Ignore the skeptics for a moment and imagine that peace between Israelis and Palestinians is around the corner. Then what?
True, merely a week after Secretary of State John Kerry announced his triumphant diplomatic achievement to loud applause, the Palestinian-Israeli peace process is showing worrisome cracks.
In Amman, Jordan, last Friday, Kerry announced a “basis” for renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Enthusiastic aides told reporters that representatives of the two sides would start negotiating in Washington as early as this week.
Oops: The designated Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, Tzipi Livni and Saeb Erekat, are still back at home.
Worse: Aides to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, tell reporters that the agreement to return to talks is, well, not quite finalized.
And, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says “we’re ready, we’ve always been ready,” his divided Cabinet has yet to approve a front-end concession he has already made — an agreement to release from prisons scores of convicted Palestinian killers.
And that’s before they even started negotiating over negotiations.
Never mind. Netanyahu said yesterday that he hopes talks will start “soon.” Earlier in the week, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that talks will start in “coming weeks.”
So yes, Kerry’s launch date was overly optimistic. But if nothing goes awfully wrong, talks willfinally resume.
After all, Netanyahu has long advocated talks with no preconditions. And Kerry reportedly threatened Abbas with cutting US aid to the Palestinian Authority, which is broke, so the Palestinians will eventually come, too.
And never mind (for now) that these talks will most likely collapse soon after they finally start. There is some merit in pushing for talks: It temporarily compels Israelis to pay attention to the Palestinians next door, whom they’re completely ignoring these days; it forces Abbas to refrain, for now, from self-destructive UN maneuvering. And it strengthens Palestinians who oppose violence.
But what would success mean?
Envision the best-case scenario: A sunny day; after nine months of negotiations Bibi and Abbas shake hands on the White House North Lawn under the loving gaze of President Obama; Kerry accepts the Nobel; against all odds, the peace agreement lasts. (And the anti-peace Hamas, which controls half the Palestinian territory? Well, never mind that.)
Would Egyptians rejoice, forgetting about the depths of hopelessness and despair that drive them to overthrow one Cairo regime after another? Would the al Qaeda affiliates in Syria lay down their weapons, while President Assad orders his troops to quit committing atrocities?
Would the tribal wars across the Arab world in Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, Jordan, et al just end?
Would Iran cease its nuclear pursuit, which threatens the world’s balance of power?
Kerry’s answer, apparently: Yes to all of the above.
Last week, he said that according to Arab leaders he talks to, “The core issue of instability in this region and in many other parts of the world is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Arabs have been trying to sell that chimera for a century, but by now nobody (including most Arabs) believes it anymore — except Kerry.
Hey, even Obama tried to “pivot” away to the Pacific before Kerry dragged him back to the Mideast – and to fixing the only part of the region that isn’t broken just now.
While in Amman last week, Kerry briefly flew over a makeshift camp in Jordan that houses a fraction of the nearly 2 million refugees from the Syrian war. In over two years, that conflict has taken over 100,000 lives, and there’s no end in sight.
“Where is America?” one Syrian woman asked Kerry during a brief meeting with a few representatives of those refugees.
Kerry then ended the brief interlude and went back to advancing the peace process — because he fears Israelis and Palestinians may one day erupt in violence.
He’s like an oblivious firefighter compulsively trying to put new batteries in a faulty smoke alarm in the living room, even while sparks start an electric fire in the basement and the roof shingles are aflame.
Can America afford to ignore the entire burning region (let alone the rest of the world) while Kerry whistles John Lennon’s “Imagine” to himself?