Mideast Peace Summit Begins

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama pressed Israeli and Palestinian leaders to seize on

the reopening of peace talks in Washington Wednesday or risk seeing the prospects of a two-
state solution dwindle. The U.S. president reaffirmed his belief that a deal between the Israelis
and Palestinians could be reached within a year. "This moment of opportunity might not soon
come again. They cannot afford to let it slip away." Mr. Obama said in the Rose Garden
Wednesday afternoon. He was flanked by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and special
Middle East envoy George Mitchell.

The U.S. leader has made securing a comprehensive Arab-Israel peace a centerpiece of his
foreign-policy agenda.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Obama warned militant groups that the U.S. and its allies were
undeterred in pushing forward with Middle East peace talks, despite Tuesday's attack on
Israeli settlers by the Palestinian group Hamas.

Mr. Obama spoke Wednesday alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the
White House, as the U.S. kicked off the first direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in nearly
two years.

"The message should go out to Hamas and everybody else who is taking credit for these
heinous crimes that this is not going to stop us from not only ensuring a secure Israel but also
securing a longer-lasting peace," Mr. Obama told reporters following his meeting with Israel's
leader.

Mr. Netanyahu thanked Mr. Obama for America's support, but stressed Israel's need for
extensive security guarantees as part of any broader peace agreement.

"The talks that we had … centered around the need to have security arrangements that are
able to roll back this kind of terror and other threats to Israel's security," Mr. Netanyahu said.

Mr. Obama also held bilateral meetings Wednesday with Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah II. The five leaders
were to have dinner together at the White House ahead of the first day of negotiations
Thursday at the State Department. Mrs. Clinton and former British Premier Tony Blair,
special envoy for the "quartet"—a grouping involved in mediating the peace process that
includes the U.N., U.S., European Union and Russia—were also to attend the dinner.

Ahead of their dinner, the five leaders voiced optimism and commitment to the talks during a
carefully staged press event in the East Room of the White House. But the differences
between the Israeli and Arab sides were also evident.

Messrs. Mubarak and Abbas stressed the need for Israel to maintain a total settlement freeze
in all disputed territories. Mr. Netanyahu, meanwhile, reiterated that a lasting peace couldn't
be maintained without expansive security guarantees for the Jewish state.

"I will not let the terrorists block our path to peace. … But that peace must be anchored in
security," Mr. Netanyahu said.
Jordan's King Abdullah, meanwhile, pressed Mr. Obama to play a direct and sustained role in
pressing forward with the peace process. "If hopes are disappointed again, the price of failure
will be too high for all," Jordan's monarch said.

At the Rose Garden, Mr. Obama pledged that the U.S. would aggressively support the process
in the coming months. But he downplayed the prospect raised by some Arab leaders that
Washington could essentially enforce a solution.

"Ultimately the United States cannot impose a solution, and we cannot want it more than the
parties themselves," Mr. Obama said. "We can create the environment and the atmosphere for
negotiations, but ultimately it's going to require the leadership on both the Palestinian and the
Israeli sides, as well as those in the region who say they want a Palestinian state."

Obama's Peace Process to Nowhere

The president's new proposal to Israel is a step backward in
the effort to establish an enduring peace in the Middle
East.
Barack Obama's latest offer to Israel in his quixotic quest for a total construction
freeze in West Bank settlements seems at first glance to be a sweetheart deal for
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In exchange for a 90-day extension of the
freeze, Israel reportedly would receive 20 additional F-35 fighter jets worth $3
billion, a guarantee that the United States will veto any unilateral Palestinian
initiative at the United Nations meant to achieve international recognition of a
Palestinian state, and a promise that Obama will not request any further
extensions of the construction moratorium.

This proposed deal, however, masks an unwelcome shift in U.S. mediation of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict. And the troubling precedents set by this package will serve to dim rather
than enhance prospects for a breakthrough in peace negotiations.

The most worrying aspect of Obama's package is the linkages it establishes between Israeli
concessions on settlements (and apparently on the pace of construction in Jerusalem as well)
and other unrelated policy matters. Washington has long opposed, and frequently vetoed,
U.N. Security Council initiatives targeting Israel. The United States has done so not out of a
sense of charity, but because the anti-Israel resolutions were unconstructive, unhelpful, and
unprincipled. The suggestion that unless there is a construction freeze America will no longer
do so will make it far harder for U.S. negotiators to defeat or soften drafts put forward in the
council in future years, and encourage further assaults on Israel there. Leaving Israel
undefended in the United Nations will make successful negotiations less, not more, likely, for
an Israel that is under constant attack will batten down the hatches not "take risks for peace."

More disturbing still is the explicit connection between U.S. security assistance to Israel and
the settlement freeze. The offer of additional fighter jets can be interpreted two ways: First,
the Obama administration may believe that the jets are unnecessary to Israeli security, and is
merely offering them as a sweetener, at a cost of $3 billion to U.S. taxpayers -- or about $33
million for each day of the freeze. The second, more ominous explanation is that the United
States believes the jets are important to Israel's security and the two countries' shared
interests, but is using them as pressure to tidy up a diplomatic mess of its own making. As
much as Israeli officials may desire the additional hardware, particularly in light of the
growing threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, they will no doubt think long and hard before setting
this precedent.

Obama's promise not to seek another construction freeze after the next 90-day moratorium
also suggests that his administration has yet to diagnose correctly what ails its Middle East
peacemaking efforts. An agreement for a freeze, with an allowance for "inward" growth of
existing settlements, was reached between former President George W. Bush and former
Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. The Bush administration was quick to
protest when that understanding was violated -- a reaction that sometimes led to tension
between the two countries.

The interest in stopping construction in settlements that would make final status talks harder
is not what differentiates the Bush and Obama administrations. Rather, it is the public and
strident manner in which the Obama administration has conveyed U.S. demands, and its
neglect of Israeli political realities. The Obama administration has sought a total freeze as a
precondition for negotiations; what is needed instead is a return to the agreements reached in
previous years, which the Obama team ignored in its "anything but Bush" phase.

Obama's departures from sensible policy would be easier for him to defend if the return were
sufficient. But the premise of the U.S. offer -- that within 90 days the Israelis and Palestinians
can conclude a preliminary agreement on borders, rendering the settlement issue moot --
beggars belief.

To be sure, a proposal on borders could probably be ginned up in 90 minutes, never mind 90

days. A quick Google search will yield a handful of ideas, all theoretically plausible. But
even armed with a sheaf of maps, a standalone border agreement is a mirage. For Israelis,
more important than where the border lies is what lies beyond it -- what security arrangements
will be put in place to prevent a barrage of rockets originating from the West Bank, as they
now do from Gaza? What will stop Hamas from trouncing the Palestinian Authority there as
well, once Israeli troops withdraw? For Palestinians, the border in which they are most
interested, but which will reportedly not be addressed during the period of the freeze, is that
surrounding Jerusalem. Avoiding Jerusalem is impossible in any discussion of borders, given
that its limits, as defined by Israel, make up a significant portion of the border between the
West Bank and Israel proper, and envelop lands that the Palestinians desire for their future
state.

These issues are intimately connected to that of borders, and solutions to them cannot be
reached in isolation from the others. Tradeoffs and connections between them are necessary,
not only for the normal give-and-take that accompanies any negotiation, but also because
resolving these issues is vital to crafting a sustainable accord that brings permanent peace
rather than fleeting diplomatic success.

With this latest gambit, the United States is trying to rescue a policy that is not worth
rescuing. Rather than heading back to the region to offer up this package, Obama needs to
head back to the drawing board.
The Obama Peace Plan
April 08, 2010 12:28 pm ET — MJ Rosenberg

The Obama administration is considering abandoning its support for indirect Israeli-
Palestinian negotiations in favor of direct negotiations based on a plan the United States
would lay on the table.

It's a great idea. Indirect negotiations are a good device for achieving nothing. They would
also constitute a step backward from the direct negotiations which have been the norm for 15
years.

This is not to say that those direct negotiations succeeded. But they came close. By the
summer of 2000, after three years of CIA-brokered security negotiations, terrorism had been
licked (without the construction of a wall) and the two sides were close to a final status
agreement.

Those three years represent the best years in Israel's history, as anyone who was there during
the period can tell you. Not only was there virtually no violence (and hence no fear of
violence), but Israeli-Palestinian relations were so good that the traffic lines of shoppers
heading to the West Bank for the weekend bargains were formidable. Naturally, the
Palestinians loved having the Israeli market coming to them.

As for Hamas, the Palestinian Authority -- working with the United States and Israel --
neutered them.

Peace would have been achieved at the Camp David summit in 2000 were it not for Yasir
Arafat's delusions, Ehud Barak's palpable contempt for the other side, and the American
mediators' one-sided support for Barak's demands. As one member of the US "peace team,"
Aaron Miller wrote, the Americans acted not as honest brokers but as "Israel's lawyers." The
Camp David failure led directly to the second intifada and its horrific violence. (It's all here.)

Nonetheless, the negotiations at Camp David came very close and even closer at Taba a few
months later. They came so close, in fact, that the terms reached pretty much match the
proposal that Obama is considering laying on the table now.

According to today's New York Times, the Obama plan would track the so-called "Clinton
Parameters," the plan devised by President Clinton during his last days in the White House.
He believed that his parameters represented the positions both sides could live with. He
believed (and still does) that his parameters offered the basis for a peace treaty which,
following negotiations, could be implemented.

