Last weekend I was in Abu Dhabi, where I teach a class on U.S. foreign policy, and I was asked to do a Q&A on the Barack Obama administration's Middle East policy. Preparing myself, I knew what I wanted to say about Iran, and Iraq, and elections in Egypt. But I was flummoxed on the "peace process." The process had just ground to a halt with the administration's decision to abandon the mortifying effort to bribe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into adopting the very modest gesture of a 90-day freeze on settlements. I always try to challenge my audience's assumptions. But if my Emirati listeners felt that Israeli intransigence had driven the Palestinians to despair of the possibility of a two-state solution, I had nothing to say in response -- except that internal Palestinian divisions had made the problem worse.
It was a friendly audience -- this was Abu Dhabi, not Cairo. But afterward I was asked, "How can President Obama permit this? Can't he put pressure on the Israelis?" I thought: What's the right answer to this question? Is it: "He tried, but not hard enough, and then he gave up"? Or is it: "No, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, he's found that he has less leverage than he thought"?
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You can make a reasonable argument that Obama has done about as well as he could with the hand he was dealt in Iran, in Iraq, and even in Afghanistan (though this last case has become harder and harder to make). You can't make this argument in regard to the peace process, where the administration has in effect admitted defeat, giving up hope for promoting direct talks between the two sides in favor of "parallel" talks, with an American mediator shuttling back and forth between capitals. Although this will remove the impediment of a settlement freeze Israel declined to accept, it will require compromises on underlying issues which neither side seems prepared to make, and offers accordingly little prospect of success. At the same time, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Gen. David Petraeus have stated publicly that the ongoing failure of the peace process constitutes a threat to American national security. The despair the Palestinians now feel, and the anger among broader Arab publics, is very dangerous for the United States. Not only al Qaeda, but Hamas and Hezbollah feed on the anger in the Islamic world over the plight of the Palestinians.
The White House has a number of potential alternatives, which I'll come to in a moment; the problem is that the Palestinians don't. I asked Rami Khouri, a Palestinian-American intellectual who directs a public policy institute at the American University in Beirut, what he felt Palestinians could or should do at this point. "There's zero leverage on our side," he said. "If this completely fails, I think the likelihood is you're going to get intense pressure within Palestinian society for a reconfigured politics -- maybe a national unity government, maybe a reactivation of the PLO, maybe resistance through peaceful means or military means."
As yet, there are no signs of a return to violence in the West Bank, only scattered talk of civil disobedience. Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas fears that violence would discredit his own government and strengthen Hamas. As for the proposed "national unity" government, Khalil Shikaki, head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Social Science Research in Ramallah, told me that Abbas views reconciling with Hamas as tantamount to cohabitating with a wolf. "Fatah and Hamas perceive as each other as the most significant threat they confront," says Shakiki. But how long can Abbas and his government survive rising public anger and disillusionment? This, in fact, is the problem with Thomas Friedman's recent suggestion that the best way for the United States to advance the cause of peace at this moment of stalemate is to "just get out of the picture" and force both sides to contemplate the nightmare scenarios before them. For the Netanyahu administration, any nightmare scenario appears to lie in a future beyond the prime minister's own political horizon; the status quo is fine. But it is precisely this prospect which will increase the pressure for resistance inside the Palestinian territories.
Abbas doesn't want to be "reconfigured" out of power. He will probably continue to build the institutions of Palestinian statehood, which Washington has encouraged and Israel has tolerated. Perhaps the Obama administration can press Tel Aviv to advance that project with more cooperation on security issues: fewer checkpoints and greater ease of movement. But Abbas's goal is to execute an end-run on the failed peace process by gaining unilateral recognition for Palestine's statehood. Brazil and Argentina have recently granted such recognition, though the European Union has said that it would do so only when "appropriate." This does, indeed, sound like a real form of leverage, though the state for which Abbas will be seeking recognition will remain strictly hypothetical until Palestine and Israel can agree on its borders. The real goal would be to gradually "delegitimize" what the Palestinians view as Israel's illegal occupation of its territories.
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