The Mideast peace process has collapsed after a stark admission of failure by the Obama administration, abandoning its strategy for reaching a Mideast peace agreement, according to VOA.
Mahmoud Abbas
The Obama administration will no longer try to persuade Israel to renew the moratorium on building West Bank settlements. The previous moratorium ended on September 26, and the Obama administration has been applying enormous pressure to the Israelis to extend it. At one point, the administration offered to provide Israel with a squadron of fighter planes if only Israel would agree to a further 90-day moratorium. However, it’s been clear that Israel’s government would collapse if Prime Minister Benjaamin Netanyahu tried to impose a new moratorium under any circumstances.
The administration claims that it’s now going to try other approaches to reaching a peace treaty, but it’s hard to see where they’re going to go next after this complete failure.
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit says that the discussions should now shift to an “end game for a Palestinian settlement,” according to Haaretz. “The Americans have been informing all of us that their efforts did not succeed,” he said. “They wanted to reach a moratorium on settlement activities with Israel. That came to an end now.”
In recent months, the 75 year old Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly said that he would like to resign and retire. Abbas renewed that threat late last week, according to VOA.
Abbas has said that his retirement would have dramatic consequences, as it would cause the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority, with the result that either Israel or the United Nations would be forced to police the West Bank.
However, that claim appears to be in doubt in view of recent challenges to Abbas by the younger Mohamed Dahlan, a hardline member of Fatah’s Central Committee. Relations between Abbas and Dahlan have been deteriorating for some time, according to Ahram, and it would be expected that Dahlan would attempt to take over if Abbas resigned.
Abbas plans to meet with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Thursday, and then go to an emergency meeting of the Arab League next week, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The main purpose of these meetings will be to decide whether to ask the United Nations Security Council for an international mandate to create a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders of Israel.
This option has been gathering support in recent weeks, according to The National (UAE). Several Latin American states, including Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, have all recognized a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders.
It’s hard to know how far this proposal will go. It’s been pretty obvious for months that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis want any sort of “peace process” to go forward, but simply want to avoid being blamed for any failure. But this proposal for a unilateral declaration could take on a life of its own, just as worldwide condemnation of Israel took on a life of its own after the “Gaza flotilla incident” last spring.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, nothing has changed in the Mideast since I made my first major prediction on this subject in 2003. (See “Mideast Roadmap – Will it bring peace?”) The Arabs and the Jews will be re-fighting the bloody war that took place after the partitioning of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel — by United Nations mandate. Any unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders would create extremely tense stalemate that could lead quickly to war.
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