An old hand on Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Nabil Fahmi shares with Dina Ezzat his concerns and meek expectations over fresh US-sponsored peace talks A bad combination of excessive tactical manoeuvring and shaky political will could blow up the chance to make Middle East peace out of talks to be launched later today in Washington between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel under supervision of US President Barack Obama and with the presence of President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. If these talks -- over which Nabil Fahmi, a senior Egyptian diplomat, hides no pessimism -- are to continue and if they are to produce a final settlement for the decades long Palestinian-Israeli struggle, Fahmi says, Obama needs to complement his moral commitment to the parameters of a fair peace deal with an action oriented approach. Arab negotiators need to show no willingness to bend when push comes to shove, and the Israeli government needs to accept that a final peace deal is only possible when the legitimate rights of Palestinians are secured. Above all, Fahmi adds, all parties concerned need to accept one of the most important lessons of years of Arab-Israeli negotiations: a deal is only possible through a comprehensive package that takes into account the interests of all parties. Fahmi was heavily involved in the Middle East peace process since its official launch in the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, at a time when Egypt was the only Arab state with a peace agreement with Israel. Beyond his last diplomatic post as Egypt's ambassador to Washington until late 2008, Fahmi -- now founding dean of the School of Public Policies at the American University in Cairo -- is keeping up his contacts with top figures of the peace process in and out of Egypt. Today, Fahmi feels that the region has come a long way beyond the days of Madrid when he arrived to the Spanish capital to set the grounds for the first multilateral Arab-Israeli peace talks. At the time, Fahmi had to negotiate a long list of issues, starting from the content of the talks to the seating of delegations and the nature of the participation of Palestinian delegates. "So much time has been spent on the peace process whose launch was first made possible by the results of the October 1973 War," that sent Israel a clear message that it cannot always have its way in the Middle East and that the Arabs will not give up on territories occupied in 1967. The talks to be launched this evening -- US East Coast Time -- should therefore reach a conclusive point, Fahmi argues, without wasting any further time on excessive tactics applied by the US broker or Israeli negotiators to cover up for a serious lack of political will required to make the final settlement, "for which the parameters are clear to everybody". This said, Fahmi does not underestimate the many challenges posed by the new round of talks. For him the "disturbed regional context" and the striking difference of the initial standing points of the concerned parties are clear and present threats to the talks. There is much tension, warns Fahmi. He explains: Israel has gone far right, the Palestinians are falling into divisions, "beyond the Fatah and Hamas division", and relations among regional players are far from smooth. "And there is hardly any common ground among the parties." "Arabs want a settlement on the basis of international legitimacy while Israel is saying plain and loud that it would not go for a settlement on the basis of the 1967 borders, it would not allow any Palestinian the right of return, and that it insists on the Jewish nature of Israel and that the future Palestinian state should be disarmed," Fahmi explains. As for the US, while Washington "seems to want to stick to the tenets of international legitimacy... and while the US secretary of state indicated a possible one-year timeframe for the new round of talks, it is still the case that the US administration does not seem prepared to move away from [an unfair] letter of guarantees" offered by former US president George W Bush to former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 that signalled Israel could keep major settlement blocs and deny the otherwise internationally recognised right of return for Palestinian refugees. With such a confused starting point, and notwithstanding the personal commitment of Obama and concerned Arab leaders to make the best out of realities on the ground, Fahmi finds it "very hard to be optimistic about how these talks will proceed or where they would lead to". Once the talks are launched, negotiating teams will meet and committees will be assembled. Come 26 September, the date for the expiry of a partial -- some say phoney -- freeze imposed on the construction of illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, the situation might be completely altered. The head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, had said that he would walk out on talks if Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu resumes settlement construction. For his part, Netanyahu said that he has made no promises, neither to Obama nor to Abbas, to extend a freeze that his ultra-rightwing coalition members are determined to end. "This will be a tough date," agrees Fahmi. It is unrealistic, he suggests, that Netanyahu who is going to these talks partially to ease tension with Obama would go into full confrontation with his coalition members. "Obama wanted these talks [ahead of mid-term congressional elections] to prove his determination to attend to Middle East issues in parallel with the pull out of US combat troops from Iraq and the complex situation in Afghanistan". By producing a context of peace negotiations Obama might be able to extract the commitment of Netanyahu to refrain from ramping up new settlement projects even if the ruling Israeli coalition declines to renew the freeze officially. "Some sort of compromise could be found, but this will remain to be seen," said Fahmi. The mode of negotiations itself could prove to be an issue, Fahmi notes, in the sense that the US is unlikely, due to decades-long commitments, to propose ideas to the negotiating teams away from prior consultation with Israel, which in turn is unlikely to agree to anything that aims to take the context of negotiations closer to the tenets of international legitimacy. Fahmi warns that Israel is working to get the US and the rest of the concerned parties to agree that any settlement has to be formulated according to the facts on the ground, and that if the facts on the ground are unlikely to be altered it becomes almost absurd to talk of a fair and comprehensive settlement. He adds, Israel will likely attempt to negotiate a provisional Palestinian state -- something that Fahmi believes no Arab leader is willing to settle for. Obama has to be more forcefully engaged, Arabs have to underline their positions as expressed in the Arab Peace Initiative, and Israel has to come to terms with the concepts of international legitimacy, says Fahmi. Otherwise, he adds, pessimism over the talks to be launched today might well be fully justified.
