

Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with John Kerry as President Shimon Peres (right) sits beside them during Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, on April 8, 2013 (Photo: Reuters)

Secretary of State John Kerry is in Israel and Palestine now. Below are several responses to his efforts to restart the peace process. The first three are critical. I include J Street’s appeal, as well. The liberal Zionist organization is anxious and in earnest.

First (at the behest of IMEU), Diana Buttu, former adviser to the PLO, states that Kerry is officiating at the demise of the two-state solution and the rise of a movement for equal rights:

“Secretary Kerry seems poised to come and once again do nothing…. [U]nless he comes with a concrete demand to Israel that it cease and reverse its illegal colonial settlement project, backed with the threat of US and international sanctions, he will likely return in two years to find the two-state solution a distant memory, replaced by a new political paradigm based on the demand for equal rights within a single, binational state. In reality, Israel has already imposed a one-state solution, an apartheid state, in the territories it controls between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

Mouin Rabbani of Jadaliyya and Al-Shabaka describes the surreal aspect of Kerry’s efforts (also from IMEU):

Two decades after Oslo, Washington is struggling to get back to the point where this all started: bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under American auspices without a clear agenda or clear objective. That is sufficient knowledge to conclude that whether Kerry succeeds or fails is all but irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. In the best of circumstances, success in reviving Oslo will lead directly to its congenital failures, not the least of which are continued Israeli impunity and continued Israeli occupation.

Mitchell Plitnick at Lobelog has an excellent piece of analysis about Kerry’s folly. He says that Kerry has expressed messianic feelings about saving partition (didn’t Clinton, Mitchell, Bush, and Condi Rice feel that way too?) but the Israelis aren’t in on it, and a key element for any progress is missing: Obama’s willingness to take on AIPAC. No thanks!

Apart from a perhaps unpleasant conversation for its Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, Israel will face no consequences for once again embarrassing the United States. How do we know this? Well, despite these Israeli actions, the United States pushed the European Union into delaying a vote on labelling imports from Israeli settlements, distinguishing them from products made in Israel proper. Of course, the US is willing to do this in part because it feeds the illusion that there’s a peace process for Kerry to work on, one which would be hindered by an EU move of this sort. The middle of June has been set as an arbitrary deadline for Kerry’s efforts. Not coincidentally, Iran’s presidential election is scheduled for June 14. At that point, we can expect the Palestinian issue, already pushed aside by first, the Iran war talk, and more recently by the escalating Israeli involvement in Syria, to be completely shunted. Mid-June is also the point at which the EU is now scheduled to vote on labelling settlement products. This would seem to be a process of going through the motions for the Obama Administration. Obama himself subtly indicated to the Israeli public in his speech there that he was not going to stop them from committing national suicide if that was their chosen course. Meanwhile, he seems only too eager to please AIPAC and the rest of their lobbying cohorts. Meanwhile, his Secretary of State is becoming a laughingstock as a result. The Palestinians have been cynical about Kerry’s efforts from the beginning. Before this latest trip, one unnamed Palestinian “senior official” expressed his pessimism, saying that the Palestinian position of insisting that Israel release Palestinian prisoners and cease all settlement activity has not changed and neither has the Israeli position. Israel, for its part, continues to mouth platitudes about supporting Kerry’s efforts while acting to thwart them on the ground at every turn. But while the Israelis are making the right official statements, they are also sneering at Kerry. The Israeli journalist Barak Ravid sums up the view of Kerry, both in Israel and among more veteran diplomatic hands in the US: “A senior Israeli official who has met with Kerry several times said the secretary of state has a messianic enthusiasm for the Israeli-Palestinian issue and acts like someone who was sent to bring the redemption. A Western official familiar with Kerry’s activity agreed with this assessment. ‘Sometimes there’s a feeling that Kerry thinks the only reason his predecessors in the job didn’t bring about a peace agreement is that they weren’t John Kerry,’ he said.” This is not a negotiator who is inspiring confidence either at home or abroad. And he’s allowing Israel to make a fool of him. Even if this is, as one hopes, a strategy to move the United States out of the center of this conflict, which it is politically incapable of resolving, the cost is becoming very high. And while Israel laughs at Kerry, the only Israeli cabinet member who has shown any semblance of interest even in the failed Oslo process, Tzipi Livni, is isolated in that cabinet and fending off assaults from her left and right as she debates the governmental majority over whether Israel is even interested in a two-state solution… It’s easy, and certainly correct, to blame AIPAC for this state of affairs. But even AIPAC has its limits, and they cannot brazenly defy a second-term President who is determined to get something done. Bush the Elder did it. Bill Clinton did it at Wye River. Even Bush the Younger did it in 2003, when he reduced Israel’s loan guarantees after Israel refused to alter the route of its security fence according to US wishes. Somehow, Obama can’t find the same backbone. And ultimately, even if Kerry’s efforts were far more sensible than they are, without that level of presidential backing — a level that all of Obama’s predecessors reached, despite their own one-sided and destructively myopic support of Israeli excesses — there is no chance for success.

Meantime, J Street is desperate about the two state solution. Its leader has said that the window closes in 2013, and here it is urging its membership to pressure the Israeli government to commit to partition. The appeal, from Yael Patir of J Street, aligns the organization with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid