The morning after occupied Crimea “voted” to become part of Russia, President Obama was busy trying to appease Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas into continuing to negotiate peace.
Oh, Obama also announced new sanctions against Russia, a nation that the administration had seen as a key partner on other US priorities, from ending the Syrian war to halting Iran’s march to nuclear capabilities.
But the big show of the day involved Abbas, who came to the White House armed with new demands. Betting is he’ll get most of them.
That’s because the United States really really wants to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state — and Abbas, well, not so much.
Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry keep going back to Palestinian-Israeli talks in hopes that success there will overshadow an otherwise dismal record of foreign-policy failures.
Problem is, Palestinians don’t really seem to want a state.
“More and more, the people say that they want freedom much more than they want a state,” a former Palestinian official told me recently after returning from Ramallah.
Whatever “freedom” means, creating a Palestinian state amid the give-and-take of negotiations doesn’t top the agenda of West Bankers.
Has it ever? For one reason or another, Palestine keeps not becoming a state: Not when Ottoman rule gave way to a British mandate in the aftermath of World War I. Not when Arabs rejected a 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine to two states, Jewish and Arab.
And not in the 1990s, when Yasser Arafat negotiated statehood under then-president Bill Clinton. And not when Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presented Abbas with a plan for creating a Palestinian state over 95 percent of the West Bank in 2009.
Nor would Abbas negotiate a year later with the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu even after Bibi, under Obama’s pressure, froze the construction of new settlements in disputed territory for 10 months.
All these events continue to be studied, debated, explained away and picked apart. The one consistent fact is: no Palestinian state. Is there a pattern here?
Nonetheless, with Abbas at his side, Obama said Monday, “I remain convinced that there is an opportunity” to achieve security for Israel and to “ensure that the Palestinians will have a sovereign state in which they can achieve the aspirations that they held for so long.”
Abbas, now closing in on 10 years into his four-year presidential term, has no street cred. He can’t make the bold decisions needed for creating a state through agreements with Israel. Before he left for Washington, his legislative body met in Ramallah to urge him to pull out of the US-led talks — or at least present new demands as his price for extending them.
Extending them? Kerry last year set a nine-month deadline to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli dispute — and it expires next month. Now the administration’s reduced to hoping the Palestinians agree to extend talks until year’s end. Abbas’ reported demands: a complete freeze in Israeli settlements; the release of several “heavies” from Israeli jails (where they’re in for spectacular murders), and an end to this “nonsense” about Israel being a Jewish state.
Netanyahu wants that last one so that a Palestinian state will have no further demands of Israel. But Abbas says no way, so now Kerry is reportedly inclined to drop “Jewish state” from a “framework agreement” he’s preparing so talks can continue.
But again: By and large the Palestinians oppose these talks to begin with. And with Israel blamed for every failure of Palestinian governance, aren’t Palestinian leaders better off forever struggling for a state than really having one?
This leaves Kerry and Obama doomed to haggle with Abbas over an ever-steeper price for his participation in a process meant to create a state for his people.
A forward-looking American leader of the progressive variety might instead join up with those on the Israeli left (like the group Blue White Future) who increasingly doubt that these negotiations can lead anywhere.
These groups would still evacuate settlements and withdraw from most of the West Bank (staying only where Israel deems it absolutely necessary for securing the country). But they’d do it unilaterally.
This would leave enough land for a viable independent state in which Palestinians can finally realize their people’s talents and potential. Or not: If they’d rather continue fighting the Jewish state than build Palestine, Israel’s security needs will be met as much as possible.
Obama and Kerry aren’t that creative. They hope that, where all their predecessors failed, their brand of diplomatic alchemy will create foreign-policy gold from Mideast straw.
Yes, that same alchemy has failed from Syria to Iran and Ukraine to the China Sea. But it has to work somewhere, doesn’t it?