Listening to Palestinian officials bemoan the condition of the peace process can be disorienting, given that that they are the ones who have played no small part in sabotaging that very same process. Ahead of Secretary of State Kerry’s meeting with Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, an unnamed PA official has been warningthat the peace talks are in “real crisis.” The two are due to meet in Paris today, but to suggest that the negotiations are in crisis now would be to falsely imply that they were in a happier state at some previous point.
If they have taken on a particularly unpromising appearance in recent weeks it is because Abbas keeps issuing lists of demands so outlandish as to threaten the entire proceedings, which is precisely what such demands are intended to do. Ironically, despite this, Kerry is seeking a way to have the negotiation period extended for up to another year.
All of this, however, creates a serious headache for Israel. Since the Palestinians are currently saying that they will not remain at the negotiating table unless a framework is agreed upon by the end of April—while themselves saying that they reject Kerry’s current framework—it is likely that Israel will come under further pressure to concede still more. The Israeli press is reporting that as part of the framework the State Department is to request that Israel implement a partial settlement freeze on those Israeli communities in isolated parts of the West Bank.
Some might argue that this demand is not a particularly unreasonable one, although the families living in the communities in question can hardly be expected to see it this way. Yet, this is beside the point. The point is that yet again, the Obama administration is moving to pressure Israel to make real concessions in return for nothing more than the Palestinians continuing to maintain the veneer of participating in the charade of negotiations. And as has now been pointed out by so many, one of the primary beneficiaries of keeping up appearances on the peace front is Kerry himself.
This has become a recurring theme under this administration’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. In what has become a cyclical and self-perpetuating pattern, Israel is pressured by America into making real and difficult concessions in exchange for the Palestinians agreeing to participate in what only ever turn out to have been symbolic negotiations. These negotiations are inevitably restricted to a limited time frame; by the time each round comes to a close Abbas has spent the political capital he managed to extract from the previous Israeli concessions and begins to demand further concessions if he is to keep going through the motions of the peace process.
We saw how in 2009 Obama forced the Israelis to implement a nine-month settlement freeze just to get Abbas to the table. Then Abbas demanded that the freeze be extended to Jerusalem, and indeed it appeared that Israel unofficially capitulated to this too. Yet, only in the closing weeks of that nine-month period did Abbas finally arrive at the negotiating table, and by all accounts once there was only interested in talking about one thing: having the freeze and Israel’s concessions extended further. When it came to the current series of negotiations, this time around Israel refused to put life on hold for the half million of its citizens living over the green line. Instead it was compelled to release Palestinian terrorists, something which understandably caused the Israeli public great anguish, and surely cast doubt on Abbas’s credentials as a man of peace.
Now Abbas is once again threatening to walk. According to Israel’s chief negotiator Tzipi Livni, hardly someone with a vested interest in derailing the peace process, the Palestinians have blocked all attempts at progress with a string of impossible demands. With Abbas having contributed nothing useful to the conversation, it seems that the State Department is now trying to bribe him into remaining in negotiations by pressuring Israel into making yet more concessions. As with their floundering negotiations with Iran, and indeed Syria, the administration is attempting to appease the unappeasable. Unwilling to take the tough actions necessary to achieve concrete end results, all that Kerry can do is keep up the façade of a process. There is something almost Buddhist in all this; the journey has become the destination. But all the while, its America’s allies that are paying an ever-higher price for this administration’s indulgences.
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