As I tried to make clear in my article in the new Discourse print issue, President Obama’s Middle East diplomacy is failing. He raised expectations before knowing he could get the sides to deliver anything substantive enough to meet those expectations. Significant on-the-ground developments have been masked by the various leaders squabbling over semantics.
It’s a relief to see, then, that Obama realizes he’s hit a wall:
The feeling in Jerusalem is that Washington believed that Netanyahu’s moratorium would move the process along a bit, and when the Palestinians failed to respond positively to the move, the US decided to sit back and see how things would play out.
Good. The answer isn’t to totally disengage from the process, but to recognize that negotiations are really unimportant at this stage of the game. Mahmoud Abbas’s political fate is uncertain, as is whether captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit will be returned as part of a prisoner swap with Hamas. Negotiations will have their time, but they’d be nothing more than photo-ops right now.
UPDATE: To give an example of the good things we can do in the meantime, check out the praise the revamped (with Western aid) PA police force is getting. Building Palestinian capacity in the West Bank doesn’t come under the banner of negotiations, but it’s still going to be very useful when the time for two states comes.
