When I first read Jonathan’s post yesterday, I thought he was blaming President Barack Obama unfairly: The Palestinians don’t need Obama to produce excuses for shunning negotiations; they’ve produced plenty all by themselves (about which more in a separate post). But when I read the New York Times article he referenced, I was shocked – not by the Palestinians’ position, but by reporter Ethan Bronner’s. For when a Palestinian official asserted that Israel’s demand to retain the major settlement blocs “abandons … the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years,” Bronner, who as a veteran Israeli correspondent should surely have known better, parroted this without a word of demurral – thereby erasing 20 years of history in which every single proposal ever discussed had Israel keeping the settlement blocs.
President Bill Clinton’s parameters of 2000, long considered the blueprint for any final-status agreement, assigned the settlement blocs to Israel. President George W. Bush asserted in a 2004 letter that “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of 2008 – which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after rejecting at the time, suddenly embraced last year, once Olmert was gone and it was off the table – also had Israel retaining the settlement blocs.
In short, Israeli retention of the settlement blocs is precisely “the framework we have been focused on for the past 20 years.”
But along came Obama, with his assertion last May that the starting point for talks should be the 1967 lines rather than two decades of previous negotiations, and suddenly, 20 years of history have been erased: The Palestinians can unblushingly assert that Israel’s demand to retain the settlement blocs is a new demand, and a veteran New York Times reporter can unblushingly parrot that assertion. In effect, the starting point for talks has just been moved.
This would indeed be a serious obstacle to negotiations if they ever resumed, because in 20 years of conceding one “red line” after another, one of the few things successive Israeli governments have never wavered on is their insistence on retaining the settlement blocs. Yet the Palestinians can’t be more Catholic than the Pope: If the U.S. president deems the settlement blocs illegitimate, Palestinians can hardly do otherwise. That’s precisely why previous U.S. presidents were always careful to provide cover for Palestinian negotiators by making it clear that in their view, the settlement blocs should remain Israeli.
But Obama has practically single-handedly created a new narrative, in which Israeli retention of the settlement blocs is not a given, and his allies in the media are eagerly disseminating it. And that mistake, as Jonathan aptly said, will haunt Israeli-Palestinian talks for a long time to come.
One can only speculate on the reasons for the carefully articulated change in direction that the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton have set out for the American government with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It does abandon 20 years of negotiations and many of the accepted precedents for a secure peace that recognizes both Palestinian and Israeli rights and the security issue. It also denies the existence of previous written and oral negotiations between the United States and Israel including Clinton's assertion that no letter between Bush and Sharon even existed. This fecklessness has now reached such epidemic proportions that the U.S. State Department won't even meet with the Foreign Minister of Israel. Oh, and by the way, he just happens to be one of the key seven of the Israeli cabinet who will make the decision on whether to attack Iran. And we won't talk with him? The question of trust between Israel and the United States is in such deplorable shape that it appears the Israelis have come to the conclusion that they will have to take on the Iranians on their own with whatever weapons they have at hand despite assurances from the Obama administration – see today's statement by Secretary Panetta mimicking the Israeli conclusion that the Iranians are a year or less from possessing the bomb. Obama has not merely provided the Palestinians with another excuse to bypass direct negotiations, but, regretfully, and much more importantly, he and Clinton have placed the entire relationship with a trusted ally in such a state of disrepair and disrespect that the Israelis believe nothing the United States tells them. See Dempsey's comments on his visit to israel as well as Secretary Panetta's statement. So what's the result? A nation with an arsenal of at least 400 nuclear weapons, including what many experts believe are 25 H bombs, and the means to deliver them anywhere on the planet is now seriously contemplating executing the "doomsday" scenario because they face the greatest existential threat to their existence since the 1973 war. The Obama administration filled with its own sense of gravitas underscored by its complete naivete, or worse, malevolence towards the Jewish state, will force the hand of a man, Benjamin Netanyahu, who believes it is his sacred duty to protect Israel and the Jewish people from yet another existential threat. The New York Times and the "Progressive" writers like Friedman, Cohen and Klein can yell, scream, insult, condemn, and threaten "the Jews" but the word Incompetence hardly does justice to the actions of the Obama administration. The U.S. and Europe had best get ready for a nuclear attack by the Israelis on the Iranian bomb program. You can bury your facilities 220 feet under rock but it won't matter much to an H bomb.