Obama’s Middle East Peace Farce

After the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations collapse, violence will follow just as surely as an “amen” follows a prayer.

The White House is currently hosting an absurd theatrical piece. All the actors appearing in it know they’re about as likely to see a peace agreement in the Middle East as they are to see a squadron of flying camels at the South Pole. But the two leading men, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recite their lines anyway because the director, Barack Obama, wants it that way. He received an award for the play before the curtain even went up: the Nobel Peace Prize. And, of course, such an honor brings certain responsibilities along with it.

Talking is better than shooting, they say, and that’s hard to deny. But what happens if the talks go nowhere, and the shooting starts up again? That already happened once, 10 years ago. The American impresario in charge then was Bill Clinton. He dragged then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is now the defense minister, along with the now deceased Palestine Liberation Organization’s chief, Yasser Arafat, to Camp David in order to force them to make peace. The negotiations were poorly planned and ultimately failed.

That was followed by an outbreak of violence: the Second Palestinian Intifada. Ehud Barak lost the election and was succeeded by Ariel Sharon, who responded mercilessly to acts of terrorism. He finally built a wall intended to keep terrorists out. Hope was rekindled when he withdrew Israeli forces from Gaza, but the vacuum was filled by the radical Hamas. Gaza became the launch pad for the rockets that rained down upon Israel until the Israeli army struck back with a three-week war in 2009.

The Camp David flop weakened moderates on both sides of the conflict. Israel has steadily drifted further to the right ever since. Arafat’s successor, Abbas, controls just a tiny spot on the West Bank. Gaza is ruled by Hamas, and that alone is enough to preclude any chance for a two-state solution because there is a de facto third state, which we’ll call Hamastan. What radical Islam thinks about the Washington peace summit was shown just prior to the beginning of negotiations when Hamas killed four Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Now those who really want peace are supposed to just ignore those fundamentalists opposed to it. But the problem is that the mere political desire for peace isn’t enough.

Even though Netanyahu, as some may have forgotten, made previous concessions to the Palestinians despite his hard-line stance at Wye River in 1998, it’s still difficult to think that he, of all people, will bring peace to the region. Obama already had to conjure up a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations in order to get Netanyahu to consent to a temporary halt to Israeli settlement expansion. That is due to expire on Sept. 26. And that will be the first test of the new peace negotiations. If Israel resumes settlement expansion, the Palestinians will walk out of the talks. If Netanyahu extends the moratorium, he loses his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and thereby his coalition government. In that event, he could bring the moderate opposition Kadima Party on board, which would help the prospects for peace. But for now the question still remains whether Netanyahu actually wants peace and, if so, what kind?

But it’s still questionable whether Abbas is strong enough to push for compromise. With Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, he was dealing with a flexible opponent. Olmert offered territorial concessions, a partitioning of Jerusalem and a solution to the refugee problem — the entire array of elements that both sides know any peace agreement would have to contain. But still there was no peace agreement. Why should it work now with Netanyahu, who, prior to the onset of negotiations, had already declared Jerusalem Israel’s indivisible capital before negotiations even began and never went as far with concessions as Olmert did?

Obama is acting far more courageously than any of his predecessors, who all waited until their second terms before they tried handling the Middle East hot potato. But he awakens exaggerated hopes under a canopy of unfavorable stars that could easily turn into bitter anger. He would have been better off hosting a flying school for camels rather than this dangerous peacemaking sham.