Framing Obama's peace framework

Framing Obama's peace framework

The leak is now credible. The New York Times has confirmed what the Washington Post published a day earlier: the Obama administration is considering proposing its own framework for a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
 
Frustrated by its failure to freeze Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and subsequent failure to get the negotiations back on track, the US government is putting the two parties on notice: Define the contours of a solution by autumn and negotiate its details, or we shall do it for you.
 
To add urgency to frustration, the US administration has framed Middle East diplomacy as part and parcel of its national security, as it fights on at least two fronts in the Greater Middle East region.
 
The Obama administration and the US military have expressed concern that a deadlocked peace process, against the backdrop of tension and violence in Palestine, are endangering US lives in the Islamic world.
 
If there is new urgency, what's new about the proposed parameters? 
 
In Clinton's footsteps
 
After US president Bill Clinton failed in 2000 to get Ehud Barak, the Israeli premier and Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, to sign a comprehensive agreement at the Camp David summit, he made clear where he stood.
 
Sharing of Jerusalem; no right of return for the Palestinians; a return to the 1967 borders with mutual adjustments to allow Israel to annex big settlement blocks; and a demilitarised Palestinian state.
 
That's how Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor, conveyed them to the Washington Post's David Ignatius (*) before his meeting with Obama, along with other former national security advisors.
 
I think they are mutations of the 'Clinton ideas,' as they came to be known, that were relayed verbally to a Palestinian and an Israeli negotiator who took notes as they listened.
 
They have not been transmitted officially since then, as far as I am aware. But those ideas became the de facto position of the US foreign policy establishment and later of the International Quartet for Middle East peace.
 
Those ideas have now become the bedrock of Washington's vision of the Middle East.
 
Paradoxically, however, neither Mrs Clinton, the US secretary of state, nor George Mitchell, Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, have been eager to officially advance them.
 
Preferring to "leave it to the parties" to reach them on their own, or to "take ownership" of them to insure their implementation.
 
Which in layman's language means leaving the weaker party, the occupied Palestinians, at the mercy of the stronger occupied Israelis!
 
How ideas become reality
 
Although George Bush, the former US president, paid lip service to advance the 'Peace Process' during his bloody eight years in office, he did underline a "vision" for a Palestinian state.
 
Alas, by entrusting his blurry vision to Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister of Israel, the Bush administration put the fox in charge of the hen house.
 
And since then the promised state has begun increasingly to resemble the homelands of Apartheid South Africa.
 
According to Israeli leaders, Bush also recognised the 'Israeliness' of the big settlement blocks in any final settlement in his administration's bilateral contacts with the Sharon government.
 
As a result, successive Israeli government have used the presumed Bush promise to expand their settlement building, especially in and around the larger settlement blocs and in occupied East Jerusalem.
 
All of which also trickled down to the central question of Jerusalem. If sharing Jerusalem meant that the Jewish settlements in and around the city become Israeli in a final settlement, as with the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the Palestinian capital, then accelerating settlement in occupied East Jerusalem is a strategic imperative ahead of realising the US framework.
 
In short, the Clinton ideas have been implemented selectively during the Bush years and to this day, turning the vision into a nightmare.

And in the process, the defective process paved the way for the surge and governing of the politically radical Islamist movement, Western sanctions and Israeli war, leaving the peace process in shambles.
 
Obama's fresh start
 
Since taking office, Obama has tried to break the mould and tried to change the tone and emphasis of the US approach to the 'peace process'.
 
After asking Israel to freeze all Jewish settlement in occupied Palestinian lands, the Obama administration rejected Israel's claim of a prior US acceptance of its future annexation of the large settlement blocs.
 
It claimed it found no such official guarantees made to the Israelis and therefore wasn't bound by them.
 
With little or no chemistry between them, the US president made it clear to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, that he expects Israel to stop humiliating it in public and start making serious effort to put the process back on track.
 
After all, the US was merely asking for a lively process, not real progress, necessarily.
 
That's why invoking autumn as the time when the Obama administration could propose its own peace initiative is probably the newsier part of the administration's leak.
 
Israelis and Palestinians who categorically reject an imposed vision, or even guidelines, for a solution, will have time to reengage in the 'peace process' in the spring and summer. 
 
A different ending?
 
If the ultimatum doesn't work, then, one presumes, the administration's idea is to - at last- make official the US position on the talks. 
 
But what's the Obama administration to do if the parties don't warm up or flatly reject his framework? As Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, warned in the meeting with Obama.
 
What would be the administration's second, third or fourth fall back positions?
 
More broadly, will the framework as summarised above, advance the cause of peace in the long term? Not necessarily.
 
Will it be fair or just? No. For example, Palestinians' 'Right of Return' is a collective and individual right and is enshrined in international law and international humanitarian law, and isn't for Obama to deny, nor even for Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO chairman, to give away.
 
Will an Obama framework pave the way towards a pragmatic solution and relatively fair resolution of the conflict? Not necessarily.
 
What it will create is a fait accomplis whereby the idea of a Palestinian state becomes reality, but not the state itself, whose borders, security, sovereignty, capital, inhabitants etc remain to be negotiated.
 
And if the intransigence of Israel's right-wing government persists, then beware of a pre-emptive escalation ahead of the autumn deadline that allows Israel to break out of its isolation. It happened before. 
 
(*) David Ignatius, a Washington Post op-ed columnist who first broke the story on April 7, also wrote a column on March 21 entitled "Time to break the fog of Middle East politics', saying basically the same thing, but as if they were his own ideas.

A couple of years ago, he published a book of discussions with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, another national security advisor, called 'America and the World', which explains his sources. In early February, he suggested that they be Obama's special envoys to Iran. Not exactly to the liking of Israeli government that recommended Dennis Ross to be in charge at the department of state.

Ignatius was also the host of the panel in Davos last year that featured Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, when he didn't allow Erdogan to answer Peres' diatribes at the end of the session, provoking a walkout by the Turkish leader.