It’s probably helpful to have someone like Dennis Ross in the room when discussing policy options towards the Israeli-Palestinian question. But he’s only helpful as a kind of canary in the coal mine, who will tell you what moves are going to evoke passionate howls of protest and come with significant political pain.
The truth is that the only way to get Netanyahu to back down and make real concessions is to make a credible threat to the status quo and show that you can withstand the blowback in Congress. Frankly, Netanyahu needs that kind of pressure to be able to sell tough decisions to his cabinet and to provide political cover with the Israeli citizenry. As long as Netanyahu can come to our country and lecture the president on history and flatly reject his framework for negotiations, he doesn’t have any cover back home to make moves towards peace.
Right now, there are two main obstacles to getting a peace process started. The disagreement about the 1967 borders is being framed around the “indefensibility’ of those borders. The idea is that the old borders invited attack. I think that argument is wholly without merit. What invited attack was the relative degree of parity between the Arab and Israeli armed forces. But, truthfully, as the CIA accurately predicted in 1967, the Arabs never had a chance against Israel. Their decision to amass armies against Israel was based on delusions of parity. All that has changed in the intervening time is that Israel has grown many times stronger relative to its Arab neighbors and now has a nuclear deterrent.
The second thing holding up peace talks is more reasonable. Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas, and Hamas has now formed a cautious alliance with Fatah. This one is a classic Catch-22. When Palestine was split with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, it was impossible to negotiate because what Fatah might agree to could be rejected by Hamas. The Palestinians needed to unify so that they could negotiate with one voice. But now that they can speak with one voice, Israel uses Hamas’s presence in the talks as a reason not to negotiate at all.
They have some justification in taking that stance, but I wish they would be more open-minded. Why not listen to what the Palestinians say rather than refusing to listen? The stance Netanyahu is taking basically precludes the possibility of negotiations.
As for the Palestinians, they would need Hamas to issue a recognition of Israel in fairly straight-forward terms for there to be any hope of moving past this impasse. The president made that clear in his speech.
