Middle East: the peace bubble bursts

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/11/middle-east-the-peace-bubble-bursts

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John Kerry, the US secretary of state, has cause this week to reflect on the old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. His determined concentration on peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, his repeated trips to the Middle East, and many months of hard work by a small army of advisers, drafters and facilitators, have ended not in a bang but a whimper. Or, as Mr Kerry himself put it before the Senate foreign relations committee, in a "poof".

The "poof" moment was Israel's announcement of permits to build 700 new homes for settlers in East Jerusalem, a clearly provocative move given the Palestinian demand for a halt, or at least a pause, in settlement activity, and their insistence that East Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state. That had been preceded by Israel's failure to keep a promise to release Palestinian prisoners. Finally, the Palestinians retaliated by using one of their few diplomatic assets: they readied applications, with prospects of success, for membership in a number of international bodies, something the Israelis find deeply irritating.

Remember that Mr Kerry's most recent efforts have not been about protecting a peace process on the point of decisive breakthrough, but merely about prolonging talks that were already languishing. Although some contacts will continue, even that limited aim has proved beyond achievement. Mr Kerry's sincerity was patent and his perseverance extraordinary, but he seems to have made a mistake that has been made before in the Middle East. He assumed the parties actually wanted peace, a proposition true only in the sense that they want to get their way without encountering violent resistance. He tried to deal with what he deemed to be genuine Israeli anxieties by persuading the Palestinians to accept an Israeli security strip along the Jordan while agreeing officially that Israel is a Jewish state. The first would be hugely difficult for the Palestinians, particularly in the absence of concessions on borders, settlements and Jerusalem.

The second they saw as humiliating, because Yasser Arafat's recognition of Israel long ago implied such an acceptance. Why spell it out, compelling the public abandonment of even notional hopes on the return of refugees? The suspicion must be that Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, emphasised the recognition issue precisely because he knew it would be unacceptable to the Palestinians while seeming reasonable to many Jews abroad, particularly in the United States. Israel would thus escape blame, both for continued settlement activity and for the failure of Mr Kerry's initiative. Clever, but not smart.