By Hasan Abu Nimah
This commentary was published in The Jordan Times on 13/04/2011
There are moves afoot in Israel to try to seize the diplomatic initiative and forestall the international pressure.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is weighing a withdrawal of Israel Defence Forces troops from the West Bank and a series of other measures to block the ‘diplomatic tsunami’ that may follow international recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders at the United Nations General Assembly in September,” Haaretz reported on April 12 (“Netanyahu mulls pulling IDF forces out of Palestinian West Bank”).
The report emphasises that “Netanyahu is not considering the evacuation of settlements” and that the prime minister sees no chance of a resumption of negotiations. But he is looking to “demonstrate an Israeli diplomatic initiative that would rally the United States, the European Union and other Western countries against a unilateral Palestinian move in the UN”.
Meanwhile, a group of former Israeli security chiefs drafted a new peace plan based on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that Israel has long rejected. The group includes former army chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former Mossad head Danny Yatom, former Shin Bet directors Yaakov Perry and Ami Ayalon, as well as former general and Labour Party chief Amram Mitzna.
The plan, endorsed also by 40 other Israeli political figures, has been devised “in light of the dramatic events in the Middle East”, and was meant to urge the Israeli government “to immediately renew peace talks”, according to a statement issued by the group, reported in Haaretz on April 5.
The initiative urges the Israeli government to recognise Palestinian statehood in “Gaza and in nearly all the West Bank, including East Jerusalem”. It proposes possible financial compensation for the Palestinian refugees, with the possibility of permitting “a small number to return to former homes in Israel” and envisages “dividing control over Jerusalem, with largely Palestinian neighbourhoods being put under their control while Jewish areas would be governed by Israel”. On the Syrian front, the plan calls for withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for security guarantees and economic projects.
Naturally, the reported ingredients of the Israeli move cannot be taken at face value. The reality could be substantially different from the little reported.
The Arab Peace Initiative itself was deliberately vague on many of its vital components in order to facilitate its marketing to the so-called international community, which is never in the mood to endorse any offer that may not fully accommodate Israel’s claims - and yet, even that was rejected by Israel. If the current Israeli plan was truly meant to urge the acceptance of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, it would certainly demand major modifications which would dilute the already weak Arab Peace Initiative even further. But it is not that important at this early stage to evaluate the contents of the Israeli move. What matters is how Washington, the “international community” and, most importantly, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah will receive the Israeli move.
Taken together, Netanyahu’s reported plan and the Israeli ex-leaders’ initiative will offer the “international community” a chance to revive the “peace process” and declare another “window of opportunity”. At worst, this could be a repeat of the 2005 “Gaza Disengagement” - which Israel always intended as a way to isolate and besiege Gaza, but which the peace process industry deliberately and naively misconstrued as the beginning of a process that would lead to the end of the occupation and the start of a golden era of peace.
For the Obama administration, whose Middle East policy has been moving from one embarrassing failure to the next, the Israeli initiative may offer a fresh opportunity, just as Obama’s reelection campaign gets under way. Washington may be tempted to utilise these Israeli steps in many expedient ways. One would be to convince the Palestinian Authority to slow down its planned moves at the United Nations to seek international recognition for a Palestinian state and return, instead, to negotiations - whether as part of a “peace process” or to coordinate an Israeli “withdrawal”, however cosmetic - and make it a “success” (success would be defined, of course, as whatever is suitable for Israel).
The PA may also be tempted to drop its standing condition that Israel freeze West Bank settlement construction before talks as a way to resuscitate the PA’s vanishing relevance. Such approach would please the Israelis who have been expressing serious concerns about Palestinian moves at the UN.
As next September marks a deadline both for Washington, which had promised quite unrealistically the birth of Palestinian state by then, and for the Palestinian Authority, which had also promised to complete the institution-building process and declare statehood as well, these Israeli initiatives, however sterile, may provide an appropriate exit.
The Obama administration may also, and for purely local considerations, make a mountain out of the Israeli molehill. On the Israeli “peace initiative”, Subhi Ghandour of the Washington Centre for Political and Cultural Dialogue commented to the BBC lately that Obama, with the help of the Quartet, plans to call for a Middle East peace conference in the fall, with the attendance of the Syrians and other Arab states.
Convincing Netanyahu to accept the former Israeli leaders’ initiative, to enable the president to present the conference as a big achievement that would reflect positively on his reelection campaign, would evidently precede that. Netanyahu would not agree without exacting additional concessions and he will easily get them. But Ghandour believes that there are chances for a deal.
I do not share this belief. Even if the Israeli leaders’ initiative is serious, the Israeli government would not accept it in the same spirit of the initiatives’ authors: to end the conflict before developments in the Arab world make Israel miss the opportunity to obtain peace on “reasonable terms” forever. The Israeli government would try at every turn to extract new concessions to make any possible offer devoid of real content and very difficult to accept even by a grovelling PA.
One should also keep in mind that although the Israeli leaders talk of the Arab Peace Initiative, they are in reality thinking of recycling most of the old, failed formulas that did not advance the cause of peace one inch.
This faint initiative will undoubtedly bring life to the stagnant political market for few months, but no progress will be achieved. Hence, it will become one more item on the long list of failed peace projects.
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