The assessment within Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s circle is unanimous:
He doesn’t want to do it, he shouldn’t need to do it and he won’t do
it.
Netanyahu can’t, after vowing last November that the 10- month freeze
on housing starts at West Bank settlements was a “one-time, temporary”
moratorium, now come out and say, “Well, actually, it’s not quite a one-time,
temporary thing, after all. It’s more of a twotime, or maybe even a three- or
four-time, semi-permanent kind of thing.”
Forget it, those close to the
prime minister indicate. It’s not going to happen. All manner of
informal
arrangements might be possible, but formally extending the freeze would
destroy
any last vestiges of trust Netanyahu still enjoys on the pro-settlement
Right.
And it would make him a bit of laughing stock all the way across the
spectrum.
The prime minister whose words are worthless.
The prime minister of
capitulation.
The Americans aren’t so sure.
Netanyahu was so
anxious to get talking with the Palestinian Authority, they reason, that
he
won’t easily let PA President Mahmoud Abbas leave the negotiating table.
They’re
certainly going to urge him to extend the freeze, especially given that
he has
Kadima to call on for support if he loses some of the Right in the
process. The
Americans might even succeed – if, that is, Netanyahu proves susceptible
to
another bout of White House pressure. Or if (less probably) he has
undergone a
far more radical political shift than suggested even by his relentless
public
assertions of a profound desire for a deal. He did act decisively early
last
month to block legislation that would have given the Knesset authority
over
future freezes.
But the Palestinians, often much better at reading
Israel’s politics than the Americans, are betting against it. They’re
betting
that, come September 26, the freeze will melt, and the pressure – the
pressure,
that is, for progress at the direct peace talks they are so reluctantly
about to
enter with Israel – will be off them.
They’ve only got to stall for
another few weeks, and Israel will be in the dock again.
UNTIL THIS week,
for Abbas, it had been a breeze. For almost nine months, he’d wriggled
easily
out of the Israeli, American and international direct-talks embraces. At
first,
he didn’t really need to do anything.
He was able to relax as the months
went by and the US and Israel simmered in bitter acrimony.
Washington and
Jerusalem went head-to-head over housing: The Obama administration
bristled at
Netanyahu’s refusal to halt all construction over the Green Line in east
Jerusalem, and in March tried to use routine new Ramat Shlomo
construction plans
as leverage, going so far as to publicly question Israel’s commitment to
its
strategic alliance with the US. Netanyahu, conscious of the support of
the
Israeli mainstream for building in east Jerusalem’s Jewish
neighborhoods,
refused to budge. And Abbas sat back contentedly.
After the American
president and the Israeli prime minister belatedly began patching up
their
differences last month, it got a little trickier for Abbas to stay away
from the
face-to-face talks. Netanyahu was honoring the freeze – which has
formally
halted construction in the West Bank and informally impacted on building
in
Jewish areas of east Jerusalem, too.
And the West Bank economy was
demonstrably improving, in part because of Israel’s eased
restrictions.
Still, Abbas managed to stave off the unwanted direct
contact for a few more weeks.
Netanyahu pledged a readiness for
negotiations anywhere, right away, with no preconditions.
Netanyahu
hinted at possible flexibility down the road regarding security
arrangements in
the Jordan Valley. Netanyahu admitted a tentative readiness to
reconsider the
status of Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem. But Abbas would not be
moved.
Among his preconditions for looking Netanyahu in the eye across
the negotiating table, Abbas variously insisted on an ongoing and
expanded
settlement freeze, advance word on Netanyahu’s stance relating to border
and
security issues, and a commitment that any territorial adjustments would
be made
on the basis of the pre- 1967 lines. The Americans ratcheted up the
pressure,
but Abbas was unfazed.
Last weekend, though, the US pulled the rug out
from under him. To his considerable dismay, according to Abbas officials
who
spoke to our Palestinian Affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh this
week, he
learned that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was about to issue
invitations
for a ceremonial opening of direct talks without so much as informing
him in
advance. He contemplated rejecting the invitation, but evidently
concluded that
picking so public a fight with the Obama administration would backfire.
So he
grudgingly accepted, secure in the assessment that Netanyahu will get
him off
the hook by ending the freeze next month.
“If Israel continues with the
settlement construction, we will withdraw from the talks,” he made clear
in a
letter dashed off to the Quartet.
ABBAS HAS worked hard in recent months
to try to correct the damaging impression he had previously given the
watching
world, notably in a
Washington Post interview in May of last year, that
he isn’t
in much of a hurry for a permanent peace accord with Israel.
In that
interview, he had declared that “the gaps” between former prime minister
Ehud
Olmert’s proposals and his own positions were “too wide,” and indicated
that he
felt time was on the side of the Palestinians.
Since then, in meetings in
the US, including with Jewish leaders, and in Israeli media contacts,
Abbas has
declared a firm desire for an accord based on two states living side by
side in
peace. He has acknowledged the Jews’ “history” in Palestine.
And those
around him, along with those sympathetic to him on the Israeli side,
have
claimed that he didn’t really pass up Olmert’s peace offer because there
was no
genuine, properly formulated offer – just hurriedly presented proposals
from a
prime minister who was about to step down.
