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Version 6 Version 7
Kerry Says It’s ‘Reality Check Time’ in Stalled Mideast Talks U.S. to Reassess Status of Talks on Middle East
(about 7 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. RABAT, Morocco — With Israel and the Palestinians falling into a familiar cycle of tit-for-tat retribution, and a peace agreement more elusive than ever, Secretary of State John Kerry conceded on Friday that this week had been a “reality check” for the peace process.
“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.” But more than anything, it may be a reality check for Mr. Kerry himself. After eight months of diplomacy, more than a dozen trips to the region and endless late-night negotiating sessions with both sides, Mr. Kerry was forced to acknowledge that he may have hit a wall too high even for someone with his seemingly endless optimism and energy.
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. As he wrapped up perhaps the most grueling trip in his 14 months as secretary of state, Mr. Kerry told reporters he was flying home to Washington to meet with President Obama to reassess the peace negotiations and whether there was a path forward.
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. “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,” Mr. Kerry said during a visit to Morocco that had been postponed from last fall, when he rushed to Geneva to try to close a nuclear deal with Iran.
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. With this latest round of talks at risk of collapse, Mr. Kerry faces a setback familiar to many secretaries of state — the last dozen, to a greater or less degree, have tried and failed to broker a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians — but one that may sting even more, given the enormous personal investment he has poured into it.
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. There was an echo, in Mr. Kerry’s tone, of a frustrated outburst in 1990 by James A. Baker III, secretary of state under President George Bush, who read out the number for the White House switchboard at a congressional hearing and told the Israelis and Palestinians, “When you’re serious about peace, call us.”
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. Mr. Kerry is not about to give up on the process. But like Mr. Baker, he is dealing with two parties that are paralyzed by intransigence and fall back on provocations: Israel announcing new Jewish settlements and refusing to release Palestinian prisoners; the Palestinians, in response, applying to join international organizations and issuing a list of new demands.
More recently, just persuading the two sides to extend the talks beyond April has been Mr. Kerry’s all-consuming mission. Defying the failed efforts in Mr. Obama’s first term, Mr. Kerry has pushed the peace process toward the top of the administration’s list of second-term foreign policy priorities. Declaring at one point that his goal was to achieve a comprehensive peace accord within nine months, he pursued it with his own brand of personal diplomacy — and with a nothing-to-lose zeal characteristic of a defeated presidential candidate who views his current job as the pinnacle of his career.
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. But as he made clear on Friday, the peace process is just one issue on a crowded plate, from the Iran talks to Russia’s aggressive moves in Ukraine to the civil war in Syria — all of which are competing for the administration’s attention. On Saturday, Afghans go to the polls to elect a successor to President Hamid Karzai; in three weeks, Mr. Obama flies to Asia to try to revive his strategic shift to that region.
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. “We have a huge agenda,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that his commitment to the peace process was “not open-ended.”
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. Mr. Kerry’s hands-on approach, penchant for reworking his itinerary on the fly and legendary stamina have helped cement the accord to eliminate Syria’s chemical arsenal. But in the Middle East, Mr. Kerry has confronted a much tougher challenge.
Nor did Israel give Mr. Kerry advance warning before formally declaring on Thursday that the last batch of prisoners would not be set free. With officials and analysts in the region preparing post-mortems on his efforts — and some finding fault with how he brokered abortive talks on Israel’s promised release of Palestinian prisoners — the White House rushed to signal its support for Mr. Kerry.
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 “not helpful.” At a meeting with his national security team on Friday, Mr. Obama referred to reports suggesting that the White House had reservations about Mr. Kerry’s approach, according to an aide in the room.
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 see a lot of senior officials quoted about Kerry and Middle East peace,” the aide quoted Mr. Obama as saying, “but I’m the most senior official, and I have nothing but admiration for how John has handled this.”
“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. Until recently, the White House had largely left the peace process to Mr. Kerry. But last month, Mr. Obama met separately at the White House with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, to urge both to sign on to a framework that would guide negotiations toward a final agreement.
“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.” When that effort fell short, the White House authorized Mr. Kerry to offer the release of Jonathan J. Pollard, an American convicted in 1987 of spying for Israel, whose freedom Israel has long sought. As part of a quid pro quo, the talks would have been extended through 2015, and Israel would have gone ahead with the release of Palestinian prisoners and slowed down building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
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. Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peacemaker who is now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said the injection of Mr. Pollard into the negotiation complicated matters for Mr. Kerry.
“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. Miller said Mr. Kerry was also handicapped by his success in keeping a lid on leaks about the details of the talks over the last eight months. “The zone of silence masks significant, substantial advances on the substance, but he can’t talk about them,” Mr. Miller said.
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. Analysts in Israel, however, also said Mr. Kerry failed to dispel a perception on the part of Mr. Abbas that Israel’s release of 104 Palestinian prisoners would include Palestinian citizens of Israel. Mr. Netanyahu never agreed to that, saying it would require a separate cabinet decision because it raised sensitive questions of sovereignty.
“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.” “The seeds of this were sown at the very beginning,” an official involved in the talks said, on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Mr. Kerry. “The gap is, what did each side hear from Kerry?”
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. For all that, some experts said Mr. Kerry was so committed to his Middle East initiative that it was more likely he would push for a change in diplomatic strategy, perhaps by offering an American peace plan, instead of simply walking away from the negotiations.
Nor was the mutual blame that Israeli and Palestinian officials engaged in on Friday encouraging. Robert M. Danin, a former American official involved in the Middle East now at the Council on Foreign Relations, said such a plan would be the last card Mr. Kerry has to play. But given how hard he has pushed this process, Mr. Danin said, “That suggests to me that he may be contemplating a pause but not abandonment of his peace efforts.”
“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.” Mr. Kerry, in fact, was careful to leave open the possibility that the United States would seek a course correction, not a pullback. The months he spent nurturing serious talks, he insisted, were not wasted because the two sides had narrowed their differences on some key issues.
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. On Sunday, American diplomats plan to meet with both Israelis and Palestinians in the region. Even so, American officials said Mr. Kerry told the two sides on Friday that they must shoulder the responsibility of breaking this impasse. Over the coming days and weeks, they said, Mr. Kerry will discuss the prospects for a new approach with members of his team and the White House.
“What is happening now is that Netanyahu is trying to get us to pay five times for the same thing,” Mr. Shtayyeh said. Still, Mr. Kerry also noted that the United States was facing an array of foreign policy challenges that were preoccupying senior administration officials. And the White House made it clear that Mr. Obama’s patience for peacemaking was not boundless.
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. “Insofar as we find fault here, it is in the inability of either side to make tough decisions,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “For us to continue to invest that kind of bandwidth in the process, we’d need to see some investment from the parties.”
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.