Have Arab-Israeli Peace Talks Reached a Strategic Dead end?
President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are fumbling around new Arab-Israeli peace talks like two bewildered passengers finding the cockpit of a stalled-out 747 empty, they're pressing buttons willy-nilly. But no wonder. In sixty-five years of existence the Jewish state, successive U.S. administrations, Palestinians and neighboring Arab countries have cobbled together more peace treaties than television's "Federation Starfleet."
In March of 1979, Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the historic Camp David Accords, witnessed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. This peace agreement signaled reconciliation between the two nations, and represented the first time an Arab state had recognized Israel. However, it appears to be coming unglued, with this Spring’s ouster of Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak. On April 29, the newly appointed foreign minister of Egypt re-opened on a permanent basis, the Rafah border with Gaza, which Mubarak had closed under pressure from Israel. In hindsight, the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, the 1993 Oslo Accords, the 2000 Clinton Parameters, the 2001 Taba Talks, the 2002 Beirut Summit and the 2003 Roadmap for Peace were little more than intermittent lulls in this perpetual war.
President Obama’s recent declaration that the basis for new peace negotiations would be based on the lines drawn before the 1967 war, infuriated the Israeli Prime Minister and his aides. Netanyahu, in a subsequent address to the U.S. Congress publicly rejected Obama’s starting gambit for launching a new peace proposal. Meanwhile, the newly unified Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, have dismissed both Obama and Netanyahu’s proposals, in favor of lobbying the United Nations to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state. While this declaration will not pass in the Security Council on account of the U.S.’s exercise of its veto, it will strengthen the hand of the Palestinians, and thus antagonize Israel further.
So, if yet another round of peace talks is not the answer to this conflict, which will continue to destabilize the region, what is? I’ll be back tomorrow with the kind of pragmatic, straightforward proposal that the U.S. media is too timid to touch.
RELATED POST: A Mideast Prediction for 2012 BACK TO HOME PAGE
Comments