The Mideast peace talks would face huge obstacles

JERUSALEM – President Barack Obama wants Israelis and Palestinians to return to the bargaining table, and he repeated the call Sunday in a speech to Israel supporters. But it seems unlikely this will happen anytime soon — and even if it did, the sides would find a formidable array of obstacles to agreement.

Obama is clearly aware of this, telling the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that "no matter how hard it may be to start meaningful negotiations under the current circumstances, we must acknowledge that a failure to try is not an option."

"Even as we are clear-eyed about the difficult challenges before us ... I hope we do not give up on that vision of peace," he added.

Among these challenges are huge gaps on important issues between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-winger for whom acquiescence to the very idea of Palestinian independence — popular around the world and now widely accepted in Israel, too — was a major ideological leap.

But even if a more compliant Israeli leadership should return to power, any negotiators would face some daunting obstacles:

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BORDERS

Obama made waves with his declaration Thursday that a peace treaty should be "based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps." It differed only in nuance from previous U.S. positions — a point Obama stressed Sunday — but hearing the principle stated clearly by the U.S. president had been a major Palestinian objective, and it touched a deep nerve in Israel, too.

Netanyahu swiftly declared the 44-year-old lines "indefensible" from a military point of view. And a look at the map shows why: Israel would be about 10 miles (about 15 kilometers) wide at its narrowest point; the West Bank surrounds the Israeli part of Jerusalem on three sides; and, on a clear day, the West Bank's strategic highlands are clearly visible from Tel Aviv, where about a quarter of Israelis live. If there is any chance that a future Palestine could turn hostile, these borders are a challenge.

Are they sacrosanct — or somehow enshrined in international law?

American officials are generally careful to use the word "lines" and not "borders" when referring to the demarcation that lasted from the end of the 1948-49 war after Israel declared independence until the 1967 war when it expanded its territory. That is no coincidence: these are temporary armistice lines between Israel and Jordan in the case of the West Bank, and Israel and Egypt in the case of Gaza. Those two countries captured the areas — previously part of British-ruled Palestine — in that 1948-49 war.

Might Israel keep some of its 1967 booty?

That largely depends on how hard the Palestinians press, and how much leverage they can summon up. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 seemed to leave the door open — calling for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." It avoided use of "the territories" and left everyone to debate whether this meant Israel could keep some areas.

On Sunday, Obama predicted the sides eventually "will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967 ... to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years, including the new demographic realities on the ground." That was a reference to the settlements Israel has built — and one the Palestinians will not appreciate.

Borders were supposed to be the simplest issue in peace talks, yet in a numbing two decades of talking the sides could never quite agree.

Gaza is simple enough, because Israel does not challenge the pre-1967 line and removed its relatively few settlers from the territory in 2005.

But more than a quarter million Israelis live throughout the West Bank now — in addition to a similar number living in the occupied sector of Jerusalem which is adjacent to the West Bank. Most of the settlers live close to the pre-1967 border. That makes it seemingly practical to include them in a redrawn Israel. Obama accepts this idea, but calls for land Israel receives to be swapped for unpopulated parts of Israel adjacent to the West Bank.

But must the swaps be equal in size? And how much land can they involve?

Obama did not specify — and the second question is critical, because there are at least two major settlements — Ariel and Maale Adumim — that have tens of thousands of residents and are deep enough inside to disrupt things badly for the Palestinians. Palestinians know that going around Maaleh Adumim — if it were part of Israel — would turn a 15-mile (25-kilometer) drive from Ramallah to Bethlehem, major West Bank centers, into a circuitous ordeal. Israelis have tended to assume creative cartography will finesse the issue. But if the swaps will be tiny, that probably means these two settlements would be evacuated.

The failure to agree even on borders suggests the issue is more complicated than it appears. For the Palestinians, getting even all of the West Bank and Gaza means accepting the loss of almost four-fifths of historic Palestine — and they're in no mood to give up yet more. And the Israelis — looking at the current map, and not so much at history — are basically uncomfortable with the smallness of their state.

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JERUSALEM

Dividing Jerusalem is even tougher than negotiating the West Bank borders.

The walled Old City, an area of less than a square kilometer (mile), houses some of the world's holiest sites for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Neither Israel nor Palestine could easily give it up to the other. Before 1967, it was part of Jordan — but a 1947 U.N. partition plan for Palestine called for internationalization of a wide area around the entire city after a British departure.

