Israel Matzav

The risks of 'direct talks'

With Secretary of State Clinton announcing on Friday that 'direct talks' between Israel and the 'Palestinians' will resume on September 2, it's time to look at some of the risks of those talks.

"What is important is the president has put some of his political marbles on the table," said Steve Cohen, author of "Beyond America's Grasp: A Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East." "Because the fact that he has set a deadline which comes right in the middle of his running for president means he is putting a lot of political eggs in this basket.

"That will have more influence on Bibi than anything he might say. Bibi follows the political issues," he said.

If Obama thinks that Netanyahu is going to commit political suicide to get him re-elected, he's dreaming. Netanyahu - who shouldn't be anywhere near a re-election bid in September 2011 - has no reason to sacrifice his coalition and political future to get a hostile American President re-elected.

Another analyst, former U.S. peace negotiator Aaron David Miller, said the new negotiations — driven in part by the expiration next month of Israel's moratorium on some new housing construction — could dangerously raise the stakes.

“In an effort to pre-empt one crisis, the Obama administration may be laying the seeds of another," Miller said. "If these talks reach an impasse because the gaps on Jerusalem, borders, refugees, are too big, the president will be responsible for saving them. If he can't, he will have rushed into a negotiation that's not yet ready for an agreement and forcing a moment of truth for which Israelis and Palestinians aren't yet prepared."

"The time to earn his Nobel may be coming soon," Miller said.

The resumption of talks indeed reflects little real progress on the key negotiating issues Miller listed. And there are other huge obstacles. An Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program could rescramble regional politics. Gaza remains under the control of Hamas, which is deeply hostile to Israel and also the enemy of the Palestinian National Authority. But there's no clear path to dislodging it, with Israelis calling on Arab and Palestinian leaders to push the group out in new elections and others hoping that successful negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians will either push Hamas out or drag it along.

Netanyahu has three reasons to play along with these talks so long as they don't require substantive concessions: Iran, Goldstone and the Mavi Marmara. Netanyahu needs those three problems to go away. The last two should go away fairly easily and Netanyahu is hoping that he's just given Obama an incentive to make that happen. If Goldstone and the Mavi Marmara are still issues in a year, from Israel's perspective the talks are a failure.

As to Iran, Netanyahu feels that he has to keep Obama on our side. But that doesn't mean he'll make huge concessions to the 'Palestinians' for a very simple reason: There's no support for them in Israel and we are still a democracy. Netanyahu is not Ariel Sharon who will try to railroad through an agreement. It's not his style.

Even staunch administration supporters were struck that Clinton's Friday announcement was noticeably short on details concerning how the talks would proceed. Several suggested the actual format for the talks and the core issues to be discussed do not appear to have yet been worked out or agreed to by the parties.

I'd say to expect some arguments over the shape of the table, if not literally then figuratively.

"The hope of a comprehensive deal within a year is a bit overly ambitious, but I think there's a chance with security and borders," said David Makovsky, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Jerusalem and refugees are harder," he said, because they are so central to the identities of the two sides.

"Neither leader has conditioned the societal landscape to be conducive to breakthrough," he said.

That's unfair. Israel was conditioned to a 'breakthrough' - so conditioned that it took four years of the Oslo War followed by the rockets on southern Israel that followed the Gaza withdrawal to convince most Israelis otherwise. On the other hand, the 'Palestinians' have never stopped inciting through their media. I don't expect any agreements to be reached within a year (if the talks even continue that long), and the longer it goes past that, the more we'll be into the US Presidential election. Will Clinton resign within the next year to run against Obama? It's not out of the realm of possibility and perhaps these talks are a way for Obama to try to keep Clinton on board.

"I think they [the Obama administration] have been focusing in the past on actually getting the parties to the negotiations and hoping that once they are in negotiations, the dynamics will change," the American Task Force for Palestine's Ghaith al-Omari told POLITICO. "Both of them [the Israelis and Palestinians] will be locked into the process; both will have to be more responsive; the administration will have more leverage" in the process.

The last time we got into talks that went on for months, the end result was that Ehud K. Olmert, who was desperate to stay in office, offered Abu Bluff everything he could have asked for (more than was offered to Arafat by Barak at Camp David or Taba) and Abu Bluff turned it down. What has changed since then? Is Abu Bluff any more politically secure? I think not. In fact, he has less legitimacy now than he had then - at the time his term in office had not expired.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:38 AM