WHEN THE history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is written, September 21st, 2011, may be remembered as the day the United States lost its leadership over what was once known as the “Middle East peace process”.
US president Barack Obama went directly from the UN assembly hall to a meeting with the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The men have had a fraught relationship in the past but yesterday Mr Netanyahu praised the US president for “standing your ground, taking this position of principle”.
The US threat to veto the Palestinian application for UN membership was “a badge of honour”, Mr Netanyahu said.
Mr Obama devoted much of his third address to the General Assembly to attempting to explain why Palestinian statehood could not be recognised at the UN, why it had to be the result of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“I know particularly this week that for many in this hall, one issue stands as a test . . . for American foreign policy,” Mr Obama said.
“That is the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.”
The US president recalled his appeal for an independent Palestine a year ago.
“I believed then – and I believe now – that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own,” he said.
“But what I also said is that genuine peace can only be realised between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves . . . I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress. I assure you, so am I.”
Mr Obama repeated six times that “peace is hard”, twice that there was “no short cut” to a Palestinian state.
But for many in the assembly, 63 years since the first Arab-Israeli war, 44 years since Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 20 years since the first Bush administration tried to mediate peace between Israelis and Palestinians in Madrid did not feel like a “short cut”.
“We can no longer wait,” French president Nicolas Sarkozy said in a direct challenge to US ownership of the dead peace process. “The method used until now has failed. Let us change the method. Let’s stop believing that a single country or a small group of countries can resolve a problem of such complexity.”
Mr Sarkozy proposed setting deadlines of one month to resume negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, six months to reach agreement on borders and security, and a year before a permanent accord. In the meantime, he offered the Palestinians a donors’ conference in Paris and observer status at the UN.
The Palestinians would have to refrain from using their observer status to attack Israel in international bodies, Mr Sarkozy said. Israel would “abstain from gestures that prejudice the final status”, ie building more settlements.
Unlike the French president, Mr Obama had nothing concrete to propose.
“Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN – if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now,” he said.
He seemed to have forgotten that the idea of partitioning British mandate Palestine was enshrined in UN General Assembly resolution number 181 of 1947, which prepared the way for Israel’s declaration of independence.
Mr Obama even mentioned Ireland. “Ultimately, peace depends upon compromise among peoples who must live together long after our speeches are over, long after our votes have been counted,” he said. “That is the lesson of Northern Ireland.”
In Cairo in June 2009, Mr Obama spoke of “the daily humiliations” endured by Palestinians under occupation, of their “intolerable situation”.
Those remarks cost him dearly. This week, the US president has been pilloried by Republican presidential candidates for allowing the Palestinian resolution to reach the UN.
In the course of his speech, Mr Obama expressed his “bedrock beliefs” in “the rights of men and women” in South Sudan, the Ivory Coast, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain.
Mr Obama also focused on Israel, “surrounded by neighbours that have waged repeated wars against it”, Israeli citizens who have been “killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses”, on Iran threatening to wipe Israel off the map, and on “fresh memories of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they were”.
“By the end of Obama’s speech, you wondered who was occupying whom,” said a European diplomat at the UN.
Arabs were quick to denounce US hypocrisy in advocating self-determination for other Arabs while denying it to the Palestinians.
“We expected to hear that the freedom of the Palestinian people was key for the Arab Spring,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
“Freedom should cover the [whole] region.”
Mr Sarkozy made the same point. “The Arab peoples have magnificently and courageously expressed this aspiration to freedom and democracy,” he said.
“We cannot respond to it by perpetuating the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has lasted too long and which feeds so much suffering and rancour.”