This year’s model of the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians “is difficult,” Secretary of State John Kerry said the other night. “It is emotional.”
Yes, it is “difficult” — especially for him right now, because it just collapsed in utter failure.
And yes, it’s “emotional” — especially for him right now, because he’s been embarrassed and humiliated by the public exposure of his arrant foolishness in focusing the lion’s share of his attention on the one key area in the Middle East where everything is not going straight to hell.
On Tuesday, the Palestinians took eight months of relentless work by Kerry and threw it in the garbage. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced he will seek membership for “Palestine” in various international forums and treaties as the equivalent of a sovereign nation.
That move violates the central concept of the so-called “two-state solution,” according to which the Israelis and Palestinians need to come to mutual agreement on the borders of a Palestinian state.
In response, Kerry canceled his bazillionth trip to the region. And yet he couldn’t admit what the cancellation implicitly acknowledged.
“It is completely premature tonight to draw any kind of judgment, certainly any final judgment,” Kerry said. “The important thing is to keep the process moving and find a way to see whether the parties are prepared to move forward.”
Kerry’s use of the plural there — “parties” — is remarkably dishonest. One of the parties — Israel — has, in fact, been “moving forward.” According to various leaks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had signaled his willingness to agree to a freeze on new settlement construction. That’s “movement,” if movement is what you expect.
What Bibi wasn’t willing to do was release a fourth batch of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails. He came under near-universal condemnation in Israel when he released the first batch last June, and again (but to a lesser degree) when he let tranches two and three go.
This time he decided not to. Why? Because, Israelis have said on background, the Palestinians haven’t made a single substantive move in the negotiations since October. No one who knows anything about what has gone on says otherwise.
What’s more, the Israelis said they would go ahead with a prisoner release if the Palestinians agreed to stay at the negotiating table beyond the end of April, when the talks were scheduled to conclude. This was a clear effort to call the Palestinian bluff — to see if the only reason they were even pretending to talk was to get those prisoners released and nothing else.
Looks like it.
Kerry said something striking on Tuesday night: “I’m not going to get into the who, why, what, when, where, how of why we’re where we are today.”
Note he used the word “why” twice in this sentence, which is a dead giveaway that it’s the thing he really doesn’t want to get into. That’s because the answer is simple, and entirely devastating to his cause: The Palestinians don’t want a deal.
This is almost impossible for him and others like him to understand — in the same way that they find Vladimir Putin’s territorial grab in Crimea impossible to understand.
Kerry said with disbelief that Putin was acting like a 19th century man in a 21st century world, without grasping that Putin is trying to readjust the 21st century world to accommodate his 19th century vision of an expanding nationalist Russia.
Similarly, Kerry can’t grasp why Palestinian leaders would be utterly uninterested in making a deal with Israel that would give them a sovereign state. But it’s been clear for nearly 15 years that they have no interest in the burdens of statehood. They prefer outright war or cold war, and the continued immiseration and statelessness of the Palestinian people.
They don’t want to bear the responsibility for the conditions under which Palestinians live and the necessity of designing a conventional relationship between Palestine and its democratic neighbor on tedious but necessary issues like the use of water, natural resources, air space and maintaining border security.
That is why the new option of establishing a virtual Palestine — a state that exists only in the corridors of international institutions but not on the ground — is so alluring to them. It provides all the trappings of statehood and none of the obligations. It is the state granted by the Wizard of Oz, the equivalent of the diploma handed to the Scarecrow to provide him with external evidence of the brain he lacks.
There’s your “why.” Answers to the other questions Kerry refused to address — the who, what, when, where, and how of this disaster Kerry has visited upon himself — await a political satirist of the highest order.