peace process - Tag Search

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington today for a series of meetings at the White House. He'll hold one-on-one talks with US president Barack Obama before a "working lunch" with Obama, vice president Joseph Biden, and several other officials.

Obama's top priority during these talks will almost certainly be pushing for an extension to Israel's temporary West Bank settlement freeze, which is due to expire in September. The end of the freeze would forestall any possibility of direct talks between the Israelis ri the Palestinians.

"There has been a distinct improvement in the White House relationship with Israel since the last meeting" between Obama and Netanyahu on March 23, said Jonathan Spyer, a political scientist at Israel's Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. "Obama will be looking for a payback," perhaps in the form of an extension to the settlement freeze, Spyer said.

But from Netanyahu's perspective, the domestic politics of extending the freeze are... difficult, to say the least. His administration has nothing to show for the current freeze: Israeli-Palestinian "proximity talks" have yielded little concrete progress, save for a rumored land swap proposal offered by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

Ever since the White House floated the idea of an "Obama peace plan," via Helene Cooper and David Ignatius, we've heard a range of reactions from Washington. Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah think it's a good idea; Marc Lynch is far more skeptical; critics on the right think it's arrogant and foolish.

The Israeli reaction has been slower to emerge; what we've heard so far, though, has generally been negative.

David Ignatius reports on the White House deliberations over a new Middle East peace plan -- one that reportedly includes linkages (there's that word again!) between the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Iranian nuclear program.

The American peace plan would be linked with the issue of confronting Iran, which is Israel's top priority, explained the second senior official.

[...] He said the plan would "take on the absolute requirements of Israeli security and the requirements of Palestinian sovereignty in a way that makes sense."

I assume the White House envisions a quid-pro-quo: Israel will agree to certain conditions (finally fixing its borders, for example) in exchange for a U.S.-led push for substantially tougher sanctions against Iran.

Avigdor Lieberman did an interview today with the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, and it's quite outspoken even by Lieberman's standards. Israel's chief diplomat ripped into Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said over the weekend that Turkey "would not remain with arms folded" if Israel "tried to burn Gaza anew."

The so-called "Quartet" -- the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia -- issued a statement today after meeting in Moscow.  The full text is after the jump.

It doesn't really contain anything new: The Quartet demands everyone abide by promises they've already made, and by the conditions of the "road map" for peace, which everyone has spent the last seven years or so ignoring.

This latest communique seems similarly destined for futility. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister, has already warned that it "distances peace."

Matt Duss flagged this video of Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana), a senior member of the Republican leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking to the Christian Broadcasting Network about why he unquestioningly supports Israel.

Pence is literally saying, Israeli officials should tell us what they want us to do, and we'll support it. That's an insane premise, and if you replace "Israel" with any other country, no U.S. politician would accept it.

I'm pretty pessimistic about Obama's Middle East policies -- but it's worth remembering that Obama has to work within the confines of the U.S. political system, and there's broad bipartisan consensus for Pence's views on Israel (as he notes in the video).

We mentioned this in our weekly newsletter -- are you subscribed? -- but Stephen Walt posted an impassioned call for George Mitchell's resignation on his Foreign Policy blog. Walt argues that Mitchell was conned into accepting the Middle East envoy job by an Obama administration that claimed to be committed to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

... he is wasting his time. The administration's early commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace was either a naïve bit of bravado or a cynical charade, and if Mitchell continues to pile up frequent-flyer miles in a fruitless effort, he will be remembered as one of a long series of U.S. "mediators" who ended up complicit in Israel's self-destructive land grab on the West Bank.

We've needled Mitchell for months -- we made our own frequent-flyer crack back in November -- but the truth is that, as Walt writes, Mitchell is only as good as the administration he represents. If Obama isn't willing to take serious (and politically difficult) steps towards brokering a peace deal, Mitchell is doomed to failure.

Yesterday was President Obama's one-year anniversary in office, and so predictably we saw a rash of anniversary pieces (we thought about writing our own but decided to spare you).

Joe Klein's Time Magazine anniversary piece is based on a Jan. 15 interview with Obama. Most of it is focused on domestic politics -- but towards the end, they discuss the Middle East peace process, and Obama really tries to dial back expectations for progress in 2010. Excerpt after the jump (emphasis mine).

Ha'aretz ran an almost Onionesque headline yesterday: Mitchell to arrive in Mideast this week with no plan, no agenda.

That's not really an exaggeration, nor an attempt at humor. President Obama's Middle East envoy is headed back to the region for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials. He does so without any guarantees: Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas asked Mitchell to promise that Israel would totally freeze settlement-building, and Mitchell refused, because Israel hasn't approved anything of the sort.

A senior Obama administration official has now denied to Yedioth Ahronoth that Middle East envoy George Mitchell threatened to cut off aid to Israel (a claim that was never terribly believable to begin with).

"It was not a threat and not an implied threat," the senior official told Ynet.

