Peter Beaumont reports that John Kerry and Mahmoud Abbas met for “urgent consultations” Wednesday night “amid fears the stalled Middle East peace talks are heading towards collapse”:
Kerry arrived in the Jordanian capital hours after an Arab League summit in Kuwait released a statement emphatically declaring that Arab leaders would never recognize Israel as a “Jewish state,” a key demand Netanyahu has made of Palestinians.
The meeting between Kerry and Abbas comes amid increasingly harsh rhetoric from both sides. On Tuesday Abbas accused Israel of a “criminal offensive” to step up settlement building in Jerusalem and the West Bank. In reply a senior Israeli official accused Abbas of trying to “torpedo the peace process” while parading “rejectionism as a virtue.”
Joshua Mitnick notes that “with uncertainty rising about the fate of the talks, some members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition are balking at following through on a politically controversial Israeli commitment to release 26 convicted Palestinian prisoners by Saturday”:
Israel’s media reported that Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew serving a life imprisonment of spying for Israel in the 1980s, might be freed by the U.S. to gain Israeli support for the release. The reports were denied by the U.S.
Aaron David Miller has compiled a list of “five ways to tell the Middle East peace process is in big trouble.” Number one: “Jonathan Pollard’s name comes up”:
This is a peace process perennial. And when it sprouts up, look out. In 1998, in an effort to reach an interim agreement between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister pushed what has become a standard request since 1985 – release Jonathan Pollard. From Israel’s point of view – and as illogical and objectionable as it may sound to an American – the imprisoned spy who was convicted for spying on the United States is like a soldier left on the battlefield. Israel is obligated to get him back. The presumption is that releasing him would afford this prime minister a political coup at home and make it easier to permit him to swallow some peace-related issue. At the 1998 Wye River summit, CIA Director George Tenet threatened to resign when President Bill Clinton seemed inclined to consider the request. Current CIA Director John Brennan may well have the same reaction. Nothing demonstrates how far afield we’ve come and how shaky this peace process is when you start mixing Pollard apples with peace process oranges. It’s a sure sign that the focus has shifted to the wrong set of issues driven by the wrong set of motives.
John Judis, who calls the peace process “nearly dead” and places most of the blame at Netanyahu’s feet, notes “there have also been signs that Kerry has either been losing interest or giving up hope in the negotiations”:
In his opening statement to a Senate Committee on March 13, he mentioned American foreign policy concerns with the Ukraine, South Sudan, the Maghreb, Central Asia, the Korean peninsula, and Zambia, but not with Israel and the Palestinians. At a Town Hall meeting with students at the State Department on March 18, Kerry described the situation in the Ukraine and then listed “other challenges that are very real.” He cited “Syria, the challenge of Iran’s nuclear weapon, of Afghanistan, South Central Asia, many parts of the world.” Conspicuously absent was Israel and Palestine.
If Kerry does withdraw and lets the talks collapse, or simply allows them to peter out after a grudging agreement to extend them without a meaningful framework agreement, the Israelis and Palestinians are very unlikely to resolve their differences. And that could set the stage for a real tragedy.
Daniel Levy looks for another way forward:
[T]he emphasis placed on American-sponsored bi-lateral negotiations may not have been such a good idea in the first place. Progress might be better served by having the Palestinians pursue their rights through international fora, civil disobedience and a focus on international law and Israeli violations thereof, even if America would pro forma oppose such initiatives. The accumulation of Palestinian leverage might then change Israel’s political calculus and even create new space for American-led peace efforts. Unsurprisingly such ideas are not to Israel or America’s liking, while Palestinian civil society and many in the political arena lose patience with their leadership for not adopting such a line.
But not everyone has lost hope. Jon Emont notes that in Israel, a business group called Breaking The Impasse is trying to pressure Netanyahu on a peace deal:
BTI has real clout. The Israeli economy is dominated by a relatively small number of tycoons. According to [Yarom Ariav, [Lavi Capital executive chairman and former Ministry of Finance general director,] the businesspeople who make up BTI control more than 30 percent of Israel’s GDP, when you add up their personal wealth, the companies they run, and the funds they oversee. This gives BTI’s members, including tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi and Meir Bran, the CEO of Google Israel, influence with Israel’s center-right leadership. It also means that the January advertising blitz was a test run for a potentially far larger public campaign.
(Photo: US Secretary of State John Kerry gestures as leaves the Jordanian city of Amman on March 27, 2014, en route to Rome. Kerry and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas held ‘constructive’ talks on the Middle East peace process, a US official said Thursday, as crunch decisions loom in the coming days. By Jacquelyn Martin/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 