Obama's Concession Dooms Middle East Peace
Coming with the global financial crisis, tortuous climate change negotiations, a trade dispute with China and a deteriorating strategic outlook in Afghanistan, one might be forgiven for concluding that the frosty meeting represents the least of Obama's foreign policy headaches and that his decision to drop his demand for a settlement freeze constitutes only a tactical withdrawal in favour of renewed final-status negotiations.
However, the retreat on the issue of settlements marks the culmination of both the Obama and Bush administrations' failure to save the collapsing prospects of a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
In 2003 the US, UN, EU and Russia co-sponsored the road map peace accords for a comprehensive peace settlement by 2005.
Unlike the ill-fated Oslo accords, the road map was a performance-based program that demanded the Palestinian Authority "undertake visible efforts" to "arrest, disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere" in return for an Israeli freeze on settlement activity, "including natural growth", the dismantling of settler outposts built since March 2001 and the reopening of Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem.
In the years that followed, prime minister and then President Mahmoud Abbas spent all of his political capital and nearly split his Fatah party in carrying out his obligations.
In the West Bank, Palestinian police forces liquidated resistance cells that held out against the Israeli army throughout the intifada and closed down more than a hundred Hamas-affiliated charities. In Gaza, Fatah operatives worked with the US in a botched attempt to overthrow Hamas.
The price paid by Abbas has been a heavy one, without recompense. Jewish settlers have continued to build new outposts in the West Bank and settlement expanded through the construction of new neighbourhoods and government-subsidised "natural growth". In East Jerusalem, Palestinian institutions remain tightly shut.
In May, a UNESCO-sponsored literary festival in the city featuring Michael Palin and other international celebrities, was forcibly closed by Israeli police on the grounds "it was a political activity connected to the Palestinian Authority".
While Israeli politicians boasted of having put the peace process into formaldehyde, Hamas capitalised on Israel's failure to fulfil its road map obligations by winning control of the Palestinian parliament in 2006, then seizing control of Gaza in 2007.
In March, the US/Middle East Project, a bipartisan panel of Middle East experts, released a statement entitled A Last Chance for a Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement. It warned the new President he must present a clear vision to end the conflict based on UN resolutions and the road map. Failure to do so would be "to cede the field to America's enemies, who are counting on the Arab-Israeli dispute as the gift that keeps on giving".
In his address to Cairo's al-Azhar University, Obama acknowledged the Palestinians' plight as a major source of tension between the US and the Muslim world. Firmly denouncing contemporary anti-Semitism and declaring America's bond with Israel was unbreakable, he also denounced Israeli settlement expansion as a violation of previous agreements that undermined efforts to achieve peace.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reply was to announce further settlement construction and pay tribute to the settlers as an integral part of "a principled, pioneering and Zionist public". In the war of wills that followed, it was Obama who gave way. In August, Netanyahu pledged he would not evict any (Jewish) people from their homes as Israeli police evicted Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, which were taken over by settlers. The White House said it regretted Israel's actions.
At this week's summit, Obama praised Israeli "steps to restrain settlement activity" and called upon both parties to "move forward" on negotiations, pressuring Abbas to drop his demand for a settlement freeze and return to the Oslo formula of open-ended peace negotiations against the backdrop of settlement expansion.
In 1973, Ariel Sharon announced his intention to make a "pastrami sandwich" of the Palestinians by building strips of settlements across the West Bank, "so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart". Today, 40 per cent of the West Bank is under the control of the settlers as the pastrami slices thicken and Palestinian transport, agriculture and commerce are stifled by the web of Israeli-only settlement roads that link up the settlements.
While that strange constellation of Jewish irredentists, Christian fundamentalists, neoconservatives, Hamas hardliners, Iranian mullahs and advocates of global jihad will no doubt welcome the quiet death of the road map, it is unlikely any other party will benefit from a return to a peace process of empty gestures.
As the last prospects of a viable Palestinian state collapse, Israel is changing from a Jewish state into an Arab country ruled by a Jewish minority. Rather than marking the beginning of a new era, Obama's Cairo address seems destined to be remembered as a footnote in the tragic history of US Middle East diplomacy.
