IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump (R) greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a joint news conference at the White House in Washington, U.S., February 15, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is slipping away, the U.N. special coordinator for Middle East peace warned on Sunday, after both sides shrugged off criticism by international mediators.
A report released on Friday by the so-called Quartet – United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia – called on Israel to stop its policy of building settlements on occupied land and restricting Palestinian development.
Israeli policy “is steadily eroding the viability of the two-state solution,” it said. It also urged the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank, take steps to end incitement to violence against Israelis, condemn “all acts of terrorism” and do more to combat them.
“The Quartet report sounds an alarm bell that we are on a dangerous slope towards a one-state reality that is incompatible with the national aspirations of both peoples,” wrote Nickolay Mladenov, U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, in a commentary emailed to journalists on Sunday.
He also addressed Palestinian and Israeli criticism of the Quartet report. “Who will make the argument that more cannot be done to end incitement?” he asked. “Can anyone question that illegal settlements … are not undermining the prospect for a two-state solution?”
Israel welcomed parts of the Quartet report but signaled no change in settlement building, saying the document “perpetuates the myth that Israeli construction in the West Bank is an obstacle to peace”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is at the heart of the impasse.
A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas expressed disappointment that the Quartet did not call for full Israeli withdrawal to lines that existed before the Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a 1967 war.
The Palestinians want an independent state in those areas and in the Gaza Strip, a coastal enclave controlled since 2007 by the Islamist Hamas group. Peace talks collapsed in April 2014 and Israeli-Palestinian violence has surged in recent months.
Mladenov appealed to Israeli and Palestinian leaders to implement the report’s recommendations, offering the help of the international community to do so.
“I urge leaders on both sides not to miss this opportunity,” he wrote.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
Photo: An Israeli soldier stops a Palestinian woman and her son at the entrance of Yatta near the West Bank city of Hebron June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
By Sangwon Yoon, Bloomberg News (TNS)
UNITED NATIONS — While the world remains fixated on the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration is facing another foreign policy showdown in the United Nations Security Council.
The administration has signaled that it might abandon the decades-long U.S. policy of protecting Israel at the U.N. and back a Security Council resolution laying out terms for a two-state solution to the almost 67-year-old dispute between the Jewish state and the Palestinians.
Robert Malley, the Middle East director for President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, told at least one European nation two weeks ago that the administration is more willing than it has ever been to work on a Security Council resolution defining the parameters for a Mideast peace agreement, according to a report on the conversation to superiors by a Washington-based European diplomat. A copy of the report was viewed by Bloomberg News.
The reported comments by Malley are “completely false,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in an email. “Rob has not had any conversation on this topic with any European diplomats then or since.”
Obama, though, has left no doubt that he’s considering whether to bend the U.S. policy of vetoing U.N. resolutions that Israel opposes and, in the process, punish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pledging that he will ensure that no Palestinian state is created anytime soon. Netanyahu also opposes the talks with Iran, warning Tuesday that the deal the U.S. seeks would “pave the way” for the Islamic Republic to develop nuclear weapons.
“We have to do an evaluation of where we are” on Mideast peace efforts, Obama said at a news conference on March 24.
Past U.S. Security Council vetoes were “predicated on this idea that the two-state solution is the best outcome,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest has said. “Now our ally in these talks has said that they are no longer committed to that solution. That means we need to reevaluate our position.”
Obama said he’ll wait for Netanyahu to form his new coalition government by the preliminary April 22 deadline before announcing the conclusions of his Mideast peace policy reassessment.
While Palestinians and Europeans are excited by the prospect of U.S. support for a two-state solution, they remain wary of how much political and diplomatic latitude Obama has to follow through.
Republican lawmakers are promising to fight back if Obama qualifies U.S. support for Israel at the U.N. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), has warned of a “violent backlash by the Congress, bipartisan in nature,” if Obama lets a Security Council resolution defining the terms of a peace agreement go forward without first getting both sides to agree.
“The last thing I want is to be put in a box where I have to take the U.N. on,” Graham told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on March 23, reminding the audience that as chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, he has the power to suspend America’s $654 million annual contribution to the world body.
U.N. diplomats and Obama’s former Mideast peace negotiators say the president has two realistic options.
First, the U.S. could back a French plan to draft a Security Council resolution that would set a binding timeframe in which to define the parameters of a two-state solution based on Israel’s 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as their shared capital, said two knowledgeable Security Council diplomats.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on March 27 that in the “coming weeks” France will restart discussions on such a text, which ended in December due to U.S. objections.
Robert Serry, the U.N.’s departing Mideast peace envoy, urged the Security Council last week to update its 1967 Resolution 242, which has been a cornerstone of almost 50 years of diplomatic efforts. It was adopted after Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and Gaza from its Arab enemies in the Six-Day War that year. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt after the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979.
Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, said “a carefully crafted resolution on parameters” is the most realistic option for the U.S. to take, “provided that it is balanced and doesn’t go into so much detail as to prejudge negotiations.”
