ISRAELI DEFENCE minister Ehud Barak’s acknowledgment in the US on Friday that, in an eventual peace deal with the Palestinians, Jerusalem would probably be divided, with Arab neighbourhoods under the latter’s sovereignty, was a welcome first small step in addressing realistically one of the “core” issues that have to be faced up to in talks. He also spoke of an “agreed solution” to the issue of religious sites in the walled Old City, a formulation that recalled proposals in a Clinton initiative a decade ago.
That his words should be so rapidly dismissed by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu – as only reflecting the perspective of minority coalition partner Labour – was an unhappy reminder of how difficult it has been to get Israel even to the point of setting out its stall on the substantive issues any deal will require.
This is precisely the issue on which US special envoy George Mitchell was due to focus when he arrived back in Jerusalem yesterday for the first time in three months. Following the US decision last week to abandon attempts to persuade Israel to renew its settlement-building embargo, and hence any immediate prospect of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Friday urged both sides to return to the core issues and to detail their positions on these “without delay and with real specificity”. Indirect talks are now seen as the only way forward for the time being.
The US retreat is being justified as a pragmatic recognition of the reality of political constraints – a pro-settler majority – inside Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, and that a 90-day embargo extension would not anyway have been sufficient to broker an agreed final definition of the borders of a Palestinian state. A resumption of building at that stage would have plunged the process into yet deeper crisis, and so settlements will now have to be dealt with in the context of a final settlement. But the volte-face is also a clear defeat for US diplomacy on an Obama priority issue, a grim sense of going back to square one, and a recognition that its optimistic timeframe – an agreement on a Palestinian state inside a year – was unrealistic.
The core issues that have tried negotiators for years include the borders issue, the status of Jerusalem, arrangements to guarantee Israel’s security, and the fate of Palestinian refugees in exile. Increasingly it has become clear, however, that the sequencing of discussions poses problems; their interconnectedness and interdependence mean that trying to agree any one ahead of the others is unlikely to succeed. Mr Mitchell’s challenge will be to see if they can be tackled in parallel tracks simultaneously, a choreography familiar from his days in the North.
Yesterday Mr Netanyahu welcomed the US settlement decision, the focus on simultaneous discussion of the core issues, and the US promise to continue blocking anti-Israeli measures at the United Nations. His officials have hinted that his cabinet may be more pliable on concessions now the settlements issue is behind them. Specifics now, Mr Netanyahu.