The failure to extract even a partial Israeli settlement freeze was humiliating for Barack Obama but disastrous for Mahmoud Abbas and his Arab allies, writes Graham Usher On 7 December the Obama administration admitted defeat in its attempts to cajole, beg and bribe the Israeli government into accepting a partial West Bank settlement "freeze" so that direct negotiations with the Palestinians could continue -- and that the anchor of its Middle East policy for 20 months had sunk. Not that failure, shipwreck, collapse appeared in any of the official Washington dispatches. "We have been pursuing a moratorium as a means to create conditions for a return to meaningful and sustained negotiations," said State Department spokesman PJ Crowley. But "after a considerable effort, we have concluded that this does not create a firm basis to work towards our shared goal of a framework agreement." The moratorium -- a 90-day limited freeze on settlement starts in the occupied West Bank -- had been sugarcoated with incentives (such as 20 free F-35 stealth bombers and a guaranteed US veto on "hostile" resolutions at the UN Security Council) for Israel's ultranationalist coalition government to swallow. Binyamin Netanyahu spat them out. He knew such gifts will come gratis given Washington's promises to protect Israel at the UN or preserve its "qualitative" military edge in the region. Even as he was negotiating the moratorium Congress was approving an increase in military aid to Israel from $2.75 billion in 2010 to $3 billion in 2011. What the Israeli prime minister was really looking for was a written US pledge that occupied East Jerusalem would be excluded from any freeze, in effect conferring an Israeli "right" to build there. Even for an administration as supine as Obama's this was an "incentive" too far. Instead, the moratorium idea was ditched amid unattributable briefings that Israel and the Palestinians were unlikely to resolve in 90 days final status issues they had been unable to resolve in 17 years. True, but no amount of spin can camouflage the scale of the American retreat. Barack Obama began his presidency accepting the Palestinian and Arab view that a complete settlement freeze throughout the occupied territories was necessary for any credible peace process to resume. Faced with pretty minor Israeli resistance, he accepted a partial moratorium in the West Bank while arm-twisting the Palestinians to go back to negotiations they knew were meaningless. Now -- while still not accepting the "legitimacy of continued settlement activity" on Palestinian land -- he has simply tossed back settlements as one more bilateral final status issue to be sorted out by the parties themselves. In less than two years his administration has swung from absolute opposition to absolute acceptance of settlements. Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official Yasser Abed Rabbo was aghast: "If they [the US] can't convince Israel or force it to stop settlement construction for a specified period of time, how will they make Israel accept a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders?" The short answer is they can't or won't. At a Washington conference on 9 December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her administration would be replacing its single-minded focus on a freeze (full or partial) with an even more hopeless policy: proximity talks so the two sides can talk to the Americans about the issues that divide them, something they have been doing for even longer than 17 years. She said nothing about her government's goal of reaching a framework agreement within a year. And she warned the Palestinian leadership not to take their case to international forums like the UN Security Council: an "alternative" to bilateral talks buoyed by the recent decisions of Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina to "recognise Palestine as a free and independent state" based on the 1967 armistice lines. "The US and international community cannot impose a solution," she said. "And even if we could, we would not, because it is only a negotiated agreement between the parties that will be sustainable... Unilateral efforts at the UN are not helpful and undermine trust." The West Bank Palestinian leadership met the US failure with anger, dismay and inaction. But there would be no Palestinian response to this "difficult crisis in peace process" until the PLO had consulted with Egypt, Jordan and the Arab League, said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on 7 December. It's easy to see why. If the crisis is humiliating for the US, it's downright impossible for Abbas and his Arab allies. In scrapping the freeze and opposing any attempt to take the conflict to the UN, the Americans have left them with no diplomatic, peaceful options. And resistance has never been part of Abbas's armoury. Instead, he will be left heading a West Bank PA obligated to provide unconditional security to Israeli settlers while offering only conditional economic security to a small part of its people. He will also have to bless indirect negotiations with an Israeli government, the core settler constituency of which has made colonisation, especially in East Jerusalem, the touchstone of support. Such a political reality cannot last. But the likely victim of any opposition will not be Israel or even the settlements but Abbas and those other Arab leaders who have given licence to a process that has long been void of substance. For the last two years the hope had been that Obama would spare them such a fate. But Obama has no policy other than capitulation when faced by the obduracy of Netanyahu's Israel -- and neither do they.
