Deadlock

Secretary Clinton left Pakistan for Abu Dhabi and she has her work cut out for her. Hopefully she can work some of her diplomatic magic to jump start the peace process but as she has said repeatedly, the US can’t want peace more than the parties involved.

In addition to meeting with the severely weakened Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, she will will hold talks (in Israel) with Israeli President Netanyahu and her counterpart, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s long-shot attempt to resuscitate a moribund Mideast peace push is coming up against a firm Palestinian decision not to sit down with Israel, unless it freezes settlement construction on lands the Palestinians seek for a future state.

Israel has given no indication it’s willing to call such a moratorium, resisting Washington’s demands for months. Israeli officials are also privately expressing doubt about the wisdom of holding peace talks before Palestinian elections scheduled in three months’ time.

Nearly a year after President Barack Obama took office, the Mideast peace initiative that is a cornerstone of his foreign policy is clearly in grave danger.

Palestinian officials say their president, the moderate Mahmoud Abbas, can’t give ground on settlements because his people are already disillusioned with his leadership and feel he repeatedly caves in to U.S. demands.

A demoralized Abbas told Clinton in a telephone call last weekend that he would not seek re-election, prompting an urgent phone call from Obama to persuade him to reconsider and assure him the U.S. is committed to establishing a Palestinian state, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the phone calls were private.

One way Clinton could break the impasse would be to wrest concessions from Israel, allowing Abbas to regain credibility.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, has rebuffed months of U.S. pressure to stop all building of new homes for Israeli settlers in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Netanyahu – who opposes some of the key territorial compromises that would be needed to attain a final accord – has also rejected a Palestinian demand that peace talks resume where they broke off under his predecessor.

Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, had no comment when asked what gestures Israel might be willing to make to help Abbas. He reiterated Israel’s position that it is ready to relaunch talks without preconditions.

Speaking Friday, Netanyahu said he hoped to use talks with Clinton “to try to relaunch the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians as soon as possible.”

But Obama’s inability to get Israel to budge on settlements has generated a feeling among Arabs that he is unwilling to put teeth into his demand.

Palestinian leaders are extremely frustrated with Obama and have decided to stick to their position on peace talks even if they end up getting blamed for holding up negotiations, said a senior Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was commenting on internal deliberations.

Clinton arrives Saturday on her first visit since Netanyahu took office in March and her second since becoming Obama’s top diplomat. She will meet with Abbas in Abu Dhabi before heading to Jerusalem.

Obama personally tried to jump-start talks last month by bringing Abbas and Netanyahu together in the U.S. for their first meeting since the Israeli leader took office. But that high-profile sitdown with Obama produced no breakthroughs.

Getting Abbas to sit down with Netanyahu could be a hollow victory if it’s done by pressuring Abbas to acquiesce to U.S. demands, or to an Israeli agenda that Palestinians see as hostile.

In five turbulent years in office, Abbas has never faced as much outrage as recently, when he suspended efforts to put Israeli officials on trial for alleged war crimes during last winter’s Gaza war. Aides said he acted at Washington’s behest.

The grassroots backlash was so harsh that Abbas quickly backtracked. Still, he was weakened badly, making it even more difficult for him to even consider backing down on the settlement freeze demand.

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Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not expressing formal policy, said starting talks with Abbas now could be pointless because Hamas could oust moderates in the elections, scheduled for Jan. 24…

I know I’ve said this before, but I continue to be absolutely stunned at the United States’ surprise that Abbas is holding on for dear life in terms of his political career at the helm of the PA, particularly given we essentially played a HUGE role in all of this by pressuring the PA to table the Goldstone Report and by backing down on our demands for Israel to cease settlement construction. What on earth did the White House think would happen to Abbas back home? The irony of all of this is that the U.S. and Israel won’t sit down in direct talks with Hamas because they are a terrorist organization and yet at every turn (except in the very beginning of the administration) they have engaged in diplomatic maneuvering that has helped ensure that Hamas will be the only group left standing at the end of the day. All of this has played right into Hamas’ hands.

In order to make inroads in fighting terrorism, we need more than unmanned drones and military threats. We need to help convince the world’s most disadvantaged people that their hope lies not in suicide bombs and promises of rewards in heaven, but in creating a better future for themselves by nonviolent means. But in order to do that, we have show them that there is some hope- hope for education, hope that their children might have a better life, hope that they will be able to work and provide for their families.

This article over on Foreign Policy has an interesting take on the stalled mid-east peace process (excerpt) :

…So far, Benjamin Netanyahu has been able to maximize his gains at the expense of the U.S. president and the Palestinians while solidifying his own position in the process.

Consider last month’s trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. After months of tough and very public statements by top U.S. officials, Netanyahu was able to get the leader of the free world to concede on a settlement freeze and gave nothing in return. For Israeli hawks and their allies in the United States, this was a victory. But it did not come without costs, even leaving aside the effect on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s domestic popularity. Heads of state around the world paid attention, and surely some of them thought of Obama: This man is a pushover.

It would be a mistake to think that this was the first instance in which Netanyahu was able to manipulate a political situation in his favor. In fact, Netanyahu has been playing Obama and the Palestinians like a fiddle because he understands an important axiom of international relations: domestic politics matter.

After his election, Netanyahu formed an Israeli coalition opposed to a two-state solution and supporting the expansion of colonial settlements. This brought him into open confrontation with Obama, who said he did not recognize the legitimacy of further Israeli settlements.

