BICOM

Key Points

• US President Obama’s engagement in the Middle East peace process has met difficulties in the first eight months leading some to be cynical of progress to date. Establishing the framework for resuming bilateral peace talks has proved too complex to achieve in time for the UN General Assembly meeting.
• With Netanyahu appearing to have softened the demands placed on him by Obama, there will be lessons for the Obama Administration to take from the last few months, and an imperative to maintain credibility with all sides.
• However progress was never likely to be straight forward. It is important to recall the importance to the international community of having the energies of the US fully invested in moving the process forward. The expected trilateral summit sends an important signal about Obama’s ongoing determination to drive the process forward in spite of the obstacles. After the high-profile drama of the General Assembly passes, the parties will return to the difficult task of building a sustainable process.

Introduction

President Obama is expected to host a trilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow on the margins of the UN General Assembly. This will be the first meeting between Netanyahu and Abbas since the Israeli prime minister was elected at the end of March. Despite the fact that some commentators are regarding this as a photo opportunity, Obama will want to send an important signal that the US is committed to Middle East peace and that the process is gathering momentum.

The meeting was organised with difficulty after a week of shuttle diplomacy by US envoy George Mitchell. However, a package of confidence-building measures – including an Israeli settlement freeze and normalisation gestures from Arab states – intended to hasten the resumption of peace talks, has not yet been agreed. What then can be expected from tomorrow’s meeting and what will follow from it?

Getting to this point

The meeting Obama will hold with Abbas and Netanyahu will be a significant landmark for his engagement in the peace process. It has been a challenge to reach this point, and hard lessons will have been learned by the Obama administration along the way.  The administration’s strategy was to lay the basis for renewed peace talks by extracting mutual concessions from Israel and the Arab world. Israel was asked to stop settlement construction, the Arab world to take steps to normalise relations with Israel, and the Palestinians to curb incitement and continue their clamp down on terror and extremism. The Obama administration has made clear it believes progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track is an important counterpart to confronting Iran and other extremist threats in the region.

The process has not gone smoothly. Though ready to make reciprocal concessions, Israel felt the pressure over settlements was unbalanced and did not give sufficient regard to the needs of ordinary people living in those communities. Obama’s team has struggled to extract concessions from Arab states that would make the deal palatable to Israel. Nonetheless, Israeli sources claimed that they reached an agreement with the US on settlements last week, and that the Palestinians did not accept it. Obama’s pressure on Israel and outreach to the Arab world may have emboldened the Arab states and the Palestinians and hardened their position. Indeed, Abbas was until recently refusing to meet Netanyahu without a prior freeze on settlement construction. Now Abbas has accepted a meeting even though the elements of the scene-setting deal are still not in place.

The Obama administration has not yet succeeded in brokering a confidence-building agreement, but its achievements so far should not be ignored. Obama has shown that unlike his predecessor, he is committed to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a matter of high priority and that he is willing to invest the energies of his administration in this endeavour. He recognises, as does the Israeli government, that the Palestinians need a political horizon and basis for trust in the political process. Otherwise, there is a high risk of the vacuum being filled with violence and extremism.

To this end, Obama has shown he is willing to put pressure on Israel as well as the Palestinians and the Arab states. Obama has also shown the wider region he recognises addressing the Palestinian issue as part of the puzzle in confronting extremism. The pressure he has put on Israel resulted in a major concession on Netanyahu’s part in accepting the principle of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has also accepted that the Palestinian issue cannot be deferred in favour of confronting Iran, and that both must be addressed simultaneously. Obama is reportedly close to an agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze, and has succeeded in putting the role of the wider Arab world on the table. Meanwhile, the Palestinian reform agenda is progressing: the security and economic situation is continuing to improve in the West Bank and the holding of the Fatah conference in Bethlehem was a landmark achievement.

What will happen in the meeting and what will follow?

Because an agreement for resumed bilateral negotiations has not yet been reached, expectations for any concrete outcome from this meeting are low. Though Netanyahu made clear from the outset that he was ready to meet Abbas without preconditions, Abbas did not want to meet before a settlement freeze and therefore comes to the meeting under duress. Nevertheless, Obama is likely to stress to both leaders the importance of getting a meaningful peace process underway and to build consensus on how to move forward. Whilst in New York, Netanyahu is set to address the UN General Assembly in what his office is billing as a dramatic speech. He is expected to focus on the Iranian threat, the Goldstone report, the conflict with the Palestinians and regional peace. Obama, Abbas and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are all scheduled to address the General Assembly over the course of the week.

