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Beyond the Freeze Deal: A New Agenda for U.S. Efforts on the Peace Process

(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Robert Satloff - The recent announcement that the Obama administration has ended efforts to negotiate a 90-day extension of Israel's moratorium on West Bank settlement construction is more opportunity than embarrassment. After 22 months of near-fruitless efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian negotiations conditioned on a total cessation of Israeli settlement activity, the administration can finally focus its efforts on the substance of its diplomatic mission. Washington's peace diplomacy deserves a reset. A central reason for its poor record - now broadly recognized by key decision-makers in the administration - was the misplaced decision to junk the tacit understanding on Israeli settlement construction limitations reached under the George W. Bush administration. This new position fed a damaging and flawed narrative about the impossibility of diplomatic progress without a freeze. The demise of the U.S.-Israeli settlement freeze proposal gives Washington the opportunity to engage in a different type of diplomacy. The course correction is to fix the U.S. approach and not for the U.S. to shift direction to another negotiating track (e.g., toward Syria) or for Israelis or Palestinians to choose unilateral options over improved diplomacy. At the heart of this new U.S. approach is a different mindset about the process - one that values the achievement of goal-driven though incremental progress over setting deadlines, making public demands, and trying to satisfy some elemental wish to be viewed popularly as working toward Middle East peace. The writer is executive director of The Washington Institute.
2010-12-10 08:17:31
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