Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, has dinner with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jerusalem
Since the Israel-Palestine peace talks finally collapsed, the two sides have been engaged in a blame game. Was it the fault of the Israelis, who failed to freeze settlement construction and reneged on a promise to release Palestinian prisoners? Or was it the Palestinians? They, too, broke an agreement to halt unilateral action when they applied for membership of 15 international conventions—signaling that they might attempt to seek international recognition of statehood as a way of side-stepping the talks—and then struck a surprise deal with Hamas, a group that does not recognise Israel, which would see a unity government leading Palestine.
Amid all the finger-pointing, relations continue to deteriorate. In an interview with The Independent over the weekend, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, said that if Israel continues to "undermine agreements... through continuous settlement activity, and lately though destroying the peace process, they are paving the way for the destruction of what remains of our relationship," threatening to freeze cooperation with Israeli security operations in the West Bank. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry appears to be hoping that talks may be resumed after a hiatus.
In surveys conducted during the talks, citizens on both sides of the Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank showed support for a two-state solution, and were willing, they said, to make certain compromises in order to achieve peace. But neither population was optimistic about the chance of success—after all, two decades of peace talks haven’t succeeded.
Part of the problem was that both leaders were beset by infighting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was grappling with hardliners within his coalition who made it difficult to agree significant concessions—Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, threatened to withdraw his party from the coalition if a proposal to release Arab Israeli prisoners went ahead, potentially leaving Netanyahu without a majority; while housing minister Uri Ariel, also of the Jewish Home, was accused of attempting to sabotage the talks in April when he unexpectedly announced a tender for 700 new Israelisettlement homes in East Jerusalem, an area that the Palestinians were hoping to claim as their capital under a two-state solution. There was never a unified front from Israel’s coalition government, formed of four different parties.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas faced struggles of his own. He is considered to be broadly popular in the West Bank but has overstayed his elected term of presidency by several years due to the 2007 Fatah-Hamas splitdisrupting elections. He had been under growing domestic pressure to take a hard stance in the negotiations, to resist concessions and to capitalise on the observer status that Palestine achieved at the UN in 2012, keeping unilateral options open.
When I spoke to a senior Israeli political journalist last week, he described the overriding feeling among the Israeli public as fatigue. They are tired, he said, and losing hope that talks can be successful. It is no longer a priority—according to the monthly Peace Index poll published on Wednesday, only 9 per cent of Israeli Jews now believe achieving peace should be the government’s top priority—and political concerns have been overtaken by socioeconomic issues, such as the country’s cripplingly high housing costs. Even Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Chief Negotiator who has been the primary mover in these talks, supported the decision to suspend them after the Fatah-Hamas deal. The sense is, he said, that the Palestinians were never truly committed to the talks.
The same accusation could be leveled at the Israelis, of course—Obama’s assessment was that “neither side had the political will to make tough decisions.” Interestingly, almost 40 per cent of Israeli Jews surveyed in the Peace Index poll agreed that both sides were equally at fault, although a majority supported the decision to freeze talks.
“Peace is a big dream,” said the Israeli journalist I spoke to, a prominent political reporter. “But if you can live your life securely [and it’s difficult to overemphasise how much of a concern security is for Israeli residents], even if you are on alert all the time—well, that’s how it’s going to be.” It’s easier for the status quo to continue, he suggested.
And this is the point. With the security situation under control, it is other issues—the high cost of living and rocketing house prices that drew hundreds of thousands of Israelis onto the streets to protest in 2011 and still haven’t been satisfactorily addressed—that affect daily life in Israel more than a peace deal with the Palestinians. Netanyahu can breathe a sigh of relief: the negotiations threw his coalition into turmoil as he tried to appease not onlycolleagues with conflicting views, but alsohis American friends and the Israeli public. Now that peace talks have been tried and failed—the deal with Hamas, defined as a terrorist organisation by both the US and Europe, provided a legitimate route out of the negotiations in the eyes of the international community—he’s off the hook.
In a speech on Friday, Martin Indyk, the US's Special Envoy to the talks, said that: "The parties... do not feel the pressing need to make the gut-wrenching compromises necessary to achieve peace. It is easier for the Palestinians to sign conventions and appeal to international bodies... It is easier for Israeli politicians to avoid tension in the governing coalition and for the Israeli people to maintain the current comfortable status quo."
If Kerry's hope is achieved and talks are resumed, it will not be because of domestic political will but because of increased international pressure on Israel, Martin Bunton, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Victoria, told me. "At present, Netanyahu himself seems more intent on focusing on domestic concerns, such as the economy and military service, or simply sees the status quo on the Palestinian front as sustainable," he said.
But trouble looms for Israel in the long term: if a two-state solution is not achieved through bilateral means, it will either be achieved through unilateral means (and Israel’s opportunity to negotiate on compromises will be lost) or it will never be achieved (and, with a growing Arab population, its identity as the Jewish state will be threatened). The status quo cannot continue forever.