Other U.S. officials are also pushing back against Mitchell's remarks: Sens. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut -- traveling in Jerusalem -- said today that Congress would never approve a reduction of aid to Israel.

There are reports this morning that George Mitchell, the Obama administration's Middle East envoy, threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Israel if the Jewish state blocks final status talks with the Palestinians. (The original source for these reports appears to be this Yedioth Ahronoth story.)

Certainly makes for a compelling headline -- but there's much less here than the headline suggests. If you read his remarks, Mitchell said only that the U.S. could, in theory, cut off aid to Israel. That's thoroughly uncontroversial! The question is whether the U.S. would cut off Israel.

If you think that's possible, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

George Mitchell, the Obama administration's Middle East envoy, is meeting in Washington today with Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Jordanian FM Nasser Judeh. They'll discuss the Obama administration's two-year timeline for final status talks, and the plan for "proximity talks" between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.

We've written a lot over the last few weeks about settlements and peace talks and domestic politics in Israel and Palestine -- so I thought it would be useful to pull back a bit and summarize the current situation.

Remember all of that optimistic talk in the beginning of the week about restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks? Take it away, Al-Jazeera:

Israel has launched air strikes against at least seven targets in the Gaza Strip, killing one man and wounding two others, Palestinian medics say.

[...] The air raids came after Israel said a dozen mortar bombs and rockets were fired from the Hamas-run territory into Israel. No casualties were reported from those attacks.

Israeli jets dropped thousands of leaflets before the bombing, warning Gazans to stay away from the border. Israel also reportedly bombed three targets in Gaza City and two in the southern city of Khan Younis; Israeli media say the Gaza City target was a weapons factory.

The Israeli foreign minister tells Quartet envoy Tony Blair that a two-year deadline for a final status agreement is simply impossible to meet:

"It is important to hold an honest, open dialogue with the Palestinians without sowing delusions that are disconnected with reality and that will only lead to violence and frustration," Lieberman told the former British premier. "It is not possible to reach a full agreement within two years."

Which begs the question, of course, "what does Avigdor Lieberman consider a reasonable timeframe?" And I'm not sure such a thing exists.

The White House and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak are close to unveiling a new plan to restart final status talks between Israel and Palestine, a process which has been stalled for more than one year, according to Israeli and Arab news sources.

The plan sets a two-year deadline (עברית) for reaching a final deal, according to the Israeli daily Ma'ariv. Israel and Palestine would start by discussing final borders, with a nine-month deadline for reaching an agreement; that deadline is timed to coincide with the expiry of the ten-month partial settlement freeze imposed last month by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ha'aretz reports that the the plan also includes the release of political prisoners, and the transfer of some land from Israeli to Palestinian security control, as incentives to bring Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas back to the negotiating table. Abbas broke off final status talks with Israel last year over Operation Cast Lead.

Israel's Channel 10 news reported yesterday on the peace deal Ehud Olmert offered to the Palestinian Authority in 2008. The channel also described a separate deal offered by then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni, which was apparently less generous than Olmert's offer.

Both reports come just days after Olmert's lengthy interview with The Australian (which we analyzed last week).

So here's my question. The Israeli PR machine is obviously trying hard to push this story; why? Olmert, I'm sure, is trying to rehabilitate his corruption-stained image. But is there a broader political goal here, too? Like trying to portray the PA as obstructionist?

You can see the broad outlines of Netanyahu's 2010 strategy emerging: He claims that the PA ignored his unprecedented partial settlement freeze, just like it ignored Olmert's and Livni's peace offerings in 2008; he condemns it for refusing to negotiate; and he writes off any further meaningful talks.

Has the Syrian government suddenly reversed decades of standing policy and dropped its demand that Israel agree to return the Golan Heights as a precondition for peace talks? Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks so.

The Australian ran a heavily sympathetic 3,200-word profile of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert over the weekend. (It's truly one of the most lopsided articles I've ever read.)

Olmert's positions are fairly predictable. He defends the 2006 war in Lebanon and the 2009 war in Gaza; he calls the Goldstone Report a "moral indignity"; he speaks highly of both Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas.

After the jump: A just-released transcript of a press conference today by George Mitchell, the Obama administration's envoy to the Middle East, in which he discusses the Israeli settlement freeze offer, the regional peace process, and various and sundry other topics. (You know it's a slow blogging day when we're posting George Mitchell transcripts.)

I'll have some insightful thoughts as soon as I've had a chance to read the thing.

Israeli newspapers and wire services are reporting that Benjamin Netanyahu will announce a 10-month settlement "freeze" today.

I use scare quotes because the proposal will include the usual loopholes: The government will continue to issue building permits in East Jerusalem, and it will not stop construction on some 3,000 homes which have already been approved. So today's "new" proposal is actually very similar to Israel's previous proposals, which the Palestinians said they wouldn't accept.