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A Familiar Obstacle to Mideast Peace: Mahmoud Abbas

(Washington Post) Jackson Diehl - Lesson No. 1 from history is that there will always be a provocation that threatens to derail Israeli-Palestinian peace talks - before they start, when they start and regularly thereafter. Israeli settlement announcements are among the most common, along with the orchestration by West Bank Palestinians of violent demonstrations and attacks from Gaza by Hamas. The Obama administration saw all three in the past 10 days: It went ballistic over one and barely registered the other two. The trick is not to let the provocation become the center of attention but instead to insist on proceeding with the negotiations. On settlements, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice adopted a pragmatic guideline she called the "Google Earth test": A settlement that visibly expanded was a problem; one that remained within its existing territorial boundary was not. The virtue of this is that Rice got the Israelis and Palestinians talking not about settlements but what they really needed to be discussing - the future Palestine. Former Prime Minister Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas went over everything: the border, the future of Jerusalem and its holy sites, security arrangements, Palestinian refugees. Privately, they agreed on a lot. Eventually, Olmert presented Abbas with a detailed plan for a final settlement - one that, in its concessions to Palestinian demands, went beyond anything either Israel or the U.S. had ever put forward. Confronted with a draft deal that would have been cheered by most of the world, Abbas balked. He refused to sign on; he refused to present a counteroffer. Behind Obama's deliberate fight with Netanyahu last week seemed to lie a calculation that a peace settlement will require the U.S. to bend or break Israel's current government. That might be true; it's almost certainly the case that Netanyahu would not accept the terms that Olmert offered. But behind that obstacle lies another - the recalcitrance of Abbas - that the new administration has been slow to recognize.
2010-03-22 10:13:55
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