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Kerry Says It’s ‘Reality Check Time’ in Stalled Mideast Talks | Kerry Says It’s ‘Reality Check Time’ in Stalled Mideast Talks |
(about 2 hours later) | |
RABAT, Morocco — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday that the Obama administration planned to re-evaluate its approach to Middle East peacemaking and decide whether it was even worth continuing the effort in light of the inability of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to make progress. | |
“There are limits to the amount of time and effort that the United States can spend if the parties themselves are unwilling to take constructive steps in order to be able to move forward,” said Mr. Kerry, who added it was “reality check time.” | |
Forging a Palestinian and Israeli peace has been Mr. Kerry’s top diplomatic priority since he became secretary of state and one he has pursued in more than a dozen visits to the region. | |
The tumultuous events in Ukraine and the civil war in Syria forced themselves onto the agenda of an Obama administration, whose priorities have been at home. Iran’s nuclear program has been a major concern for several American administrations. | |
But Mr. Kerry, virtually single-handedly, has pushed the Middle East peace process toward the top of the administration’s foreign policy priorities, declaring at one point that his goal was to achieve a comprehensive peace accord within nine months. | |
The secretary’s goals have gradually receded as his Middle East team tried to coax the two sides to negotiate over issues that have bitterly divided them for decades. | |
After securing a full treaty seemed too daunting, Mr. Kerry’s team focused on securing a “framework” within their nine-month target date that would outline the main parameters of an agreement. | |
More recently, just persuading the two sides to extend the talks beyond April has been Mr. Kerry’s all-consuming mission. | |
Even then, Mr. Kerry has clung to his ultimate vision of completing a comprehensive accord that would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all. | |
Mr. Kerry, who left for Europe on March 23 to attend a nuclear security summit in The Hague with President Obama and has not been back to the United States since, interrupted his recent travels to rush to Amman and then Jerusalem to try to salvage the talks. But he encountered frustrating setbacks that suggested that neither side was prepared to yield to the United States’ entreaties. | |
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, did not inform Mr. Kerry of his Tuesday speech in which he announced that the Palestinian side would sign 15 international agreements and treaties — a move the Palestinians made in response to Israel’s reluctance to release, as promised, a fourth group of Palestinian prisoners. | |
Nor did Israel give Mr. Kerry advance warning before formally declaring on Thursday that the last batch of prisoners would not be set free. | |
As Mr. Kerry prepared to return to the United States on Friday, he acknowledged at a news conference here that the actions of both sides had been “unhelpful.” | |
Even so, some experts say, that Mr. Kerry is so committed to his Middle East initiative that is more likely that he will push for a change in diplomatic strategy, perhaps by tabling an American peace plan, instead of simply walking away from the Middle East talks. | |
“I think it is a tactic to get the parties to get him more involved,” said Robert M. Danin, a former American official who worked on Middle East issues. | |
“I find it surprising that Secretary Kerry, after driving this process so hard, did not play the one card he has left, and that is to put down an American plan or set of ideas for the agreement he has been seeking,” Mr. Danin added. “That suggests to me that he may be contemplating a pause but not abandonment of his peace efforts.” | |
An Israeli official with knowledge of the negotiations, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of Mr. Kerry’s ban on discussing them publicly, also said he did not believe that Washington would really withdraw from the process. | |
“I don’t think they’re going to take a back seat,” the official said. “For the time being I expect the U.S. will continue to be very much involved. They may draw some conclusions from what happened in terms of how their role should be played, but they will continue to play a very important role.” | |
Mr. Kerry, in fact, was careful to leave open the possibility that the Obama administration would elect a course correction, and not a pullback, from the Middle East peace talks. | |
“We are going to evaluate very carefully exactly where this is and where it might possibly go,” he said in response to a question. “We are going to evaluate what is possible and what is not possible.” | |
Still, Mr. Kerry is just one principal in policy deliberations that also involve the White House. And the heightened difficulties in the Middle East talks have increased at a time when 40,000 Russian troops are within striking distance of Ukraine, the peace talks over Syria have collapsed and it remains far from clear that Iran is prepared to go beyond the interim accord that freezes much of its nuclear program by agreeing to a stricter and more comprehensive agreement. | |
Nor was the mutual blame that Israeli and Palestinian officials engaged in on Friday encouraging. | |
“Every time there is a proposal on the table, whether Israeli or American or American-Israeli that obligates the Palestinians to make a decision, they disappear,” Tzachi Hanegbi, a member of Israel’s Parliament from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said on Israel radio. “They are, unfortunately, incapable of making a decision that entails an historic compromise.” | |
But Muhammed Shtayyeh, a senior aide to Mr. Abbas and former member of the negotiating team, said the crisis was caused by Israel’s insistence that the fourth batch of prisoners promised as part of the nine-month talks started last summer would be freed only if Palestinians agreed to extend negotiations for another nine months. | |
“What is happening now is that Netanyahu is trying to get us to pay five times for the same thing,” Mr. Shtayyeh said. | |
Defending his past emphasis on the Middle East, Mr. Kerry said on Friday that his counterparts have regularly raised their concerns over the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The months he has spent trying to encourage serious talks, Mr. Kerry insisted, were not wasted because the parties have narrowed their differences on some key issues. | |
But he also acknowledged that the United States was now facing an array of foreign policy challenges that were competing for the White House’s attention, ticking off Ukraine, Iran and Syria. | |
“We have an enormous amount on the plate,” he said. | “We have an enormous amount on the plate,” he said. |