Which begs the central
question now: Since the PA leadership is being wooed by an Israeli prime
minister with a strong coalition, a high degree of popularity, a
credible
capacity to deliver on any deal and a declared commitment to an
independent
Palestinian state, why has Abbas had to be dragged, kicking and
screaming, into
the direct talks framework? Is it because he mistrusts Netanyahu’s
intentions?
Well, few Israelis can credibly claim to know where exactly the prime
minister
is headed. But Netanyahu said again this week that he was determined to
“surprise all the critics and the skeptics.” Surely the best way to put
him to
the test is at the negotiating table.
Is it because he is cowed by the
hostility to Israel among his own people? Well, that’s a phenomenon he
could
have sought to confront if he’d wanted to, by energetically advancing
the cause
of reconciliation – for starters by stopping his own PA’s glorification
of
Palestinian “martyrs” and by tackling the demonization of Israel in the
PA’s own
media.
Is it truly because Netanyahu won’t pledge to maintain the
settlement moratorium? That doesn’t square with Abbas’s behavior since
last
November.
For if the PA chief had really wanted talks, he wouldn’t have
spent the last nine months, when the freeze was biting, avoiding them.
Even now,
he knows that Netanyahu could be prevailed upon to informally maintain
at least
a partial moratorium – limiting building to settlements in areas Israel
would
anticipate retaining under a permanent accord.
And a renewal of building
solely in the blocs should not be a disaster for an Abbas who genuinely
seeks
peace. It does not contradict his stated willingness for an accord that
provides
for territorial swaps. And his consent to such an arrangement would
bolster the
credibility of the negotiating process among skeptical Israelis, thereby
raising
the prospects of a deal.
A slightly more plausible explanation for
Abbas’s disinclination to go into the talks and for his evident desire
to
quickly find a way to back out of them might be that he anticipates
Barack Obama
– whether staring at a bleak future after humiliation in the November
midterm
elections, or reinvigorated by an unexpectedly strong Democratic showing
–
seeking to impose a more favorable deal, with widespread international
support,
sometime around year three of his presidency.
But if that were Abbas’s
thinking, he would probably be mistaken. The notion of the Obama
presidency
trying to impose a deal if negotiations can’t make progress is not at
all
far-fetched. The idea that it would be particularly dissimilar to the
Clinton
parameters is more improbable. And the notion that the Israeli public
would sign
on for an imposed deal of that nature is remote.
Maybe, just maybe, with
an American president it really trusted, and a Palestinian leadership it
had
come to regard as genuinely committed to long-term peace, the Israeli
mainstream
would contemplate the idea of relinquishing almost all of Judea and
Samaria and,
still more dramatically, the division of Jerusalem, including the Old
City, into
areas of Israeli and Palestinian control. Maybe, just maybe, the Israeli
mainstream would have gone along with the idea 10 years ago, before the
second
intifada had demonstrated the vicious extent of Yasser Arafat’s
duplicity, and
before the Hamas takeover of Gaza had demonstrated what can happen when
territory is relinquished in the absence of a genuine accord. Maybe,
just maybe,
a few years from now, amid a continuation of the relatively benign
current
security environment, and at the end of demonstrably good faith
negotiations.
But a Clinton-style deal under an Obama presidency regarded
with wariness, to put it mildly, by Israel? And with a Palestinian
leadership
still allowing its media to incite relentlessly against Israel, a
leadership
balking at the very idea of negotiating in the same room as the Israeli
government? That’s almost out of the question, however much mainstream
Israel
mistrusts the status quo and believes that time is working against
us.
All of which, again, the Palestinians, with their savvy understanding
of the Israeli mind-set, doubtless fully understand.
BUT IF Abbas’s
absent enthusiasm for direct talks isn’t a function of his mistrust of
Netanyahu, or of the ongoing hostility to Israel he has allowed to
fester among
his people, or of the settlement freeze’s imminent expiration, or of an
assessment that the US might be able to impose a more favorable deal
down the
line, then why did he stay away for so long, and why is he so keen to
get away
again now?
Could it be, as the Israeli pessimists say – pessimists not
only on
the traditional Israeli Right, but deep into the mainstream, too – that
Abbas,
though he may be better intentioned than the duplicitous Arafat, is too
weak-willed to have confronted Arafat’s malevolent legacy, and is
terrified of a
vicious domestic backlash, led by Hamas but including Fatah loyalists,
too, for
the crime of negotiating a viable deal? Is it also that he’s betting on
Palestinian fertility, unreconstructed regional opposition to the very
fact of
Israel’s existence, and growing international delegitimation of Israel,
ultimately sparing the Palestinians the need for significant
concessions? And
does he believe that the international community will eventually
legitimize the
state of Palestine that his Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad is steadily
constructing, without the need for a negotiated settlement that,
unpalatably,
recognizes Israel – without the need for reconciliation and a formal end
to our
decades of conflict?
Not at all, his defenders would doubtless chorus.
He
really, truly, genuinely, honestly wants an accord.
If so, he’s following
a curious path toward getting one.