Whatever Happened to Middle East Peace?

By all accounts, the picture emerging from the Holy Land over the past couple of months is quite bleak.

Peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians have been stalled for more than a year. Palestinian civilians are still reeling from Israel’s 2009 invasion of Gaza, facing a continuing military siege that prevents them from accessing even the most basic goods. Hamas remains powerful as ever, and rockets launched by Palestinian militant groups have once again begun to fall on southern Israel.

Despite the Obama administration’s attempt to broker a moratorium on Israeli settlement construction, new housing units continue to be erected. New reports suggest that the Israeli government is silencing dissidents, shutting down human rights organizations, and deporting humanitarian activists working in the occupied territories. Clashes have again broken out in Jerusalem and tensions are rising in cities across the West Bank. Observers are predicting that a Third Intifada may be looming. Hezbollah –- with an influx of steady Iranian support –- is now stronger than it was during the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war. Lebanon and Israel have once again begun to exchange barbs and threats of military action. And all the while, in the background lies the increasingly real possibility that Israel will launch a preemptive military strike on Iran in the coming months.

The onset of the Obama administration -– and the ousting of the neocons from power –- was supposed to usher in a new era of American foreign policy toward the Middle East, providing us all with a glimmer of hope that the U.S. would begin to once again play a constructive role in achieving a much-needed breakthrough in the Israel-Palestine conflict. More than one year since President Obama took office, however, the prospects for Middle East peace have perhaps never looked grimmer, and with further escalation lying on the horizon, the U.S. now risks becoming entirely marginalized in the conflict.

The recent controversy that has arisen from the Israeli government’s announcement of the construction of 1,600 additional housing units, in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem, during Vice President Biden’s visit to Jerusalem earlier this month has thrust relations between the United States and Israel into the media spotlight, leading many mainstream media pundits to suggest that the special relationship has reached an all-time low. Indeed, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, deemed the recent conflict a “crisis of historic proportions,” likening the spat to another tense historical moment in U.S.-Israeli relations, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger demanded in 1975 that Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin partially withdraw Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula.

In fact, this kind of language focusing upon the tension in the U.S.-Israeli relationship is self-serving for Israel and its supporters in the United States, deflecting attention away from the real crisis at hand: Israel’s continued illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric coming from Israel and its supporters in Congress. There is no real crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton confirmed as much during her recent address to the annual conference of the influential pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), when she pledged continued aid to the Israeli government and described America’s commitment to Israel as “rock-solid.”

If the U.S. wanted to send a serious message to the Netanyahu government, it would utilize the full extent of its economic and military leverage to extract concessions. Rather than declaring the relationship between the two countries as untouchable and unshakable, the Obama administration would apply real pressure on its ally -– by withholding loan payments, rolling back military aid, or recognizing the U.N. Goldstone report detailing Israel’s violations of international law in the 2009 Gaza War. Such action has not occurred, which suggests that the supposed crisis in relations between the countries will soon dissipate.

What will not fade away, however, is Israel’s ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For all practical purposes, a two-state solution to the conflict is moribund. Israel has engaged in such prolonged and systematic settlement growth since the June 1967 War that most scholars and Middle East experts now believe that there is no longer enough Palestinian territory remaining in the West Bank to create a single, unified Palestinian state. Cut-up by Jewish settlements, checkpoints, high-speed highways, and a soaring wall of separation, a Palestinian state centered in the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, has become a vision of the past.

Given that the Netanyahu government is filled with right-wing, ultra-nationalist politicians bent on retaining Jerusalem as the sole unified capital of the Jewish people, it would have taken a near-miracle for the Obama administration to have been able to extract significant Israeli peace concessions. But what little chance for a two-state solution may have existed seems to have now vanquished. Despite Obama’s laudable clear and unambiguous calls last year for a complete Israeli settlement freeze, the president largely stood by when the Netanyahu government erected new housing units in East Jerusalem over the course of this year. Netanyahu’s defiance –- recently telling the Israeli Parliament that construction of Jewish housing in Jerusalem was not a matter for negotiation –- has rendered extinct the possibility for serious or meaningful renewed negotiations between the two sides.

The Palestinians are most likely hoping that the latest spat between the U.S. and Israel will lead the Obama administration to place greater pressure on Netanyahu, but it is more likely that Obama will see this episode as reason to distance himself from further controversy, placate Israel’s supporters in Congress, and repair the country’s special relationship with Israel. This would be a grave misstep, squashing any lingering hopes for a two-state solution and even more, damaging U.S. interests across the region.

In recent months, Head of Central Command, General David Petreaus, has reportedly raised questions over America's still virtual unconditional support for Israel, suggesting that "Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [is] jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region ... and could cost American lives.” President Obama would be well-advised to listen the message of his high-ranking military adviser -- and not the calls of AIPAC or the vocal pro-Israel members of Congress -- before his larger agenda in the entire Middle East and AfPak region gets completely derailed.

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