As Secretary of State John Kerry gets ever deeper in the weeds of an Israeli-Palestinian process that he alone believes will lead to peace in our time, the omens suggest things are more likely to get worse.
Wednesday brought signs that renewed violence lurks, as well as new complaints about Kerry’s work from both sides.
That night, an elite Israeli Defense Force unit, trying to arrest a Hamas top terrorist in the West Bank town of Jenin, got caught in a firefight with armed Palestinians.
Nafa al-Saedi, a member of the Palestinian Authority’s internal security apparatus, got caught in the crossfire and killed. By some reports, at least, he was simply in the wrong spot at the wrong time. After all, PA security often cooperates with Israelis in fighting Hamas.
It’s unlikely that Saedi, in his early 20s, was targeted by the IDF unit, which tried to shoot itself out of a hairy situation. It was the recent uptick in Palestinian violence against Israelis that drew the IDF into the skirmish in the first place. Now the incident could trigger wider bloodletting.
Earlier in the day, Haaretz reported that PA President Mahmoud Abbas had sent an angry “secret memo” to President Obama, complaining about a revelation from Kerry last week.
The secretary had gone to Jerusalem and Ramallah in part to update both sides on the work of Gen. John Allen, a decorated Marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan who went with him.
In the event, a freak storm hit the city, and Kerry spent his 70th birthday last week battling the snow. The Bostonian would’ve been better off giving the locals tips on plowing than the advice he did bring — namely, Allen’s ideas for how to assure Israeli security in the aftermath of the comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians, which (in Kerry’s plan anyway) will be signed in the spring.
Of course, a US military man selling West Bank security strategies to Israelis is as needed as, well, a Florida salesman hawking snow sleds to Aleutians. Allen worked on his plan for months — and wound up with something close to blueprints some Israelis had devised long ago. And even that was too much for Abbas.
Allen suggests, for example, that the IDF would keep troops along the Jordan river, on the West Bank’s eastern border, for at least a decade. It would withdraw only if it deems that no jihadis or other enemies were poised to use the borderland of the future Palestinian state to launch a new war.
Abbas reportedly grew “boiling mad” over Allen’s plan; his note to Obama all but asks our president to ditch Kerry, who has become too close to the Israelis for Abbas’ taste.
But not to worry. Kerry is scheduled to return to Jerusalem and Ramallah in early January to straighten it all out. Of course, even if he can satisfy Abbas, there remains Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli prime minister is expressing more concern over another of Kerry’s excellent adventures. “Our best efforts to reach Palestinian-Israeli peace will come to nothing if Iran succeeds in building atomic bombs,” he told a Washington crowd recently, via video from Jerusalem.
With such complications, the odds are increasingly against Kerry as the year comes to a close. Israelis and Palestinians are unlikely to overcome their differences by April 29, the finale of Kerry’s nine-month deadline for completing a comprehensive agreement to end the century-old dispute. The best he’s likely to get is some agreement to extend the deadline, allowing him to shuttle between Ramallah and Jerusalem for another year or so.
But a year in the Mideast is a long time, especially these days. By then, another incident like Wednesday’s Jenin shootout could trigger the much-dreaded “third intifada.” Or one like last week’s killing of IDF soldier Shlomi Cohen by a Lebanese army sniper could trigger a war in Israel’s north. Or the Syrian war could spill into the Golan. (No one expects anything to come from Kerry’s January peace conference in Geneva on Syria.)
Or Iran could go nuclear, throwing the whole region into turmoil.
For all that Kerry truly believes that a game-changing Israeli-Palestinian peace is just around the corner, he’ll be lucky if even another year of shuttling even leaves him in a position to ask the Israelis and Palestinians for yet another extension.