During past peace talks, the sides spoke of each controlling its "own" holy sites — but were not known to have reached a detailed understanding of how two states could divide between them an ancient enclave full of warrens and alleyways, ancient ruins and underground tunnels and excavations. Would there be a border? Who would be in charge of security? At one point there was even talk of the most explosive site — known as the Temple Mount to Jews, and Haram as-Sharif to Muslims — being placed under "divine sovereignty" to sidestep the problem.

But even beyond the Old City, Jerusalem's current demographics defy a division anywhere near as clean as, for example, the wall that once divided East and West Berlin.

After 1967, Israel expanded the municipal borders into the West Bank. Over the years it has ringed the Arab-populated part of the city with Jewish neighborhoods. The Palestinians call them "settlements" no different from those in the West Bank, and indeed, some have the appearance of distinct hilltop communities. Some 200,000 Jews now live in such developments in the occupied area of the city, alongside about 300,000 Palestinians and 300,000 Jews in the western part of Jerusalem.

The sides have discussed the principle of each keeping those areas of the city where its people live — but again, without much detail. On the ground, such a division would yield an astoundingly kaleidoscopic jumble, with islands of Jews surrounded by Palestinian areas and vice versa. A light railway planned for the city could end up crossing several borders a minute.

Jerusalem's mayor, Nir Barkat, put aside arguments about national rights and religious holy sites and argued plainly, in a meeting with foreign media this month, that a division of the city was no longer a practical possibility.

Yet to the Palestinians, Jerusalem is the heart of their country, and it is difficult to see them accepting a merely face-saving formula — such as access to, or some sovereignty over, their holy sites. Peace probably requires doing what Barkat argues is impossible.

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REFUGEES

The Palestinians have always demanded a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants to their families' previous homes in Israel — even though in most cases the homes, and in some even the villages, no longer exist.

For Israelis across the political spectrum this is a non-starter. The main reason they did not annex the West Bank and Gaza — and the reason why many are willing to part with such strategic territories — can be boiled down to a desire to ensure their Jewish majority.

On occasion, Palestinian officials would hint that a formula was possible that would satisfy everyone — perhaps, for example, with the right declared in principle but implemented only for a small number. A 2002 peace initiative by the Arab League made only indirect reference to the refugees, giving some Israelis hope.

But the deep Palestinian yearning is still there, seeming to grow stronger with each generation that grows up disenfranchised in countries such as Syria and Lebanon. Youth who have never seen their ancestral land carry keys to vanished family homes. Earlier this month, thousands risked their lives trying to breach Israel's borders, and several were killed by bullets fired from rattled Israeli troops.

At the White House on Friday, Netanyahu said the Palestinians must be told clearly that a return is "not going to happen." With this statement, the often divisive Netanyahu spoke for the vast majority of Israelis. In his speech a day earlier, Obama had sidestepped the vexing issue.

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According to the original timetable of the 1990s, a comprehensive deal ending a century of conflict was to be reached by May 1999. That never happened, and still seems far from imminent today. What, then, are the alternatives?

For one thing, the Palestinians say they will ask the United Nations for recognition of a state along the pre-1967 lines in September. Obama is trying to dissuade them.

If the Palestinians proceed, the gambit promises to be messy. Since the United States can veto any move in the Security Council, the Palestinians' bid would likely pass only in the General Assembly that has declarative but not practical powers. Still, such a recognition could spark other moves, including economic boycotts against Israel and mass public protest in the West Bank. Israel does not take it lightly.

A host of other scenarios, in the short and long term, could possibly unfold:

? An interim deal: Israel would probably jump at a plan establishing a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank and all of Gaza, leaving Jerusalem and the other issues for later, and not requiring the Palestinians to forswear all future claims. The Palestinians, fearing the temporary will become permanent, reject this out of hand — but world pressure might change this.

? A unilateral pullout: In 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would unilaterally pull out of most of the West Bank, essentially implementing the interim scenario without Palestinian agreement. The Gaza precedent now works against this in Israeli public opinion: Israel pulled out of the coastal strip, Hamas militants soon seized it, and the area has been used as a launching pad for rockets against Israel. But some variant of unilateral pullout may regain favor, especially if Israel faces mass Palestinian unrest that gets out of hand. Some speak of removing some settlers — but keeping the army in place for now.

