BARACK OBAMA failed to achieve a hoped-for breakthrough aimed at the resumption of Middle East negotiations yesterday during a three-way meeting with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York.
The US president had only one success to show for months of effort: a handshake between Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who met for the first time since the Israeli leader was elected in February.
The two appeared reluctant to shake hands, smiling hesitantly and having to be coaxed by Mr Obama.
A final burst of White House activity over the preceding 24 hours failed to close the diplomatic gap between Mr Abbas and Mr Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister rebuffed a US call for a total freeze on Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Mr Abbas refused to resume negotiations without such a freeze.
Both blamed the other for the failure of the Washington peace initiative.
The US’s frustration showed when Mr Obama told reporters: “Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon. It is past time to talk about starting negotiations. It is time to move forward.”
The US negotiator, George Mitchell, who spent a fruitless week in the Middle East last week shuttling between the Israeli and Palestinian sides, is to return next week to the region for further talks.
The failure to have anything significant to announce yesterday was a setback for Mr Obama, who hoped for a diplomatic triumph after weeks on the defensive on domestic policy.
But it represented a success, at least in the short term, for Mr Netanyahu, who had been resisting US efforts for a settlement freeze.
It was also a setback for Mr Abbas, who had been reluctant even to attend the tripartite talks without a settlement freeze. Mr Abbas’s advisers made clear that the New York encounter was a meeting, no more, and an act of deference to a US president who aroused such high hopes. By attending, he opened himself to attack from opponents such as Hamas, who had already criticised him for taking part in a photo opportunity without receiving anything in return.
Speaking after yesterday’s talks, the Palestinian president said that if stalled peace talks were to resume, Israel must honour agreements on borders and Jerusalem which he said its government made in 2008 talks with the Palestinians. He also repeated Palestinian insistence that Israel halt settlement building in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.
Although Mr Obama emphasised he was in for the long haul, it was an inauspicious start, failing to secure even a confidence-building deal that would have opened the way for the resumption of negotiations. Mr Obama, speaking at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where he has set up temporary headquarters, said that since his administration took office in January there had been progress towards laying a foundation for the resumption of peace talks “but we still have much further to go”.
He called on the antagonists to show “the flexibility, common sense and compromise which is necessary to achieve our goals”.
The meagre results of the meeting made a gloomy comparison with the excitement generated by Mr Obama’s election and then his long-heralded speech in Cairo last June. Its messages to the Muslim world included his insistence that Israeli settlements must stop. – (Guardian service)