In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,†Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, reviews coverge of the Netanyahu-Obama meeting.
Since the White House meeting on May 18 between U.S. President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there has been intense media focus on their disagreement over the issue of settlements. While accepting a halt to new settlement construction, Netanyahu has rejected Obama’s opposition to “natural growth†of existing settlements. Nevertheless, several Israeli analysts have pointed out that although contentious, the issue of settlements is not, contrary to popular misconception, the major stumbling block to a possible peace deal.
For one thing, the settlement matter, though undeniably a complicating factor on which even Israeli opinion is divided, is resolvable. In fact, at the Camp David and Taba negotiations (2000-01), there was general agreement that a very small percentage of the western part of the West Bank, where about 75 percent of the settlers live in blocs around Jerusalem, would be incorporated into Israel in exchange for Israeli land that would be transferred to the Palestinians. (It’s important to remember that these negotiations foundered not on settlements, but on then-Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat’s refusal to recognize any Jewish claim to Jerusalem.)
In his May 28 Globe and Mail article, “The politics behind the fight in the West Bank settlement,” Patrick Martin correctly noted the compromise involving the settlement blocs, but incorrectly wrote that Obama (along with PA President Mahmoud Abbas) said that settlements “are the biggest single obstacle to peace.” In fact, Obama, consistent with the policy of several previous U.S. administrations, maintains only that settlements are an obstacle to peace. But, again, this is something that is resolvable and, indeed, had moved to resolution several years ago.
What are far greater obstacles to peace, though they receive relatively scant media attention, are the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize Jewish sovereign legitimacy (the source of Arafat’s rejection of the Jewish historical and religious attachment to Jerusalem, and, arguably, Abbas’ refusal to acknowledge Israel as the Jewish state), and their insistence on the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to present-day Israel.
In a rare but exceptionally revealing look at Abbas’ rigidity, the Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl (“Abbas’s waiting game,” May 29), first noted the onus that Obama has placed on Netanyahu regarding the settlement issue and the explicit endorsement of a “two-state” solution – long accepted in principle by the majority of Israelis. However, Diehl then wrote the following about the Palestinian leader:
“But Palestinians remain a long way from swallowing reality as well. Setting aside Hamas and its insistence that Israel must be liquidated, Abbas – usually described as the most moderate of Palestinian leaders – last year helped doom Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, by rejecting a generous outline for Palestinian statehood.â€
Diehl added that, in an interview with the Post, “Abbas acknowledged that Olmert had shown him a map proposing a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank – though he complained that the Israeli leader refused to give him a copy of the plan. He confirmed that Olmert ‘accepted the principle’ of the ‘right of return’ of Palestinian refugees – something no previous Israeli prime minister had done – and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert’s peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of [former U.S. presidents George W.] Bush or Bill Clinton; it’s almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further.
“Abbas turned it down. ‘The gaps were wide,’ he said.”
(It should be noted that while Olmert’s offers to Abbas were indeed generous, he did not accept a “right of return†as a principle – that would be an impossible demand for any Israeli leader.)
Shedding more light on the issue, Abbas’ chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, in fact told Al Jazeera TV (March 27) that when Olmert raised the Jewish claim to the Temple Mount, Abbas (like Arafat almost a decade ago) defiantly uttered “I am not in the marketplace or bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders [when the Old City including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall were under exclusive Jordanian control] – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.” Erekat added: “This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign.”
This hardline, rejectionist Palestinian attitude is why Obama’s confrontation with Netanyahu over settlements will almost certainly have no effect in addressing the real obstacles to peace.
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