Israel Matzav

The 'peace process' is secondary for this visit

But the idea that the president would parachute into the Middle East and attempt to jump-start a peace process that has been stalled for years by himself without any indication that genuine progress is even a remote possibility gives Obama less credit than he deserves. The president may intensely dislike Netanyahu, but he has no desire to preside over a fiasco or to be seen as a failure so early in his second term.

Lip service will no doubt be paid to the peace process and grand words will be uttered about the need to end the conflict during the course of the visit. There will even be some who will give the president credit for pushing Netanyahu to call for a new round of talks even though the prime minister has been regularly issuing that appeal for years to no effect. But after more than four years in office, even the Obama administration has caught on to the fact that Abbas is more afraid of a return to the negotiating table than he is of his Hamas rivals. The chances that the Palestinian Authority will sign any document that recognizes the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn, or end the conflict for all time, are virtually nonexistent.

President Obama may hope to push Netanyahu to make more gestures to the Palestinians, but there are other and, frankly, more important things for them to discuss than the sensibilities of the corrupt gang that presides over the PA in Ramallah.

Both the U.S. and the Israeli governments are closely monitoring the chaos in Syria as well as the situation in Egypt where the installation of a Muslim Brotherhood government has complicated the strategic equation in the region. And looming over everything is the desire of the United States that Israel not act on its own to forestall the nuclear threat from Iran. No matter how much of the atmospherics of the trip center on the peace process, it is those topics that are really at the top of the agenda.

To assert that the topic of talks with the Palestinians is not the most important subject of discussion between the two countries is not to argue that Obama and Netanyahu will agree on most things. They don’t like each other and don’t share the same frame of reference about the imperative to convey the message to the Arab and Muslim world that there is no daylight between their governments’ positions on major issues.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Egypt, Iranian nuclear threat, Middle East peace process, Muslim Brotherhood, Syria

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:44 PM