SINCE TAKING office in January President Barack Obama has launched a dizzying series of foreign policy initiatives – on Russia, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the Muslim world, and now on Israel and the Palestinians. He has taken advantage of the more favourable attitudes towards the United States which accompanied his election. On the Middle East he will definitely need such goodwill, since he has to rebalance a policy tilted so much towards Israel by his two predecessors that it is difficult to re-establish the US role as an even-handed broker of peace. This week’s visits to Israel by leading figures in his administration show he is taking the task seriously.
His decision to make a central issue out of new Israeli housing settlements in east Jerusalem is a good one in these circumstances. Given the go-ahead by the Israeli government under its new prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu after the US made clear this would be objectionable, the project is a provocative assertion of Israel’s right to build anywhere it likes in the city. That cuts right across international law and United Nations resolutions which call on Israel to withdraw from territory occupied in the 1967 Six Day War within the context of a peace agreement. The presence of 300,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and 190,000 in east Jerusalem shows how large a task it will be to reach an agreement on that basis.
The Palestinian leadership refuses to reopen peace negotiations unless a complete halt is called to the expansion of Israeli settlements, a position essentially backed by the Obama administration. Mr Netanyahu insists that previous agreements with the Bush administration would allow for expansion of existing settlements made necessary by population growth. This week’s talks between George Mitchell, Mr Obama’s envoy, and Mr Netanyahu failed to produce a breakthrough on this question, but intensive bargaining is now under way and will continue. Mr Obama may have to appeal more directly to Israeli public opinion, but before doing so he must establish his credibility with Arab leaders and peoples, so has little room for manoeuvre on the principle at stake.
It is a strategically vital principle if a sustainable agreement is to be reached on a two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Palestinian state would not be viable if it is based on accepting these Israeli settlements as so-called “facts on the ground”, since they Balkanise the area into non-contiguous territories and would be a permanent source of instability. If the US is to be a genuine broker of peace there is no room for compromise on the matter.
Putting this initiative into the wider setting of a normalised relationship between the Arab world and Israel reinforces this conclusion. That can only be done if Israel withdraws from occupied territory in return for a cessation of hostilities and enmities and a recognition of its right to exist in peace in the region. This wider vision of peace is possible only if Israel too accepts the reciprocal rights of Palestinians to a viable state.