The tripartite summit Tuesday between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama is not likely to bring about a breakthrough or so much as a line for the final-status agreement. Both Israel and the PA have been emphasizing at every opportunity that the summit is not about negotiations, but merely a "preliminary meeting."
The subdued tone stems from extra caution on the part of both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaders. Netanyahu faces coalition pressures and concern, and Abbas is losing support by even appearing for the summit without securing his important precondition - a settlement freeze in all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The summit serves, first and foremost, to provide the Obama administration with a much sought photo-op: Three leaders shaking hands, seemingly getting back to negotiations. This would come against the backdrop of the White House's resounding failure to force Israel's agreement to a complete settlement freeze or to persuade Arab states to make even tentative steps toward normalization with Israel, so a picture of the three leaders together will look like an extraordinary achievement. It might even help Obama and his administration to get the stalled peace process moving, however slowly.
This is precisely the reason why the PA realized that although Abbas set the precondition of a complete settlement freeze, as the United States demanded, he must now, according to that demand, rescind his condition without getting anything in return. The talks Abbas held in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and in Jordan with King Abdullah II brought home to him just how desperately the Americans need this summit.
Still, it's hard not to wonder about the manner in which the American administration (and even more so Abbas himself) conducted itself over the past few weeks. Abbas stands to lose most from the summit. He stressed to the Palestinian public at every opportunity that there is little point to a tripartite summit before there's an agreement on a construction freeze, especially in East Jerusalem.
Senior PA officials (like top negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo, who spoke to Haaretz last week) said that going to the summit without a freeze in East Jerusalem was crossing a red line, a surrender to Israel likely to provoke "a third intifada, this time against the PA." Abed Rabbo went so far as to say there was no use in a "tea or coffee" meeting.
The hands of the American administration are not particularly clean. The State Department envoys assured the Palestinians that Washington was on their side this time, and was not going to yield to the Israelis. Only in the last few weeks did Abbas' people in the Muqata find out the White House was, in fact, very understanding of the Israeli demand not to freeze construction in the settlements altogether, and to leave Jerusalem out of the debate.
Abbas was apparently prepared to forgo his dignity rather than replace Netanyahu as the bad boy in the peace process. He understands that no political bounty is likely to come out of the meeting, and that he himself is undertaking a considerable risk.
The Palestinian leader has but two things to comfort him - that the summit falls on the Muslim holiday Eid el Fitr, when the reaction in the Arab media is likely be minimal, and that the tea or the coffee at the summit will be good enough to come all the way to Washington.
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