After the high-profile drama of the UN General Assembly, the respective leaders will return to the difficult and painstaking work of building the peace process. Whilst committed to renewing political talks, Netanyahu believes that the way to peace is through the gradual process of developing the Palestinian economy, which in turn will strengthen moderates and isolate extremists. Sceptics fear Netanyahu is more interested in containing the situation than in resolving the conflict, and that never-ending peace talks are a ruse to keep the situation quiet without making any concessions. Yet the prevailing fear among Netanyahu and his advisors is that talk of establishing a Palestinian state in the near future is out of step with reality on the ground. The lesson they draw from Gaza is that where Israel withdraws, Iranian-backed Hamas extremists take over. Israel cannot take such a risk with the West Bank. It is only when moderate Palestinian society has been strengthened from the bottom up, they believe, that any territorial concessions can be contemplated.

Abbas, for his part, must address a direct challenge to his own legitimacy. Elections in the Palestinian Authority are due in January, but a long-sought unity agreement with the Hamas authority in Gaza that would make elections possible remains elusive. Though Palestinian unity talks are scheduled to resume in October, expectations are low for their success. However, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has now set out a blueprint for Palestinian institutional development to create viable Palestinian state institutions over the next two years. Building on the success of the revamped US-trained security forces and Netanyahu’s commitment to Palestinian economic development, real progress on the ground in the West Bank is possible in the coming period.

Working with this complex hand, the Obama administration must build a political process. A considerable degree of US credibility continues to rest on securing some form of settlement freeze in return for normalisation steps from the Arab states. If they achieve such a deal, the question then follows about what form the peace process will take. The Annapolis process initiated by President George W. Bush focused on high-level talks aimed at reaching a framework agreement resolving all final status issues. This attempt showed, as it did the talks at the end of the Clinton term in 2000, that attempting to resolve all final status issues in one agreement has a high risk of failure.

So far, the approach of the Obama administration has had more in common with the staged approach of the Roadmap. The Roadmap focused on creating the circumstances for the establishment of a Palestinian state before attempting to resolve final status issues. Stage one of the Roadmap, intended to precede the establishment of a Palestinian state, includes Palestinian political and security reform, alongside Israeli removal of restrictions on movement and freezing of settlement construction. Stage two features the establishment of a Palestinian state in temporary borders in advance of stage three, which entails the resolution of outstanding final status issues. In many ways, the circumstances for advancing stage one of the Roadmap, at least in the West Bank, are better now than ever before. The US is more actively engaged. Palestinian security reform has created a much improved reality in the West Bank. This in turn has made it possible for Israel to make considerable improvements to movement and access, and therefore to the Palestinian economy.

The difficulty will arise when it comes to discussing political progress to accompany the security and economic progress. There are those in Israel who believe it is in Israel’s interest to grant greater powers of sovereignty to the Palestinians in the West Bank and even to move quickly to the establishment of a Palestinian state in temporary borders. There is no sign, however, that Netanyahu has been convinced of this approach, and he has given few clues as to what he believes a political process should look like. Abbas is also sceptical of a Palestinian temporary agreement, fearing that it would defer indefinitely discussion of the final status issues. Meanwhile, the ongoing stagnation in Gaza has the potential to reignite into violence, challenging any political process that may be ongoing. This is the next set of challenges the parties will have to wrestle with, once a bilateral process does resume.

Conclusion

The Obama administration has not achieved all it wished to at this point in the process, and it may have reason to question whether its approach has always been perfectly calibrated. However, tomorrow’s meeting is an important milestone in its attempt to relaunch the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Whilst the confidence-building package, including a settlement freeze and Arab steps towards normalisation, has yet to be agreed, Obama is not devoid of achievements. The US has clearly demonstrated to the Arab world its willingness to invest political capital and energy to move the process forward. Netanyahu has accepted the international consensus on the future establishment of a Palestinian state. Whist tomorrow may not see the launch of a new bilateral process, few can doubt American commitment to achieving that goal in the near future. Determining the form that the bilateral process will take will be the next set of challenges the parties face.