Obama team loses face
2009-11-03 07:21
Washington - The Obama administration must devise a fresh plan to restart Arab-Israeli peace talks after losing face with a backtracking on its demands for a full Jewish settlement freeze, analysts said on Monday.
President Barack Obama's team has disappointed many Palestinians and other Arabs who long for it to fulfill both its initial tough stance on settlements and a broader pledge to improve ties with the Muslim world, they said.
During a Middle East tour, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought on Monday to reassure Arabs after angering them with her weekend praise of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's offer to restrict settlements as "unprecedented".
The chief US diplomat insisted her administration still opposed settlements as strongly as before.
Disputing her claim is Aaron David Miller, who served as adviser on Middle East peacemaking in previous US administrations.
"Netanyahu has produced nothing short of a masterful performance. He's outmaneuvered us. He's ingratiated himself to the American Jewish community and the administration," Miller told AFP.
"He's put (Palestinian leader) Mahmoud Abbas on the defensive and he's said 'no' to the great power, without cost and without consequences," said the analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington.
Core issues
The "paradox", he argued, is that an administration which began with a tough policy toward the Israelis and a "sensitive" one toward the Palestinians has now shifted the onus to the Palestinians.
But he said the Obama administration has concluded that it must, at least for now, co-operate with rather than fight the Israelis on an issue like settlements.
The administration, he said, had hoped to revive negotiations on core issues such as the borders of a future Palestinian state by obtaining a total settlement freeze in return for steps by key Arab states to normalise ties with Israel.
Unlike settlements and normalisation, he said, borders, the status of the disputed holy city of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and security for Israel are the core issues.
"They (the Obama team) need to do some fundamental rethinking about what their overall objective is and how they are going to achieve it," Miller said.
Amjad Atallah, a former legal adviser to the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, said the US shift on settlements has only weakened Abbas further and made him more reluctant than ever to enter peace talks with Israel.
"They (Palestinians) argue that if the United States was not prepared to back up what it said on settlements, why would it be prepared to back up what it might say on borders?" Atallah told AFP.
'A business-as-usual negotiating strategy'
The members of the US administration, believing in their powers of "moral persuasion", were caught off guard, said the analyst with the New America Foundation.
"They thought once it got into permanent status negotiations, things would go relatively quickly. What they didn't count on was the Israeli government's instransigeance," he added.
Now that that has happened, "how do we go about re-establishing our street cred and what's our strategy going forward"? he asked.
The administration now needs, Atallah said, to devise a diplomatic strategy that matches the "high-minded principled recognition" that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a central threat to US national security interests.
Instead, the United States is pursuing "a business-as-usual negotiating strategy" that can only ultimately lead to a worsening situation and even violence, he warned.
Obama, in failing to deliver on settlements, seems to have reinforced the Arab narrative that the "Americans are all in the pockets of the Zionists", according to Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
"It's not going to be easy, but we need to find some way to change topic," Clawson told AFP when asked about how the US can revive talks.