How Abbas Derailed the Peace Process

The Weekly Standard reports:

The week of dueling speeches by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu was great political drama, but a key character was missing from the scene: Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. While Abbas was absent, it was in fact his creation on April 27 of a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas that provided the backdrop for what we saw in Washington. So an analysis of what happened last week must begin not with Bibi’s calculations or Obama’s, but those of Abbas.

Mahmoud Abbas is 76 years old and will retire from politics next year, having announced that he will not seek reelection. His tenure as chairman of both the Fatah movement and the PLO (which began when Arafat died in late 2004) has been disastrous, for he lost first the 2006 elections and then control of Gaza to Hamas. A man without charisma or great political courage, he was never a serious candidate to make the difficult compromises that a peace deal with Israel would require and then defend himself against charges of treason and betrayal. To the generous peace offer made by Ehud Olmert in 2008, Abbas responded with silence. It is true that life on the West Bank has improved considerably during his tenure as Palestinian Authority president, but he never cared much about wearing that third hat; he left such mundane matters to PA prime minister Salam Fayyad while he jetted around the world seeking support for the Great Cause.

Abbas thought his ship had come in when Barack Obama became president: Surely this man, so diffident about Israel, would deliver the Israeli diplomatic collapse the PLO needed. And sure enough, Obama’s tenure began with the hiring of George Mitchell (on Obama’s second day in office) and the demand for a total construction freeze by Israel — not only in the settlements but even in Jerusalem. Now, two years later, Mitchell is gone and Abbas has given up on Obama. In a remarkably bitter interview with Newsweek, Abbas vented his disillusionment: “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze. I said okay, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.”

Unwilling to make far-reaching compromises himself, and now convinced Obama would not force deep concessions on the Israelis, Abbas decided to secure his legacy a different way: through a façade of national unity. Sure, he lost the elections to Hamas and they have Gaza, but with this unity deal there would be new elections next year and — on paper, anyway — the split would be over and the Palestinian family together again. And he would deliver more: United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state through a vote to admit it to membership. So Abbas would leave office with honor. To be sure, he would always be a transitional figure between Arafat and whatever came next, and neither peace nor real statehood would be any closer. But in the realm of symbolism and rhetoric where Palestinian political life has always been lived, he could say he had never yielded an inch to the Zionists.

These developments left both Netanyahu and Obama high and dry. For Netanyahu, the Hamas deal not only meant that no negotiations were possible but also endangered the existing cooperation with the Palestinian Authority. The West Bank economy had (with some Israeli help) improved steadily in the last few years, and the new American-trained PA police worked closely with Israel against terrorism — and especially against Hamas. It was possible to see some ways forward: handing control of more West Bank territory to the PA, strengthening PA security forces, watching a Palestinian state develop on the ground under Fayyad’s pragmatic leadership. Now that approach was gone.

And so was Obama’s push for a negotiation. The incoherence of U.S. policy is summed up in this passage from Obama’s AIPAC speech: “We know that peace demands a partner — which is why I said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist. .  .  . But the march to isolate Israel internationally — and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations — will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative.” So Israel cannot be expected to negotiate and it must start negotiating.

That is where the president stands after two years of involvement in Middle East peacemaking, and his problems are largely of his own making. Israel and the Palestinians had been at the table together for decades until the Obama/Mitchell/Rahm Emanuel decision to demand a total end to Israeli construction froze not the settlements but the diplomacy. Previous presidents — both Clinton and George W. Bush — had managed to gain the confidence of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, while Obama is now mistrusted on all sides.

We would not be where we are had all three men — Abbas, Netanyahu, Obama — not given up on each other, a striking failure in American diplomacy. The president’s inability to get it right was visible this past week. The pair of speeches must have been the products of intense effort at the White House, yet the errors made in his Thursday speech at the State Department required quick fixes on Sunday at AIPAC. He forgot on Thursday to mention the three “Quartet Principles” that are the preconditions for Hamas participation in government and in negotiations: abandon violence, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, respect all previous Israel-PLO agreements. So those were added to the Sunday speech. His Thursday formulation suggested that the “1967 lines” would be Israel’s new border with some swaps agreed to by the Palestinians. Owing to protests, he had to add in his Sunday AIPAC speech that the parties “will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967” — while complaining that he had been deliberately misunderstood.

Meanwhile his mistreatment of the visiting Netanyahu can only have deepened the latter’s belief that Obama was irretrievably hostile. While the diplomatic niceties were observed this time (Netanyahu got to stay in Blair House, and there were plenty of photos and a TV session in the Oval Office), the fact remains that Obama gave a major Middle East speech the day before Netanyahu arrived. The message was clear: I have no interest in what you are saying and will make my views plain even before we exchange one word. Worse yet was the lack of any advance notice. The Israelis had been told days before that the Obama speech would cover the Arab Spring and say little about them, and were given only a couple of hours’ notice that, on the contrary, the president would make a significant policy statement that contradicted Israeli views. They felt — and they were — blindsided. In the Clinton and Bush administrations such major policy statements were preceded by weeks of consultations, and when a president breaks that pattern it is a deliberate and powerful message. This is the explanation for the brief tutorial in Israeli security concerns that Netanyahu held Friday in the Oval Office: The gloves were off, but it was Obama who took them off first.

The president jetted off to Europe after his AIPAC speech, and after his own speech to Congress Netanyahu went home. Washington is celebrating Memorial Day weekend, entering the summer, and watching the Republicans begin to figure out who will be their candidate in 2012. But now what? After the four dueling speeches, is there an American policy? What remains of the “peace process”?

For Abbas, the path forward seems clear. Get the U.N. vote in September; hold local elections this fall; hold parliamentary and presidential elections next year; and then retire. This requires holding the Hamas-Fatah deal together, no easy task: The last such deal, in 2007, failed in a few months and led to the Hamas coup in Gaza. But this one may last longer because it is less ambitious. It is an agreement to have an election next year, while Hamas keeps Gaza and Fatah keeps the West Bank for the interim. Fatah and Hamas hate each other no less today than they did yesterday. Their leaders have decided that the right formula for the coming year is patriotic speeches plus a U.N. vote plus an election, and in part this is their reaction to the “Arab Spring.” They need to have elections because every Arab state seems to be doing so now, and they need to keep public dissatisfaction focused on Israel lest people decide that their own rulers are the problem.

But Abbas is in fact creating a very dangerous situation with these maneuvers. As noted, they bring into question the growing security cooperation in the West Bank. Will a PA leadership now doing deals with Hamas be willing to continue acting against it on the ground? What is to become of the American-trained police forces when Prime Minister Fayyad, who has provided leadership to them, leaves office this summer in accordance with the Hamas-Fatah agreement?