Something we can all agree on.
(Telegraph) — The peace process is dead again, but don’t let anyone tell you there’s no common ground between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Just listen to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, in January 2010, addressing the subject of stalled negotiations – stalled because a then newish US president had made them contingent upon a total “freeze” on Jewish settlement construction in both east Jerusalem and the West Bank:
The Palestinians have climbed up a tree. And they like it up there. People bring ladders to them. We bring ladders to them. The higher the ladder, the higher they climb.
Now listen to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, sounding off to Newsweek two months ago about the collapse of peace negotiations once a partial construction freeze, and those negotiations, had inevitably come and gone:
It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said okay, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.
So both Bibi and Abbas have cast the president of the United States under the deepest suspicion and given up on the arboreal metaphors for appeasement. Both are now hardening their lines, with newly galvanised political bases to support them, two years after another failed round of Washington diplomacy. Even the boundlessly optimistic George Mitchell has quit in frustration.
Netanyahu has returned to Israel the conquering hero after out-manoeuvring Obama twice last week on the latter’s home turf, first at the annual AIPAC conference, where the Israeli’s reception was rapturous, then before Congress, where it was ecstatic.
Yet despite a very public and sensationalised tussle with Obama over seven dirty words – “1967 borders and mutually agreed land swaps” – Netanyahu actually received more assurances than provocations from the White House. (As to those seven dirty words, last November, Hillary Clinton issued a joint statement with Netanyahu about, erm, “1967 borders and mutually agreed land swaps”.)
In two separate speeches given by Barack Obama, everything Bibi hates – the Goldstone Report, ‘Durban’ hate forums, Hamas, delegitimisation of Israel in general – were publicly cited and denounced. Obama reaffirmed Israel’s definition as a “Jewish state” and the “unshakable” commitment to her security, backed up by more military aid than she’s ever before received and more sanctions than have ever before been passed against Iran, which still seeks a “world without Zionism”.
Netanyahu knows as well as Obama that Hamas, which has just been allowed into the Palestinian Authority, will only ever recognise a Jewish state if it’s located at the bottom of the Mediterranean. So any calls for it to reform are merely gestural.
Netanyahu also knows as well as Obama that the US is due for an even rougher spell with an even pricklier recipient of its largesse. Egypt is set to elect a forbidding consortium of Muslim Brothers and Salafists to parliament next autumn, having already opened the Rafah border crossing with Gaza through which all manner of ex-jailbird jihadis can and will pass unmolested. Copts are being hounded out the country weekly, and the Egyptian military recently had to turn back a mob trying to invade the Israeli embassy in Cairo. The linchpin of a formerly tenuous Mideast peace is about to pop.
Things are somewhat darker for the Lear-like Abbas who, at 76 and on the cusp of yet another threatened retirement, is everywhere surrounded by enemies and usurpers and has little to show for his once-heralded “progressive” style of governance. Moderation and conciliation are looking increasingly pointless at this stage.
Despite being asked not to by Obama, Abbas is still pursuing UN General Assembly recognition of a Palestinian state that won’t exist come September.
The piece of paper he just signed with Hamas might as well carry a Mission: Impossible-like self-destruct sequence, since Hamas clerics are going to start talking like this again from mosques and youth centres in the West Bank: “All the predators, all the birds of prey, all the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.”
Even the Old Man’s chatter has taken a regressive turn. Abbas recently wrote a dishonest (and unhelpful) account of the origins of 1948 Palestinian refugee crisis for the New York Times, and he indicated, during ‘Nakba Day’, that all 5-6 million Palestinian refugees – who include great-grandchildren of the ‘48 generation – ought to return to Israel whose Jewish population is 6 million. (What price UN recognition when demography can work its quiet magic next door?) It wasn’t that long ago that the Guardian was accusing Abbas and his cohort of ‘giving up’ on the Right of Return.
His smartest policy decision, the appointment of the extraordinarily brilliant and effective Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, has also turned to dust. Fatah and Hamas have forced Fayyad out of office as part of their shabby unity pact, and for good measure Fayyad suffered a heart attack last week whilst attending his son’s college graduation in Texas.
Fortunately, he’s in stable condition. Too bad the same can’t be said about anything else in the Levant.
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