? Outside intervention: It seems far-fetched today, but some Palestinians speak of asking the U.N. for a "trusteeship" over their areas, not unlike the British "mandate" over all of Palestine conferred by the League of Nations in 1922. Israel would find it tough to rebuff. It seems unlikely except as a very last resort, because it would probably require the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority and a sort of admission that the Palestinians aren't ready for independence.

? A binational state: Few on either side say they want this today. But if Israel cannot extricate itself from the West Bank, in the long run it would face pressure to give the Palestinians the right to vote, much as South Africa did when ending white minority rule. The Palestinians are already about half the population in Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza — and barring massive Jewish immigration they will very likely become the majority through their faster birthrate. In an irony of history, Jewish nationalism — in bonding Israel to the areas it conquered in 1967 — would have helped bring down the Jewish nation-state.

Obama and Netanyahu face tense session Mideast

WASHINGTON  - approval of the US President Barack Obama a Palestinian request for a long time on the borders of their future State paves the way for what could be a tense meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Friday.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who had strained relations with the Obama, headed to Washington saying that the vision of the President of a Palestinian State on the 1967 borders - in its elusive vision for a negotiated peace agreement with the U.S. - could leave "untenable." Israel

The White House talks were never conceived to yield no significant progress to re-launch the long peace talks - deadlocked but now this perspective seemed dimmer than ever.

Obama, in a speech policy Thursday on the "Spring of Arabic" uprisings across the Middle East, has its clearest markers still the compromises that Israel and the Palestinians need to do to resolve their decades-old dispute.

His position includes essentially the Palestinian view that the State, they seek in the West Bank and Gaza should extensively draw along the lines that existed before the war of 1967, in which Israel captured these territories and Jerusalem.

On the eve of the Netanyahu visit, it was seen as a message that Obama expects Israel to finally make big concessions.

"The viability of a Palestinian State cannot come at the expense of the existence of Israel," Netanyahu said in a statement before flying to the United States for his interviews with Obama.

First statement of pure and simple of the Obama of its position on the issue of borders could help the doubts of ease in the Arab world in its commitment to act as an impartial broker.

But the Democratic President quickly came under fire from Republican critics, who accuse him of betraying the Israel, the closest U.S. ally in the region. Pushing Netanyahu risks alienating the base of the Jewish State of support among the American public and Congress as Obama seeks re-election in 2012.

"This approach undermines our special relations with Israel and weakens the ability of our ally to defend themselves, said House Cantor Eric for the Leader of the Republican majority."

ISRAELIS CONFUSED

Taken while Obama also had hard words for the Palestinians, Israeli officials have been particularly aback by its language blunt criticism of "colonization" and its continued occupation of Arab lands.

There was no word on if Netanyahu, who heads a coalition of right-wing, pro-settler, had been warned.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the efforts of Obama renew talks which collapsed last year.

Obama has little to show for his efforts for peace since coming to Office. His last attempt collapsed when it backed that face Israel in the colony in the West Bank.

Despite the tensions, Obama has created three hours for Netanyahu Friday, including a working lunch. Visits could not always smooth, however.

In March of last year, Netanyahu was left cooling his heels, while Obama went to the residence of the White House for dinner with his family, seen as a snub in Israel.

Word of Thursday, Obama said: "we believe that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the lines of 1967 with mutually agreed swaps" land.

Although this has long been the private Washington view, Obama went further than the American authorities have disappeared in the past, when they described such a solution as a Palestinian aspiration that it includes not only their own.

Obama, in a BBC interview after his speech, said that Israel is "going to have to feel confident about his security" before he is expected to agree on an arrangement of border.

Obama has also delivered messages that will be difficult for the Palestinians to swallow, suggesting their effort to gain membership of a Palestinian State of the Nations United is condemned and that they have much to explain to treat a reconciliation with Hamas, which considers the United States as a terrorist group.

To reassure the Israelis, Obama returned to the safety of Israel and said that any future Palestinian State must be "non-militarized", something Netanyahu demanded.

But he warned of Israel: "the dream of a Jewish and democratic State cannot be filled with permanent occupation."

In a sharp response, Netanyahu said that he expected to "hear a reaffirmation of President Obama of commitments U.S. taken into Israel in 2004" - a reference to a letter the President George w. Bush suggesting the Jewish State can keep blocks of large facility under a peace Pact. "."

