November 2, 2009
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of an Israeli position that fell short of a total settlement freeze moved the U.S. closer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stance, while leaving Palestinians unimpressed and unwilling to resume peace talks.
During a four-hour stopover in Jerusalem this weekend -- wedged between visits to Abu Dhabi and Morocco -- Clinton praised Netanyahu’s readiness to exercise “restraint” in limiting new construction on the West Bank.
“While their offer falls short of our position, if acted upon, it would provide unprecedented restrictions on settlements and would have a significant and meaningful effect on the ground,” Clinton told Bloomberg News in Marrakech, Morocco, where she starts talks today with Arab foreign ministers.
That was a departure from the secretary of state’s remarks in May after Netanyahu’s first Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama. Clinton said then that only a complete construction halt would be acceptable to the president.
“There’s no question that it’s a change of tone for the administration,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “First they were trying to bury Netanyahu and now they’re coming to praise him,” said Miller, who argued that the U.S. wasn’t tough enough on Israel in his 2008 book, “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.”
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations broke down last December when Israel launched a military operation in the Gaza Strip. The Obama administration’s high-profile efforts have failed to bring the two sides together again.
‘Unprecedented’ Proposal
Netanyahu told his Cabinet yesterday that the Palestinians needed to “come to their senses” and return to direct negotiations.
Netanyahu’s proposal to halt new building in the West Bank aside from construction in existing settlements to meet natural growth, as a precursor to talks, was something no previous Israeli leader has offered, Clinton said at a news conference in Jerusalem on Oct. 31.
“The Obama administration now has a better sense of what is viable in terms of Israeli politics, and have dropped from their vocabulary the insistence on a total settlement freeze,” said Mark Heller, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said yesterday that the U.S. had “not changed” its view of settlements and that “our position is that no settlements -- including natural growth -- would create an optimal atmosphere for negotiations to begin but it’s ultimately up to the parties to determine what is good enough. The danger is if you make the perfect the enemy of the very good, you never get to negotiations.”
‘Not Unprecedented’
Aides to Abbas said after Clinton met with the Palestinian leader in Abu Dhabi that the discussions hadn’t changed his insistence on a freeze of all settlement building before returning to talks. In previous rounds of negotiations with Israel, the Palestinians didn’t make a settlement freeze a precondition to starting talks.
Chief negotiator Saeb Erakat said in an e-mailed statement that Netanyahu’s offer was “not unprecedented.” The Palestinians “have seen these same kinds of ‘arrangements’ before,” he said. “What would be unprecedented is a comprehensive settlement freeze by Israel in line with its obligations under international law and existing agreements.”
The shift in the Obama administration’s approach to Netanyahu means “the stalemate’s going to continue,” Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, said in a phone interview.
Tougher Approach
“President Abbas is in a very delicate position and under great pressure from the Palestinian street,” Abusada said. “He can’t go back to the negotiating table at this time while everybody sees Israel continuing to expand settlements.”
Miller said Obama has been unable to sustain the tougher approach he initially adopted toward Netanyahu.
“You come out of the gate harder and faster than any other president in recent time with respect to setting a new tone in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, which they did,” he said in a telephone interview. “Then within eight months they can’t get it, and now they’ve turned around and essentially said, you know, forget what we said. What the Israelis have done is quote- unquote unprecedented.”
Clinton told the president last month that it was premature to resume formal Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The Palestinians need to take more steps to prevent terrorism, and Israel needs to do more to improve the lives of the Palestinians, an official said Clinton told Obama.
Making Mistakes
The president ordered a review of the peace effort after a three-way meeting with Abbas and Netanyahu on Sept. 22 in New York that didn’t lead to a resumption of talks.
Miller said the Obama administration was making mistakes in its relationships with the Israelis and the Palestinians.
“It does reflect an absence of a smart understanding of number one, the needs and requirements of the Arabs and Israelis, and number two, exactly what the focus of American efforts should be,” Miller said.
“Is it settlements? Is it normalization? Or is the main event getting an agreement which right now is not attainable between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the core issues?” he said.
