Today's Palestinian Leaders Can't Deliver Peace
Following Obama’s optimistic speech this morning about the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the panel on ‘Palestinian Leadership – Today and Tomorrow’ offered a much bleaker view of the situation.
Though he “[wishes] it were otherwise”, Director of Global Research in International Affairs Center Barry Rubin said, “I don’t think there is any possibility of an Israeli Palestinian agreement for years, possibly even decades”. Rubin felt that Obama’s speech ignored key issues in the region and offered a naïve view of the peace process. “If we analyze Palestinian politics in detail,” said Rubin, “what we find is that what we are generally told by politicians and the mass media…does not match the situation that exists on the ground”.
Ghaith al-Omari, Advocacy Director for the American Task Force on Palestine, explained the situation on the ground that Rubin referred to. Al-Omari laid out the complexities of competing Palestinian interest groups and how they have the potential to shape the future of Palestinian government. Hamas and Fatah, National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Palestinian youth and any potential reform parties would have opposing interests and al-Omari said that their competition for leadership will be a “bloody transformation.” The fluid leadership situation in Palestine makes it very difficult to predict which group will come out on top.
Rubin argued that because Palestinian public opinion has not been prepared to accept any compromise, Palestinian society has a fundamental “inability and unwillingness” to make peace.
“Palestine is only willing to make concessions if those concessions leave the door open for everything someday”, said Rubin. He was visibly incensed that Obama’s speech “did not take any of [these] factors into account at all”.
David Makovsky, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process Director acknowledged that “there has been progress… these are four of the quietest years that the Israelis and Palestinians have had since Madrid.” He conceded however that “that doesn’t mean that there has been progress everywhere.”
al-Omari’s comment that “the role of the United States is not to impose a solution, but the United States is in a place to impose a code of conduct” was the only comment on the panel that drew clapping from the audience, once again hinting at displeasure with the President’s remarks this morning.
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