Israel, Palestine and the Jewish settlements

No time for Barack Obama to give up

The American president must soon present his own plan for breaking the stalemate

ONLY a few months ago, there were rare flickers of hope that America’s persuasive new president might bring Israelis and Palestinians together to revive negotiations that could actually lead to the creation of two states living side by side in peace. But Mr Obama’s early momentum, boosted by a ringing declaration of good intent to Muslims and Arabs in Cairo in June, has begun to flag. This week at the UN, despite overseeing the obligatory handshake between the leaders of Israel and Palestine, he failed to show evidence of even a whiff of progress. It is time for him to spell out his own vision—and tell the Israelis directly why they must take a number of awkward steps, in particular by totally freezing the building and expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, if they are to secure that elusive long-term peace (see article). Above all, though plainly he has more than enough on his plate elsewhere, Mr Obama must get personally involved.

The outlines of a durable agreement have long been clear. The two states’ boundary must run close to the 1967 line, with several of the big Jewish settlement blocks eventually becoming part of Israel, while the Palestinians are compensated with land swaps of equal size and quality. Jerusalem must be shared. Israel should accept the Palestinians’ moral right to return to lands they lost when Israel was founded in 1948, while the Palestinians accept that only a few of them from the diaspora will in practice be able to resettle there.

Mr Obama equally needs to tell the Palestinians and their Arab backers why they, too, have to take decisions that will stick in their gullets. They must accept Israel as a Jewish state, albeit one where people of all faiths, including Arab-Israelis, have full rights. And if a deal is to stick, the rival Palestinian groups, Fatah and Hamas, must settle their own differences.

Mr Obama has been taking flak from Israel’s stalwart lobbyists for blowing the settlements row, as they see it, out of proportion. In a final deal, they say, everyone knows that the border will be adjusted so that some settlements will stay in Israel, free to expand behind a new line. Why make a meal of it?

Deeply unsettling

That is not the point. Year after year, under Israeli governments of every stripe, the settlements have butted into Palestinian land, eroding a would-be Palestinian state. Since 1993, when a peace deal that eventually failed was signed in Oslo, the number of settlers in the West Bank and the mainly Arab east side of Jerusalem has grown by more than 200,000. In this way Israel has flouted all the big agreements under American and international auspices. Yet no American administration, bar briefly that of George Bush senior, has ever penalised Israel for its settlement-building. Palestinians therefore utterly disbelieve American protestations of even-handedness.

For all these reasons, Mr Obama was quite right to say “Enough”. Mr Netanyahu’s arguments, for instance that new buildings are needed to cater for growing families, are bogus. If the settlers need more space, they could move to Israel proper; America could perhaps offer cash incentives to help them do so. The real worry behind Mr Netanyahu’s shilly-shallying is that he has shown no sign, since his reluctant and caveat-ridden acceptance in June of the two-state idea, that he really envisages, let alone welcomes, a Palestinian state.

As the stalemate persists, Mr Obama should not blink from the prospect of reducing aid to Israel, and rethinking America’s knee-jerk backing for it in such forums as the UN, so long as its overall security is not threatened. Above all he should spell out, directly to the Israeli people, why compromises over land, as well as on other matters, will not weaken Israel; rather, a two-state solution is the best guarantee of its future safety. Mr Netanyahu gives the impression that there is no urgency; Israel, he implies, can resist, however much the Palestinians and others huff and puff. That is sorely misguided. Mr Obama must tell the Israelis that their country cannot remain a walled fortress for ever.