The biggest challenges will be whether to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which the Palestinians and the French oppose, and what security arrangements should be included to ensure that a new Palestinian state couldn’t be a launching pad for attacks against Israel, said the two diplomats.
The second U.S. option is to introduce a new draft Security Council resolution that outlines no parameters. It would call on both parties to make progress toward resuming negotiations and condemn activities such as Israel’s settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank for obstructing the path to peace, said an Arab diplomat at the U.N. who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
While such a resolution is unlikely to be adopted, a draft would pressure Israel and Netanyahu to at least freeze settlement construction, said three Security Council diplomats who asked not to be named commenting on sensitive matters.
Such actions also might help deter the Palestinians, at least for a time, from seeking full statehood recognition from the Security Council and membership in international treaties, or from pursuing its request that the International Criminal Court probe alleged Israeli war crimes, said the three diplomats.
Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Wilson Center in Washington who served as a Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations, said Obama first must determine his goals for the remainder of his term before exploring the U.S. options at the Security Council.
“The real question is, what is the best option for the administration to pursue in the next two months?” Miller said.
Adopting a U.N. resolution before any agreement is reached between the two parties would be useless unless the administration is ready to try to force Israel to accept a two-state solution by cutting U.S. aid to Israel, recognizing Palestine, or pushing the Europeans to sanction Israel and reduce trade, Miller said.
“But I see no indication whatsoever that this administration is ready to do that,” he said.
Photo: Zack Lee via Flickr
By Daniella Cheslow, McClatchy Foreign Staff
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who’s considered the architect of the April agreement that reunited Hamas and Abbas’ Fatah movement in a unity Palestinian government, paused as he contemplated his groundbreaking deal in the wake of Israel’s crushing campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Then he acknowledged that the situation might be different had Hamas not taken the course it did.
“Why the hell spend all this money and effort just showing off?” Shaath asked during an interview with McClatchy. “Hamas did not want this war. . . . They just needed a promise that at the end of the cease-fire there would be a normal life for Gazans. But by not throwing rockets, maybe they could have avoided giving excuses to the Israelis.”
Shaath’s comments, made Sunday as the Palestinian death toll passed 1,000, underscore the deep differences that remain between the freshly reconciled Palestinian factions, even as Israel and Hamas fight. Fatah and Hamas split violently seven years ago when Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah in fierce fighting. The movements remained bitter rivals until they signed the reconciliation pact in late April.
During the years they were split, Fatah and Hamas viewed each other with acrimony. Under Abbas, Fatah pledged “nonviolent resistance,” meaning diplomatic pressure on Israel. Hamas, on the other hand, is the flag bearer of forceful resistance, including firing rockets at Israel, mostly without effect, and burrowing tunnels under the Gaza-Israel border to enable attacks.
The current operation in Gaza is challenging the Fatah strategy, according to Alaa Rimawi, an expert on Islamic politics.
“The message of Hamas was always that Israel will never give you a state, and it seems the Hamas prediction was right,” Rimawi said. “Fatah is in crisis. . . . Fatah and Hamas are now presently on the same track.”
Shaath is intimately familiar with the tensions between Hamas and Fatah. During the long hostility between Hamas and Fatah, he was instrumental in shuttling from the West Bank to Gaza to hammer out an agreement. Under the unity deal signed in April, the two sides were to form an interim government within five weeks and hold parliamentary elections six months later. So far the interim government hasn’t been formed because of the campaign.
Shaath said some Fatah members still harbored bad feelings toward Hamas. “Yes, there are some of us who still think of the fraternal enemy more than they think of the real enemy,” he said. However, many of these Fatah members have been galvanized against Israel by the spiraling death toll in Gaza, he said.
A turning point came last week, when Abbas adopted the Hamas demands for a cease-fire with Israel, including opening border crossings with Israel and Egypt and building an airport and seaport.
Shaath didn’t endorse violence against Israel. In fact, he said, Palestinian police continue to check for weapons at rallies and to keep a tight lid on what could escalate into violent protest and lead to a third “intifada,” the term used to describe previous prolonged periods of anti-Israel violence.
However, he noted that “the word intifada does not mean violence. An intifada is an uprising, its people saying ‘no’ to the occupation. . . . If Israelis continue in Gaza, there will be an intifada, and my duty will be to steer that in a nonviolent direction.”
In Ramallah, Fatah seemed rejuvenated by its clearer line against Israel. Shaath squeezed in the interview after meeting with Russian diplomats and British dignitaries. His office director was one of the planners of a large protest at Qalandiya last week in which thousands took part.
Others in Ramallah were less sure. Abu Samaha, a worker in a sandwich shop, marched in last week’s demonstration that began in his neighborhood, the al Amari refugee camp.
“May God give power to Ismail Haniyeh and Gaza,” he said, speaking of the Hamas leader. “Abbas is a mayor, not a president. His decision-making is not in his hands.”
Cheslow is a McClatchy special correspondent.
AFP Photo/Jack Guez
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