By Rime Allaf, Arab Media Watch adviser and associate fellow at Chatham House
11 March 2010
Bitterlemons International

The Obama administration is still an international novice compared to other governments around the world, but it can already claim to have achieved results with its approach to the Arab-Israel problem. Every time US officials have made a request or embarked on a trip aiming at resuscitating a process of some sort, they have been met, sometimes preemptively, with a significant Israeli gesture.

Indeed, Israel believes in confidence-building measures and will spare no effort in finding new opportunities to demonstrate them, as long as they achieve the desired goal: boosting its own position and its own confidence. And nothing can build Israel's confidence like the public rejection of a request, let alone a requirement, made by an ally: the closer the friend, the bigger the humiliation, the greater the Israeli self-confidence and the more futile the subsequent interchange.

The Turkish ambassador's shameful treatment at the Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv was so petty and bizarre that he didn't even realize it was happening; nor did the reporters present there, who had to be told that it was a calculated insult to keep him waiting and seat him in a lower chair.

In contrast, having experienced it so often, Americans (and the entire world watching) always know when they're being humiliated, usually after having delivered the obligatory ode to Israel's security and the closeness of the ties binding the two states. Vice President Joe Biden thought he was covered when he assured Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu--addressed fondly as "Bibi"--that "there is simply no space between the US and Israel", feeling safe enough to mention an imaginary "moratorium that has limited new settlement construction activity". Unfortunately, this was not enough to spare Biden the embarrassment that other officials, and more importantly his own boss, have already faced; the Israeli response came through yet another settlement expansion announcement.

Nevertheless, there is a new factor in this latest engagement: the US is not even pushing for actual Israeli-Palestinian talks, but has taken the unprecedented step of going publicly backward, rather than forward, in a process it sponsored 20 years ago under the equation of land for peace. Instead of demanding compliance with binding UN resolutions, Washington has decided to stop chaperoning and start playing messenger. Even for the sake of peacemaking appearances, this retreat wipes away what little US influence remains with its own allies, let alone in the region.

Obama's slide from the semi-hype of a special envoy to the absurd position of a go-between speaks volumes about the intransigence of Israel. Yet even in this new role, an undignified position for the sole superpower, the US is getting the exact same response: more construction on illegal settlements. The more others try to accommodate Israel, the more it defies them, and the more "facts on the ground" it can show.

This is all deja vu of course, and various Arab states have often tasted the bitter fruit of their own disposition, natural or contrived, to compromise. Repeated and unjustified Arab concessions have yielded Israeli greed instead of the expected reciprocation, with demands piling on the Arab side to "normalize" in return for nothing, and with a partial metamorphosis from a Palestinian resistance to a forced Palestinian assistance to the occupation.

One wonders exactly what these indirect talks will bring when the organizer is desperate to prove it still has clout. Clearly, the US will only play devil's advocate with one of its charges, and it will be using the full force of its power not on the one it should pressure, but on the one it can pressure. Enter the Arab League, recruited to rubber stamp one of the most absurd "initiatives" ever made in the history of the conflict, after the US was unable to push even Saudi Arabia to "do more" than it already offered in the Arab Peace Initiative.

It's understandable that acting-PA president Mahmoud Abbas would want nominal Arab backing on this. Having shocked the world and incensed most Arabs with his eleventh hour turnabout on the Goldstone report, requesting an adjournment to the vote at the Human Rights Council in Geneva which would have condemned Israel's war crimes in Gaza, Abbas could not show he was alone in caving in to Israeli and American pressure.

This is why the lukewarm endorsement of the Arab League was necessary, as much for Abbas as for the US. The League's reluctant nod to this farcical deal has been quantified and its support is initially valid for four months. Given that the Arab Peace Initiative has still not expired eight years on, even when Israel's immediate response had been yet another brutal assault on a part of occupied Palestine, there is no telling how long the indirect talks are going to be touted as an actual peace process, or as American engagement.

Having waited itself for this engagement to manifest itself in ways other than sanctions, Syria seems to have come to the realization that there's little the Obama administration is able or willing to do about its own Israeli-occupied land. For years, there has been no move to rekindle the Syrian-Israeli track, apart from the involvement and encouragement of Turkey, through which real indirect talks had been taking place before Israel's brutal assault on Gaza. From a near agreement in 2000 to public Israeli refusals to withdraw from the Golan, Syria has maintained a declared interest in making a deal with Israel, and in aiming at a comprehensive settlement. The noise about peace with Syria is being heard again in Israel, a usual diversion from the Palestinian track when it suits its needs for a "process," but there is little reaction from Washington on that front.

The US has actively sought Arab support on any pretense of engagement on the Palestinian issue, but it continues to completely ignore the much wider parameters of the conflict, which include not only the Golan in Syria's case but also all the problems born at the time of the creation of Israel, including the refugees' right of return and compensation, the nature of the eventual Palestinian state, and the duties of Israel, among others.

In fact, focusing on settlements, and on invented partial building freezes, is in itself a huge concession to Israel's agenda. Even if it were an objective and honest broker, Washington's engagement is flawed if it continuously bows to an increasingly insolent and intransigent Israel acting in full illegality. Negotiations, whether direct or indirect, with or without Arab cover, will yield neither peace nor security. Talk may be cheap, but Palestinians are still paying the heaviest price as envoys come and go.

http://www.rimeallaf.com/articles/article.php?d=11&m=03&y=2010