They probably would have been too if Clinton had a few more months in office. But he didn't
and the next administration was not - except for Secretary of State Colin Powell and his team
- interested in pursuing negotiations. Unfortunately, Powell's efforts were sabotaged by Elliot
Abrams, a Likud-backing White House aide, who admitted using his position to make sure
that Bush administration efforts to achieve peace (except on Israel's terms) were blocked.
(Naturally, Abrams -- convicted of lying to Congress in 1991 -- is the leader of the effort to
block Obama's plan now).

Nonetheless, the Clinton plan is back, or something very close to it, and it could soon be
redubbed the Obama-Clinton Parameters.

Here is the plan Obama is considering, as reported in the New York Times today, along with
my thoughts:

First, Palestinian officials would have to accept that there would be no right of return for
refugees of the 1948 war that established the Israeli state, and for their millions of
descendants.

Palestinians understand that and have no expectation that millions of refugees would return to
Israel. Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem would become citizens of a
new Palestinian state. Those outside would have the option of becoming citizens of that new
state. A symbolic number (a few thousand) would be allowed to return to Israel itself, with
Israel having a veto over any and all applicants for citizenship in Israel. The Obama position
is identical to the Israeli position.

Rather, the Palestinians would have to accept some kind of compensation.

Again, this is the Israeli position too.

Second, the two sides would have to share Jerusalem - Palestinians locating their capital in the
east and Israelis in the west, and both signing on to some sort of international agreement on
how to share the holy sites in the Old City.

This is not hard to accomplish. Israel unilaterally expanded the size of Jerusalem by 300%
after the 1967 war, to include dozens of Palestinian villages. They should return to the
Palestinians. The Old City, holy to three faiths, would be shared with outside (probably
American) monitors making sure that Jerusalem remains one city, open to all.

This is acceptable to Palestinians but strongly opposed by the Israeli right, settlers, and some
Israeli centrists.

Third, Israel would return to its 1967 borders - before it captured East Jerusalem and the West
Bank in the Six-Day War - give or take a few negotiated settlements and territorial swaps.

In other words, Israel would get to keep the settlement blocks adjacent to Israel but would
compensate Palestinians with territory elsewhere so that the Palestinians would maintain Arab
control of the 22% of historic Palestine it held prior to the Six Day War of 1967. Israel would
retain 78% of historic Palestine, as prior to the war and which represents land allotted to Israel
under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan plus the lands Israel won in the subsequent war
for independence. The Palestinian Authority accepts this as does a majority of Israelis.

Fourth, the United States or NATO would have to give Israel security guarantees, probably
including stationing troops along the Jordan River, to ease Israeli fears that hostile countries
could use the Palestinian state as a springboard for attacks.
The Palestinians have not agreed to an Israeli presence along the Jordanian border, which is a
clear infringement on Palestinian sovereignty -- as is the requirement that the Palestinian state
be disarmed - but Israelis insist on both and the Obama administration agrees.

And finally, Arab neighbors like Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel.

Under the terms of the Saudi Peace Initiative, every Arab state in the world would sign a
peace treaty and normalize relations with Israel in exchange for the establishment of a
Palestinian state in the '67 territories.

At this point, there is no proof that the President will go ahead with this plan. But it is telling
that he would consider putting it forth before resolving the conflict with Prime Minister
Netanyahu over settlements.

In fact, going with this plan is a way of end-running the settlement issue and getting right to
negotiations that will end the whole conflict.

It won't be easy. Prime Minister Netanyahu will balk but he has, in fact, endorsed the two-
state solution and he, more than most, knows exactly what it entails. Then there is Hamas,
which controls Gaza. It will be up to President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad to get its
authorization to negotiate not only over the West Bank but over Gaza, too. In the past, Hamas
leaders have said that they would allow Abbas to negotiate for all Palestinians in his capacity
as Chairman of the PLO.

The really good news is that the President is moving ahead. It's not that he has forgotten
about the settlement issue and the recent blow-up over it, but he is going back to the vision for
Middle East peace he offered in Cairo last spring:

"The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations
from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people
develop the institutions that will sustain their state, to recognize Israel's legitimacy, and to
choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past....

"America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and we will say in public what
we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs We cannot impose peace. But
privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis
recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to
be true....

"Too many tears have been shed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a
responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their
children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of the three great faiths is the place of
peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and
Christians and Muslims."

Now is the time to realize the vision. And that means laying the American plan on the table.
All friends of Israel, and of Palestine too, should support it. The alternative is the end of the
two-state solution and everything that collapse would entail -- including the end of Israel as a
democratic and Jewish state.