Martin Indyk Explains the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process - Uri Friedman - Th... - 1 views
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Indyk somehow retains hope for a peace deal. For all the stasis and backsliding over the past two decades, he argues that the Palestinians have made some strides over the years. Instead of rejecting Israel, they've accepted its right to exist. Instead of practicing terrorism, Abbas's Fatah party has embraced non-violence. Palestinian officials have come to terms with acquiring a demilitarized state encompassing only 22 percent of historic Palestine as part of a two-state solution.
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On the Israeli side, Indyk added, annexing the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinian Arabs, as some Israelis on the right are calling for, is antithetical to Israel functioning as a democratic, Jewish state. If it remains democratic under this scenario, then the Palestinians will constitute a majority of the population. If it remains Jewish, then the Palestinians will be stripped of their rights.
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But then, beginning in mid-February, Abbas suddenly "shut down." By the time the Palestinian leader visited Obama in Washington in March, he "had checked out of the negotiations," repeatedly telling U.S. officials that he would "study" their proposals, Indyk said. Abbas later signed 15 international conventions and struck a unity deal with the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. These moves deflated the peace process.
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he delivered a frank postmortem on the process, detailing how excruciatingly close negotiators were to a deal and why they ultimately fell short of one. Initially, Israel agreed to release more than 100 Palestinian prisoners in four stages in return for the Palestinians not signing international conventions or attempting to join UN agencies. After six months of direct negotiations between the parties, he explained, Netanyahu "moved into the zone of a possible agreement" and was prepared to make substantial concessions.
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What accounts for Abbas's about-face? The explanation, Indyk says, lies in Jewish settlement activity during the talks. The U.S. had anticipated limited activity in so-called settlement "blocks" near Israel's 1967 borders, where roughly 80 percent of Jewish settlers live.
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What caught Washington off guard was the Israeli government's announcements, with each release of Palestinian prisoners, of plans for settlement units, many of which were outside the blocks. "The Israeli attitude is that's just planning," Indyk noted. "But for the Palestinians, everything that gets planned gets built. ... And the fact that the announcements were made when the prisoners were released created the impression that Abu Mazen had paid for the prisoners by accepting these settlement announcements." Netanyahu may have simply been playing domestic politics and trying to placate the Israeli right-wing, but these announcements effectively humiliated Abbas
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ndyk's implicit message appeared to be that Israel's settlement policy inflicted the most harm on the peace process: The settlement announcements undermined Abbas, who in turn walked away from the talks.