US stumped on future of Middle East peace
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Just over a week ago, the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his efforts to bring about a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.
On Monday, the Americans ensured that Netanyahu met U.S. President Barack Obama behind closed doors, with no news conference and no photographed handshakes at the door with his host either prior to or after the meeting.
In the eyes of Israeli analysts, the Obama administration is about to change its mindset on the Middle East issues, though still at a loss of where they are exactly heading.
Behind closed doors
Despite Clinton's warm words for Netanyahu, Washington is still, at a surface level, very dissatisfied with Israel's failure to agree to freeze all construction work on its settlements in the West Bank and in Eastern Jerusalem.
Yet Jonathan Rynhold, a senior research associate at the BeginSadat Center for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv, sees the silence rather differently. In his opinion, there really is a shift in the Obama administration's understanding of the Israeli- Palestinian situation and the role of the surrounding Arab states.
The problems began some five months ago.
The Obama team got it right when they pressured Netanyahu into announcing his support for a Palestinian state in his key June 4 speech, said Rynhold. However, since then, in Rynhold's opinion, Washington has been pushing Netanyahu too far on the settlement issue.
Only in the last couple of weeks have they come to this realization and the Clinton comments were a part of that recognition, he said.
The silence, he argues, was to give the Arab states the impression that the U.S. is extremely frustrated with Israel's failure to budge on the settlement issue. That does not mean Washington is totally in love with the Netanyahu government, but that the picture behind closed doors is not as dire as some analysts are suggesting.
This view is shared by Shlomo Slonim, an expert on Israeli- American relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
No way forward
In agreement with Rynhold, Slonim argues that Washington is not sure where to turn next.
The Israeli analysts talk a lot about climbing trees. The idea is that politicians climb so far up a tree with their own policy statements that they have no ladder of compromise on which to climb down.
Slonim believes the American pressure on Israel to freeze its settlement activity was so significant that it encouraged Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas into making the freeze an inviolable precondition to peace talks. Abbas walked so far along this branch, said Slonim, that he has been unable to find a way back down.
Now, the Obama team has begun to revise its position. It knows what Netanyahu is prepared to give and realizes there is no point in too much further pressure, he suggested.
"The Clinton statement was a very clear indication of a mellowing on the part of the U.S. and a much more reasonable approach to Israel's demands," said Slonim.
Yet despite this seemingly newfound maturity in the White House and State Department, the analysts believe the Americans really do not know where to take the peace process.
Netanyahu has made clear to Obama what he can and cannot deliver, while Abbas has threatened not to run for office in future because of the lack of progress on the peace front. Both men cannot move anywhere right now.
The Americans lack a game plan, according to Rynhold.
"They realized that in the real world you've just got to make decisions. How much political capital do you want to spend on Netanyahu? The time just is not worth it, and that's something they could have realized if they'd thought about it earlier," he said.
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