Palestinians say settlement expansion is aimed at depriving a viable State and successive US administrations have saved the Jewish State of resolutions of the Security Council of the United Nations condemning such activity.

Obama to offer relief of debt in Egypt in the speech Mideast

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama will present a programme of economic assistance of the Egypt and the Tunisia, on Thursday in a broad effort to support democratic reforms in the Middle East and representatives of the North Africa, the United States, said.

Senior advisors to Obama overview of parts of his speech, said Wednesday that in the United States would bring the debt relief for a total of approximately 1 billion dollars "for a few years" in Egypt through a debt swap mechanism which would be to invest money to stimulate the employment of young people and support entrepreneurs.

Washington would also loan or guarantee loans to a total of $ 1 billion through the Overseas Private Investment Corp (CIPO) for the Egypt to fund the development of infrastructure and stimulating jobs, officials told reporters in a conference call.

Billions of dollars in additional funding would come from multilateral banks for development as well.

Administration seeks also to foster trade and economic development throughout the region and encourage private sector investment, officials said.

"We believe that these initiatives will help the Egypt and the Tunisia as they undertake the twin challenges of economic transformation and democratisation," said an official.

Officials avoided a question on the issue of whether the debt relief was enough.

"Egypt has, in my view, a very good perspective of access to private capital markets and it is important to future economic dynamism of the Egypt, and it is something that we know that the economic leaders in Egypt want to strengthen," an official said when asked why the country's total debt is not cancelled.

In his speech greatly expected Thursday, Obama is designed to present a coherent approach to deal with the turmoil that swept the region and the decades interspersed with American policy unprecedented.

Part of this approach include stimulating economic fundamentals to stimulate democratic reform.

"... "We know our study of the past that a successful transition to democracy depend in part on strong foundations for prosperity, and to strengthen economic growth is an important means of strengthening a democratic transition," an official said.

PUSH ECONOMIC

The United States would form "Egyptian-American, and Tunisian-American Enterprise Fund" to promote private sector investment, the White House said in a statement laying down some of its proposals.

Washington also works with the allies to reorient the European Bank for Reconstruction and development support the Middle East region and North Africa, just as he helped the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

US authorities are concerned about the Economic Outlook in Egypt and Tunisia, after the democratic revolutions swept away long-autocratic decision.

Growth forecasts have been revised downward by 1% in Egypt and the growth of gross domestic product in Tunisia should be close to zero this year, the White House said.

The White House wishes to send a message to other countries in the region that they, too, could benefit from economic support if they are pursuing a democratic path.

"... Part of the objective of this economic program aims to strengthen not only positive changes in Egypt and the Tunisia, but a positive model that can empower and encourage democratic change and economic reforms in other parts of the region""an official said."

Intermediate Mideast leaves — but does it matter?

JERUSALEM – The question of whether mediators matter took on acuity this weekend with the resignation of U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell, a move that came exactly as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he was asked to help resolve seems about to retake center stage.

For all the hand-wringing in diplomatic circles, reaction on the ground in the Middle East itself, was uncharacteristically muted.

That reflected the fact that peace talks have been largely frozen since 2008, with the exception of a brief span in September, a Mitchell-mediated effort that quickly ran aground.

It may also have had to do with Mitchell's failure to truly get his groove with these rough-and-tumble protagonists: He was an envoy of the type who listens and facilitates — not the kind who takes a position and twists arms.

But some say that Mitchell — skilled and experienced, with a Northern Ireland peace deal to his credit — was simply impeded by the fact that the current crop of Israeli and Palestinian leaders simply wasn't ready.

The idea, in a wider sense, is that middlemen cannot do magic: for a deal to be possible, the stars must first align.

"Without the political will (by the parties), no mediator could manage to bridge the gaps," said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. negotiator and public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank. "You could have invited Moses, Muhammad and Jesus and they would not have been able to do it right now."

The Palestinians say Mitchell was ineffective because the Obama administration did not exert the necessary pressure on Israel to maintain — as the United States itself demanded — a construction freeze in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, war-won lands the Palestinians want for their state.

Jordan-based analyst Mouin Rabbani said that failure dovetailed with a big credibility problem emanating from the fact that the United States sees itself as a strategic partner of Israel's and therefore is not detached. Still, Rabbani said, while "I wouldn't say that the mediator and identity is irrelevant ... at the end of the day, the mediator is a secondary issue, and I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect example of that."

