Playing the blame game

Some in the American Jewish community may be waking up to the implications of a possible Kerry failure

By ALAN ELSNER
Abbas and Kerry meet in Ramallah 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Abbas and Kerry meet in Ramallah 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
As US Secretary of State John Kerry prepares for a final round of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to try to reopen peace negotiations, Israel and its US backers are already positioning themselves to blame the Palestinians should Kerry fail.
In tepid public statements mid-June, issued reluctantly in response to Kerry’s call on American Jews to get behind his initiative, several senior US Jewish figures suggested that the sole holdup came from the Palestinian side. For example, David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, told the Daily Forward that he hoped the Palestinians will return to negotiations “in good faith to hammer out the tough issues.” And Rabbi Steve Gutow, president and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said he saw the Palestinian leadership as the barrier to negotiations and saw no need for American Jews to push Israeli leaders.
For Kerry, the past few months have been a harsh wake-up call. He came into office full of enthusiasm, convinced he could breathe new life into the moribund peace process. He believed he could entice Palestinians back to the table with promises of economic aid and attract Israelis with the glittering prize of wider regional acceptance, as promised by the revived and updated Arab Peace Initiative that he promoted. But neither side has proved to be easily seduced by those sweeteners.
The view from the White House was always more measured.
President Barack Obama and his aides were willing to give Kerry some running room to see if he could make progress. But the president, tempered by four tough years of dealing with Netanyahu, told supporters he was only willing to give these efforts a few months and would not be drawn into an endless process of talks for the sake of talks. In private meetings, Obama has also ruled out trying to exert US pressure on Israel as politically unrealistic. That means most of the pressure has fallen on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who is being asked to abandon his demand for an Israeli settlement freeze in exchange for entering the talks, without any prior Israeli commitments on substance.
If Kerry fails in this final round of talks, there are many in the Administration who will urge him to walk away. Other issues urgently await his attention – the pending US military pullout from Afghanistan; a new Iranian president; nuclear disarmament talks with Russia and above all the rotting abscess of Syria.
Looking at the world through Abbas’s eyes, US officials say they can see why he might hesitate to reengage. They understand that Abbas doubts whether it is worth negotiating with an Israeli government that is so clearly split. They also fear that Netanyahu’s real goal is to drag the negotiations out as long as he can and keep building more settlements all the while – and then blame the Palestinians if they decide to walk away. But Kerry’s view is that once talks resume (if they resume), they would take on a momentum of their own. And should the parties reengage, Kerry intends to be a very active mediator, ready to step in with his own ideas whenever the parties get bogged down.
Interestingly, given the blame game mechanics, American Jewish organizations responded harshly to a statement from Housing Minister Naftali Bennett, who told a settlers’ conference in mid-June that Israel should “build, build, build” in the Palestinian territory and annex over 60 percent of the West Bank immediately.
The American Jewish Committee was among several organizations, which rushed to condemn Bennett.
The AJC called the statement “stunningly shortsighted” and urged Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders to repudiate it.
It may be that some in the American Jewish community are waking up to the implications of a possible Kerry failure. Israel needs these negotiations to proceed – and so does American Jewry.
Without them, the Netanyahu government is likely to find itself more isolated diplomatically than at any time since the 1980s, able to count on support in the UN and other international bodies only from the United States and a few atolls in the south Pacific.
So while there may be little genuine enthusiasm for the two-state solution at the top reaches of American Jewish organizations, few look forward to seeing its demise as an idea and an aspiration.
If Israel’s strategic goal is to pin the sole blame on the Palestinians for the possible breakdown of the Kerry initiative, Bennett’s comments were highly problematic. But if there are no negotiations, the likes of Bennett and the equally hawkish Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon will increasingly become the drivers of Israeli policy as the settlements continue to grow unabated. Few American Jewish leaders look forward to living in that world with much relish. 
Alan Elsner is Communications Director of the left-leaning Jewish American advocacy group J Street