The Last Hope

Barack Obama wants to advance on the Israel-Palestine issue. He said this to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who he received in the White House on May 18th. With that occasion, the American president began a round of diplomacy where he plans to bring Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and with him the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas to Washington before the pronouncement of a June 4th speech on the Arab-Muslim world in Cairo.

This American will for re-engagement is welcome; the two actors in the old conflict seem so incapable now of supporting an equitable settlement. The same is the concern of the new team in the White House: to assume anew the role of arbiter and to break with the politics of President Bush, who consistently left the issue to his unswerving Israeli allies.

In spite of his great caution, President Obama is at risk of creating frustrated expectations. The issue has been transformed into an inescapable spiral for 12 years. The failure was hard to miss. It began in the Oslo accords, which finished it off in 1999. However, its promises were not honored, like the creation of a Palestinian State announced by the “Roadmap for Peace” (an international peace plan) in 2005, and affirmed at a 2008 conference in Annapolis.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has in this way lost all credibility. It has been eroded away by the political realities which have each day belied the official discourse, like colonization, which persists to the tune of about 12,000 new inhabitants a year.

This inertia makes the issue seem done already. The day is coming when land sharing no longer makes sense and when no Palestinian will be found who will accept the name State for an ensemble of disparate geographic locations and hypothetical economic viability.

Over the course of the past years, the international patrons of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process have tacitly agreed to manage the conflict more than they have attempted its settlement. But from the way President Obama has conducted the process up until the present, and from the means he intends to use in the project, he seems to have decided to bring about a settlement, to erase a failure, a sure coup for the shaky fundamentals in the hope of peace.