The former U.S. Senate majority leader was the latest in a long line of mediators to bump up against the Middle East conflict — ranging from diplomats like Dennis Ross to CIA Director George J. Tenet and retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni; at times the task was assigned to secretaries of state from William Rogers to Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Warren Christopher and Colin Powell.

Some enjoyed small degrees of success.

Christopher helped bring Israel and Syria closer to a peace deal in which Israel returned the Golan Heights, captured in 1967 — but it never came about. He helped broker a cease-fire between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah after an outbreak of fighting in 1996, but what ended the tension there — for a time — was Israel's unilateral pullout from south Lebanon four years later.

Perhaps the most widely attributed successes attributable to U.S. mediation came between Israel and Egypt in the 1970s. Kissinger is widely credited with the separation of forces between the countries in the Sinai Peninsula in 1975, two years after a devastating war; and two years later President Jimmy Carter himself convened Israeli and Egyptian leaders at Camp David for almost two weeks and pushed them into agreeing on a full peace treaty with Israel returning all of the Sinai.

But that was a situation in which the two countries seemed primed for making the move, and the terms of the settlement were relatively simple, and the mediation took the form of direct pressure at the highest level.

"Carter got involved as a mediator only after he was asked by the Israelis and Egyptians," noted Arie Kacowicz, an international relations professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The more junior — and full-time — mediators have little to show for their two decades of dealings with Israelis and Palestinians.

Ross helped midwife a series of Israel-PLO interim deals, but only after the breakthrough came in secret talks involving Norwegian and not American middlemen. Ultimately the so-called "Oslo Process" fell apart without Ross, or any other mediator, able to push the sides toward the final settlement that was meant to be reached by 1999 and eludes them still.

Tenet, Zinni and Mitchell spent years on the project with little to show.

Former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said Mitchell "failed totally" because the United States resisted presenting a clear outline for resolution.

And even though many say the outlines of a peace settlement are clear, the two sides have never resolved at least two dealbreakers: how to divide Jerusalem — which both want as a capital but where their people are by now significantly intertwined — and how to resolve the Palestinians' demand that millions of refugees and descendants be given rights to return to what is now Israel.

Kacowicz, the Hebrew University professor, said mediators tend to succeed when the sides are ready to do a deal and largely know what it will be. "In a way mediators are most effective when they are less needed," he said. "When the parties are ready to reconcile between themselves, they may need good offices, or some assistance."

Indeed, the Maine Democrat was successful in Northern Ireland in a situation where the two governments overseeing the Belfast talks — Britain and Ireland — agreed years beforehand on the shape of a workable settlement.

Success in that context mainly meant moving the key local parties gradually closer together to the point where they basically settled on what British and Irish governments saw all along as the compromise.

From his arrival in Belfast, all local parties were based in same British government building. Mitchell's shuttle diplomacy involved going from room to room, floor to floor. The deal still took 26 months and required exceptional patience, but Mitchell worked in alliance with two governments and didn't have to persuade them.

In the Middle East, some had hoped the United States would appoint a more interventionist mediator like the late Richard Holbrooke.

And it would seem logical that the nature of the mediator makes a difference: Do they have expert knowledge or familiarity with the antagonists? Are they perceived by all as neutral? Does a track record matter? Is their personality in sync with that of the people they must nudge and cajole?

Some believe it the very doggedness of the mercurial, charming Holbrooke that was key to his success. But history suggests that Holbrooke, too, was successful where the circumstances were already right.

He was for a time considered a mediation magician for his success in brokering the Dayton Agreement of 1995, ending a brutal war in Bosnia that lasted more than three years but also left the two sides impoverished, exhausted, deadlocked and probably aware that they must compromise over the ethnically mixed former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The same Holbrooke failed utterly to secure peace in the former Serbian province of Kosovo, even though in Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic he had one of the same protagonists as in the Bosnian mediation. The difference: Kosovo's territory was sacrosanct to the Serbs, and the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo were overwhelmingly in the majority and saw an alternative path in which Serbia is simply forced to pull out. NATO eventually attacked Serbia over the issue in 1999 and Kosovo declared independence nine years after that.

In 2005, the Kosovo status issue was handed by the United Nations to former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who won the Nobel Peace Prize several years later for helping douse flames across a broad swath of the world from Namibia to Indonesia. But agreement on Kosovo, with Serbia involved, in the end eluded even him. In 2008, Kosovo declared independence on its own.