At their spring meeting in Washington, it became clear that the two men were already at loggerheads. When Obama again pressed him on halting settlement expansion, Netanyahu diverted the discussion by highlighting the Iranian threat and Palestinian “incitement” against Israel.

Shortly thereafter, Obama met with Abbas and seems to have sent the Palestinian leader back to Ramallah with two contradictory messages. First, he must have impressed upon Abbas the need to quell the “incitement” that Netanyahu was talking about. Second, he must have urged Abbas to cooperate with U.S.-supported Egyptian efforts to broker reconciliation between rival factions Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah.

When Abbas returned to Ramallah, his U.S.-supported security services stepped up a campaign of arrests of Hamas affiliates in the West Bank, while negotiators in Cairo attempted to bring the sides together. An agreement to end the stalemate that should have been signed in June has been delayed repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu was taking a page from the playbook of colonialists of old by seeking to divide and rule. Once Abbas was done flexing muscle in the West Bank and some Hamas affiliates were released from Palestinian Authority prisons, it was time once again to tip the scales, this time in Hamas’s favor.

Not only did Netanyahu get Obama to back down on a settlement freeze as a precondition to talks, but he also got Abbas to agree to quash the Goldstone report that alleged war crimes against Israel for its attacks on Gaza.

Why would Netanyahu care whether such a report moved forward in the U.N. system? Israel has never paid attention to the United Nations, and any meaningful condemnation of Israel in the international organization has consistently met a U.S. veto.

Netanyahu knew that if Abbas’s representative in Geneva didn’t put forward the Goldstone report, this decision could be exploited to expand the gap between Hamas and Fatah at a critical juncture. He is well aware of each Palestinian party’s distrust for the other and of their ongoing struggle to solidify their positions as rulers of their respective fiefdoms in the West Bank and Gaza.

At the same time, in an unprecedented move, Netanyahu approved the release of 20 female Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for a videotape of one captured Israeli soldier. It may have seemed like a lousy deal, but not if you understand Netanyahu’s intention: strengthening Hamas’s hand against Fatah…

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Reasonable people can disagree about this issue but I think the above article makes some salient points.

And then I came across this article over on CNN, which I think illustrates the above point nicely:

For Berlanty Azzam, Wednesday’s two-hour round trip from Bethlehem to Ramallah was supposed to signal the possibility of a new life chapter for the 21-year-old college student.

Azzam, a senior studying business at Bethlehem University, had a job interview in the West Bank capital, hoping to land a sales position after her graduation in December.

Azzam made it to the interview, but on her way back to Bethlehem she was stopped at an Israeli Army checkpoint. She handed over her identity papers to the soldiers who told her she could not leave.

She said she was held at the checkpoint for five hours with no explanation, and then blindfolded, handcuffed and put into a military vehicle.

“I did not know what they were going to do with me or where they were taking me,” Azzam said in a interview.

As it turns out, Azzam was being removed from the Palestinian West Bank and brought to the Gaza Strip. She called the experience “frightening and dehumanizing.”

The Israeli military released a statement saying Azzam was “residing illegally” in the West Bank and had overstayed a permit “allowing her to stay in Jerusalem for a few days in August 2005.”

Azzam, who grew up in Gaza, left her home four years ago after receiving a travel permit from the Israeli government to visit the West Bank. Azzam said she was “scared of something like this happening” and had not returned home to Gaza for that reason. She acknowledged that the Israeli government had issued a temporary permit but said she stayed on in the West Bank because it was the only way for her to attend school.

Azzam’s return to Gaza means there is a strong likelihood she will not be allowed back to the West Bank to finish her studies.

In a stated effort to isolate the radical Islamist group Hamas which controls Gaza, Israel has imposed extremely tight restrictions on Palestinians leaving the densely populated coastal strip. The restrictions have extended to Gaza residents who have been accepted to universities in Europe and the United States in addition to the West Bank.

The issue received notoriety last year when the U.S. State Department exerted pressure on Israel to allow some Fulbright scholarship winners to leave Gaza to attend schools in the United States.

Azzam’s case has been taken up by Gisha, an Israeli organization which advocates for Palestinian freedom of movement. The group’s executive director, Sari Bashi, told CNN that they were petitioning the Israeli supreme court to allow Azzam to immediately return to her studies in the West Bank.

Bashi said that Azzam’s forced return to the Gaza Strip is part of a recent campaign by the Israeli military “to search the West Bank for Palestinians whose ID cards are registered in Gaza and to remove them to Gaza by force.” Bashi said the right of Palestinians from Gaza to stay in the West Bank is being litigated in the Israeli courts and that the military’s “aggressive” treatment of Azzam constituted “a blatant attempt to avoid judicial review.”

Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government, said he was not aware of any policy to remove Palestinians from the West Bank to Gaza and said that in the past there have been concerns about Hamas using access to the West Bank as a way of placing their activists in universities.

Officials at Bethlehem University said they were worried that Azzam’s case could set a precedent for the removal of more of their students who come from Gaza and questioned why it was a problem to allow her to finish her studies.

“She has been here since 2005,” said Brother Jack Curran, a vice-president at the Vatican-sponsored university. “Name one security concern that she has been involved in.”

I think that Hillary Clinton’s blunt talk in Pakistan was a refreshing change of pace and I am hoping that she uses the same strategy in this next leg of her trip- and yes, with BOTH the Israelis and the Palestinians.

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