Peace Talks: Lowering the Bar on ‘Progress’

Rather than previewing their peace proposals, the protagonists in this week’s Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington made sure everyone knew their version of who is to blame for the negotiation’s widely anticipated failure. Not surprising, really, because each side’s position is well known to the other, and the odds of talks bridging the gap — even “direct” ones, as opposed to those called “proximity,” i.e., mediated by a shuttling U.S. diplomat — remain long.

The Palestinians warn that there will be no agreement if Israel continues expanding its settlements on occupied land. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must “choose between settlements and peace,” as Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat put it. The Israelis note that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lacks the political strength to sell any deal to his people, possibly even to his own Fatah movement. Abbas governs under the shadow of his rivals in Hamas, which emphasized its rejection of a peace process in which it has no stake by launching two deadly attacks on Israeli settlers this week. The Israelis say Hamas is a proxy of Iran, whose influence is a key obstacle to peace. And if the Obama Administration wants peace, it had better get on with pulling Iran’s claws.

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Although this week’s peace summit may mimic the rituals of its predecessors, its substance is quite different from the heady days of the Oslo process. None of the parties believe that the year of talks launched on Thursday, Sept. 2, will result in the implementation of a two-state solution anytime soon. The goal is a “framework agreement,” which special envoy George Mitchell described as “more detailed than a declaration of principles but … less than a full-fledged treaty.” In other words, a guideline to be implemented on a better day.

Abbas is convinced, with good reason, that Netanyahu won’t offer what he needs. After all, the Israeli Prime Minister refused to halt settlement construction or accept the 1967 borders as the basis for talks, and he insists Israel won’t share Jerusalem. So the Palestinian leader has told his own people he’s been dragged to Washington under threat of having donor funds cut to his aid-financed administration, effectively undermining any deal that results from the talks. Obviously, he’s not expecting one. Abbas may be hoping simply to demonstrate, with Americans in the room, that Netanyahu won’t willingly implement a viable two-state solution and that if Washington believes, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized, that a two-state peace is important to U.S. national security, it had better be prepared to pressure the Israelis. Obama’s retreat on the settlement-freeze standoff suggests that may be wishful thinking.

(See why Israel doesn’t care about peace.)

Netanyahu, for his part, is under no political pressure at home to reach agreement; on the contrary, when he resisted the Obama Administration on the subject of settlements, his domestic political standing soared — peace with the Palestinians is simply no longer a priority for the Israeli body politic. As former Camp David negotiators Robert Malley and Hussein Agha succinctly concluded in the Washington Post on Thursday, “If Netanyahu comes back with an accord, he will be hailed as a historic leader … If the talks collapse, his followers will thank him for standing firm, while his critics are likely in due course to blame the Palestinians. Abbas will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.”

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Netanyahu has professed his readiness to make a historic compromise, but that may not mean the same thing to him as it does to Abbas. The Israeli Prime Minister entered office arguing it was futile to try to implement a political deal to end the conflict in the immediate future. Instead, he advocated “economic peace,” focused on easing the conditions of life in the West Bank to enable economic and administrative development, creating an infrastructure for long-term Palestinian coexistence with Israeli neighbors. Even getting Netanyahu to use the words Palestinian state took some doing by the Obama Administration. He eventually complied in a speech last year but added conditions unacceptable to Abbas or any other Palestinian leader.

With Hamas in control of Gaza, the Israelis envisage regime change in the coastal strip as a precondition for progress. And given the state of Palestinian politics, Netanyahu aides argue, it’s naive to imagine that Abbas could seal a deal that resolves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So the current talks are viewed not as a decisive settling of accounts with the Palestinians but an application of what Israeli leaders once called a “political horizon” to a strategy of cooperation, in order to boost Palestinian well-being and good governance in the West Bank while leaving Gaza festering to force Palestinians to reject the path of Hamas.

(See pictures of life under Hamas in Gaza.)

The Bush Administration embraced this view and had Abbas spend a year in open-ended conversations with then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, aimed at achieving what was (rather unfortunately) dubbed a “shelf agreement” — a reference to its destination, as the world waited for a better day on which it would be implemented.

Although even a shelf agreement eluded Abbas and Olmert (a more centrist leader than the hawkish Netanyahu), the Obama Administration’s framework-agreement concept may not be all that different. It’s about creating hope on the deferred horizon while changing the status quo by increments.

Deferring Palestinian statehood will exasperate Abbas and moderate Arab regimes, because they believe its framework had been well established in previous rounds of talks. Still, a framework agreement may be the best the Obama Administration can get as long as it seeks consensus with Netanyahu. Optimists in Washington may hope that, like getting Netanyahu to say the word state, an agreed framework for the future will be perceived as progress.

The real lesson of the past two decades, however, is that the situation on the ground trumps the conversation among negotiators. And over those two decades of talks, Israel’s settler population doubled and its political median moved steadily to the right, while Abbas was irrevocably weakened by the diminishing returns of his negotiation strategy. Even as the new conversation starts, Hamas is killing settlers, and the more militant settlers are no doubt planning their revenge. It may take more than framework talks to prevent the situation on the ground from turning very nasty very quickly.

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