Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Israel on Tuesday afternoon to kick-start peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with the schedule kept from the media and the whole operation managed from above. Kerry was there a day before President Barack Obama landed, and State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said he would “have a meeting or two, in preparation for the president’s arrival” while the “schedule was being worked out.”
The diplomatic choreography centered on the 2002 Saudi Peace initiative, which Kerry intended to put back on the table for Israel and the PA, according to Yedioth Ahronoth. The plan would have Arab nations recognize and make peace with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 armistice lines, an agreed solution to the Palestinian refugee issue, and acceptance of the formation of an independent Palestinian state. Then crown prince, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, said the initiative was only meant to serve as a basis, not a dictate, and that all of its points were open to negotiation.
Who Gets to Negotiate
Kerry had also warned the Palestinian leadership in the past that it would have to make concessions on some of the clauses laid down by the peace plan. Former deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, who was the foreign policy adviser of then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, said the government rejected the offer but still tried to probe it. “He sent me to find out if the Saudis are serious,” Ayalon said, adding that he tried to arrange, through middlemen, a meeting with Adel Jubeir, who at the time was an adviser to Abdullah. “We almost met in a restaurant in Washington and in the last-minute he didn’t want to meet,” Ayalon recalled. “We promised it would be under the radar, it would be very low-profile,” but the Saudis reneged on the scheduled meeting.
Ayalon said the government did not like the proposal because it was on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, with no room for discussions, though he said it could serve “as a basis for negotiations in the future, when conditions are much clearer here.” Sources close to Obama said his first priority in the visit would be resetting his oft-troubled relationship with Netanyahu and evaluating the new coalition government Netanyahu laboriously cobbled together. Aaron David Miller, an adviser on Mideast peace to six secretaries of state who is now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, said, “This is not about accomplishing anything now. This is what I call a down payment trip.”
The People Paying the Price
Kerry would accompany Obama on his visit from Wednesday and depart with him to Jordan on Friday, but would return to Israel on Saturday night for an additional meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Kerry and Obama were scheduled to meet with Abbas in Ramallah on Thursday morning. Maariv reported on Wednesday that Kerry would try to arrange a three-way meeting between Obama, Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The talks came after Israelis and Palestinians had not held direct talks since the fall of 2010, when the talks broke down after Israel refused to agree to the Palestinian Authority’s demands that it extend a settlement construction freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a pre-condition for talks. Last November, the PA gained nonmember observer state status at the UN, despite objections by the US and Israel. Since the UN vote, Israel announced a series of construction plans for areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, including in the controversial E1 corridor, located between Maaleh Adumin in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The Palestinians demanded that Israel halt settlement construction as a pre-condition for returning to the negotiating table. Israel, for its part, maintained that there shouldn’t be pre-conditions for peace talks since all final status issues — security, Jerusalem, refugees, and borders — would be agreed upon during the course of negotiations. A source close to Abbas told Israel Radio Tuesday morning that the Palestinian president would ask Obama to pressure Israel into making gestures of goodwill to the PA. Among the requested gestures would be the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, the transfer of additional land to PA control and the handing over of armored vehicles donated to the PA by Russia.
Netanyahu reportedly was already considering offering a package of goodwill gestures to coincide with the presidential visit. A Maariv report earlier this month said that Israel’s defense establishment had drawn up a package that included the transfer of authority over two access roads — one to the new Palestinian city Rawabi, and the other to the West Bank city of Tulkarem — to full Palestinian control, the approval of building plans for 10 Palestinian villages currently deemed illegal and under threat of being demolished, the release of many of the 123 Fatah prisoners arrested by Israel before the Oslo peace talks and the transfer of small arms ammunition to Palestinian security forces.
What the Summit Crowd Did Instead
However, Palestinian officials expressed little, if any confidence in the immediate future of revived peace talks. Nabil Shaath, a PA official and former member of the Palestinian negotiation team, noted in an interview to Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam that the new Israeli government, sworn in on Monday, contained more settlers and fewer religious legislators than previous administrations. The settlers, he said, were more extremist and more dangerous than the religious MKs. Top Palestinan negotiator Saeb Erekat said Tuesday night that there was no need for Obama to bring a new initiative to the region, nor was it necessary to arrange a summit meeting with Netanyahu and Abbas. “The only thing needed is to set a clear timetable for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders,” Erekat told al-Arabiya. Erekat was quoted on Wednesday by Israel Radio saying that the new Israeli government, sworn in on Monday, was formed in order to destroy the principle of a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict.
While the officials traded ultimatums and photo-op logistics, thousands gathered in Tel Aviv on Thursday for the third annual People's Peace Summit, an event organized by a coalition of over 80 Israeli co-existence and human rights organizations. Old peace activists, women in hijabs, bilingual schoolchildren, and men in tzitzit gathered in Tel Aviv. Israeli and Palestinian speakers urged a revival of a peace movement many fear has been pushed to the margins by endless wars.