saudi
diplomats.
Minor land swaps had already been conceded in principle in 2008 by the
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in talks with Israel’s then prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, before negotiations broke down. But the Arab League’s
latest announcement marks the first real step towards reviving the peace
process since Barack Obama visited Israel in March and Mr Kerry began
shuttling around the region. The Americans and the Arab League hope that it
may provide a ladder for Mr Abbas to climb down from his position that he
will not return to the negotiating table unless Israel first stops expanding
settlements.
Yet while Mr Kerry hailed the Arab League’s “very big step forward”,
Palestinian and Israeli reactions were more guarded. The Palestinians’ lead
negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the announcement was in line with the
Palestinians’ official position. Hamas, the Islamist group which runs Gaza,
rejected it outright, saying the Arab League had no authority to make
concessions on the Palestinians’ behalf. Some Arab countries, resentful of
thumb-sized Qatar’s démarche, were also unenthusiastic. Jordan made no
immediate comment, while Egypt said nothing had really changed.
For his part, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, fearing that
American acceptance of the Arab League’s initiative would set the 1967
borders as the basis for a Palestinian state, sounded cool if not
dismissive. He called for the Arab League first to recognise Israel as a
Jewish state, a demand made of neither Egypt nor Jordan before they signed
their peace treaties with Israel. Other members of Mr Netanyahu’s ruling
coalition welcomed the concession, but argued for bigger land swaps.
Liberal Israelis condemned Mr Netanyahu for sounding as rejectionist as the
Arabs had been before the tortuous peace process began. “There’s an
antagonistic convergence between Bibi [Mr Netanyahu] and Hamas,” says Matti
Steinberg, a former senior Israeli intelligence man. “He says he’s against a
bi-national single state, but is not ready to pay the price for two.”
Although the Americans hoped that the Arab League statement and Mr Abbas’s
cautious acceptance of it would shunt the ball into Israel’s court, Mr
Netanyahu faces little domestic pressure to address it. Tzipi Livni,
Israel’s justice minister, who has been given the task of co-ordinating
possible negotiations with the Palestinians, welcomed the amendment as “good
news” but said Israel could not accept the Arab League’s continued albeit
muted insistence that Palestinian refugees and their descendants had a right
to return to Israel.
Hopes that Yair Lapid, the finance minister, who heads the second-largest
party in the ruling coalition, might persuade Mr Netanyahu to bid seriously
for a two-state settlement have also begun to wear thin. Mr Lapid, a
relative centrist, has consolidated a tactical alliance with Jewish Home, a
religious party which is against establishing a Palestinian state, endorsing
the call of its leader, Naftali Bennett, that any Israeli withdrawal from
the West Bank be put to a referendum. Of the 22 members of Israel’s cabinet,
only Yaakov Peri, the science minister, who used to head the internal
security service, Shin Bet, said Israel should take the Arab League’s
proposal seriously.
Shelly Yachimovich, leader of the opposition Labour party, who has
concentrated on domestic social issues, voiced support for it, while
Binyamin Ben Eliezer, a veteran Labour party member of parliament, offered
to join Mr Netanyahu’s government if he would accept it. “It’s not the talk
of the day,” says Ofer Zalzberg, an Israeli analyst studying the influence
of settler ideology on the country’s policymakers. The peace camp, which
used to bring hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets, is
nowadays barely audible.
Still, the participation of Arab League countries at an Israeli-Palestinian
summit, which some diplomats hope to stage next month in Jordan’s capital,
Amman, or in Washington might just bring the comatose peace process back to
life. Some Israelis who back a two-state settlement want to shift the format
from bilateral to multinational talks, so that regional powers might lessen
Israel’s bargaining strength over the Palestinians. This week even China
unusually seemed to join the fray (see
<
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21577423-china-hosts-israeli-and-palest
inian-leaders-and-touts-its-peacemaking-credentials-playing> article).
“The bilateral process launched in Oslo in 1993 has been failing for over a
decade,” says Assaf Sharon of Molad, a doveish new Israeli think-tank. He
has recently put out a paper calling for the revival of the multilateral
format under which the peace process was relaunched by the Americans in
Madrid in 1991. That conference also involved the Russians and a clutch of
European and Arab countries, as well as the Palestinians and Israelis. “It
is time to return to Madrid,” he says.
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Received on Thu May 09 2013 - 16:09:13 EDT
