Obama’s Bias in Favor of Direct Negotiations

Direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have become the goal that President Obama’s administration is striving for, and the title under which it plans to announce its “success” in solving the Middle East conflict. Thus, rather than the discussion focusing on the content of the negotiations and what needs to be done in order to establish a just and comprehensive peace — an expression now devoid of any meaning — the debate centers on whether George Mitchell, unfortunate enough to be appointed official negotiator, will sit with the two sides separately, or in the same room!

This administration has deceived itself into believing that approximate negotiations, translated as “indirect negotiations,” were a gift or waiver it gave to the Palestinians in return for Netanyahu’s agreement to the settlement freeze in the West Bank for a ten-month period (ending on the 26th of this coming September).

But all the information leaked about Mitchell’s trips points to the fact that they didn’t achieve any further opportunities for peace — on the contrary, they helped expose how wide the gulf between the Palestinian territories and the Israeli government really is.

This is being caused by the Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and their clearly provocative expansion into Arab neighborhoods they hadn’t previously entered, as well as the Palestinian suspicions about the Israeli government’s intention to fulfill the minimum requirements for peace. But the most important reason for the failure of approximate negotiations is that Obama stands powerless before continued Israeli hostility toward opportunities to achieve peace, and he announced at the start of these negotiations that he overestimated America’s chance of success in this role.

If he were being honest, he would acknowledge that the fundamental reason for the failure of these negotiations to make any progress goes back to his inability to impose the necessary conditions for peace on the Israeli side, as withdrawal from the land Israel controls is a primary condition for establishing the promised Palestinian state.

With his persistent bias in favor of the Israeli position on negotiations since the beginning — before any progress could be made in the current negotiations — Obama had divested himself of any semblance of neutrality in the dispute and wrapped himself up in Israeli colors. The Arabs’ and Palestinians’ problem with him with regard to his demand that they sit face to face with Netanyahu is that he’s selling them illusions, such as the illusion that the negotiations will achieve real results before the end of his term, and that the president of the Israeli government is prepared to make “painful concessions” on the path to achieving peace. When the Arabs heard Obama speaking like this, after it was said that the previous differences between these two men were due to Netanyahu’s settlement policy, they couldn’t help but recall the speech by George W. Bush about Ariel Sharon, where he described Sharon as a “man of peace.”

At least Bush’s ideological blindness satisfied him as to the truth of what he said about Sharon, but what drives Obama is merely political opportunism and cheap electoralism, and there’s nothing left for the Palestinians and the Arabs to do except to oppose it, so that they don’t pay the price for this disgraceful American control of the conditions and requirements for peace out of their own pockets.

There’s no doubt that in the past months Netanyahu has succeeded in kicking the ball of the dispute with Obama from the Israeli side of the field to the Palestinian and Arab side. He made the Palestinians’ refusal of direct negotiations seem like a refusal to work for peace. In the face of this and other challenges, the Palestinian position must be unified, and they must end this shameful division amongst themselves.

As for the Arabs who promote approximate or indirect negotiations on the condition and as a result of American guarantees, it’s their duty now to support the Palestinian position and insist that the Americans take a resolute stance toward Netanyahu’s politics…or else demand that America withdraw its mediation, which has become more dangerous to the peace process than the Israeli policies themselves.