Stuck in the mud

As you may have heard: The peace process is stalled. The proximate cause is Israeli settlement-building: Abbas wants a complete settlement freeze; Netanyahu agreed to a time-limited partial freeze.

Politics prevent both men from changing their positions. Netanyahu's fractious right-wing coalition would completely fall apart if he ordered a complete settlement freeze. And the consequences might not be limited to politics -- remember, defense minister Ehud Barak is already receiving death threats over the limited settlement freeze.

And Abbas -- already suffering a crisis of confidence, after years of failed peace talks with Israel and failed reconciliation talks with Hamas -- is unable to budge. Unable, and unwilling: The Palestinian president is tired, and frustrated, and wants to wait for Israeli concessions. (That's why Netanyahu's partial settlement freeze was so shrewd, politically: It places the onus on Abbas to respond, and if he doesn't, Netanyahu can portray his Palestinian counterpart as an obstructionist.)

In other words, concessions on this issue are politically untenable, and neither Abbas nor Netanyahu is the kind of bold leader who throws caution to the wind and does something transformative.

So that's the political dimension. Morally (and legally, it's hard not to sympathize with the Palestinian position. The construction that's being approved in East Jerusalem is not limited to Jewish neighborhoods; all of the permits issued this week, for example, are in Arab neighborhoods. It's hard to see any motive here beyond expropriating Palestinian land -- laying claim to areas that would otherwise become part of a future Palestinian state.

Washington's role

The White House, frankly, has very little ability to change this dynamic. Obama clearly can't cajole Netanyahu into a more expansive settlement freeze; the State Department issues a sternly-worded statement whenever Israel approves new construction in East Jerusalem, but Israel keeps on building.

On the Palestinian side, advisers to Abbas often say that their boss has lost confidence in Obama. Six months ago, Abbas might have been willing to take political risks to work with Obama. Today? Doubtful.

Abbas' advisers are tapping into a broader sense of frustration -- resignation? -- in the Arab world, where many feel the promise of Obama's Cairo speech has completely evaporated. The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir ran a column today about the Aboul Gheit/Judeh visits, and it provided this cynical assessment (عربي) of the administration's sudden push for peace.

The agenda of the Obama administration has stalled in more than one place around the world -- most notably in Palestine -- and the administration seems to feel the need to achieve something aside from military redeployment in Iraq, the escalation of the drums of war in Afghanistan -- and possibly in Yemen.

That view isn't an outlier; I've seen and heard similar arguments from several other Arab journalists this week.

Is there any way forward here? Not in the short term -- not while Abbas and Netanyahu are in office. Abbas has lost too much legitimacy to engage in any meaningful negotiations (and we haven't even touched the question of reconciliation with Hamas). Netanyahu will ride out the next eight months of his partial settlement freeze, and then refuse to make any more unilateral concessions.

And Obama -- who was once viewed with a sense of skeptical optimism in the Arab world -- is now increasingly seen as just another American politician.