It was a good example for bad timing: just shortly before the news broke that President Obama had been awarded the Nobel peace prize, Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, made headlines when he declared in an interview on Israeli radio that in his coming meeting with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell, he would explain that "there was no chance of reaching a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians for many years". Lieberman will probably be suspected by many of doing his best to make sure he is proven right – after all, he never had the reputation of a peacemonger. From his very first day in office, news reports depicted the Israeli foreign minister as a "rightwinger" who "favours aggression rather than concessions to the Palestinians".
While Lieberman's debut speech as foreign minister in April was hardly diplomatic, it didn't justify the conclusion that he has no interest in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To be sure, Lieberman was dismissive of the Annapolis process that failed to produce any agreements after a year of intensive negotiations, but many pundits had been dismissive of these talks even before they started and Lieberman only confirmed this negative assessment. Similarly, Lieberman is by no means the only one who doubts that a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement can be achieved any time soon, and I have pointed out previously that his pessimistic assessment of the prospects for peace is not that much different from the one offered by the highly regarded Middle East experts Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in an analysis published in June.
But even if the case for a long-term conflict management strategy cannot be dismissed as a partisan rightwing cause championed only by politicians like Lieberman and Netanyahu, it is clear that this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Obama has little sympathy for the "no peace now" camp – though he has so far made little headway against its formidable forces. If Obama had time to read the newspapers and surf the web, he would see that he got lots and lots of free advice about what went wrong and what he should do differently. The widespread sense that a different approach is urgently needed is illustrated by the fact that even Israel's left-leaning daily Ha'aretz recently published a sharply critical assessment of Obama's record as an aspiring Middle East peacemaker.
Among the failures highlighted in this article by Aluf Benn is the lack of popular support for Obama's efforts among Israelis:
Obama has not succeeded in enlisting even one supporter in Israel's public arena or political establishment, who will stand up to Netanyahu and call upon him to accept the president's initiative and gallop toward a "two-state solution.
The Israelis don't think establishment of a state headed by Abbas will improve their situation in any way. The hard-core ideological left is fighting the Israel Defence Forces in the name of pacifism, and striving for a binational state in the name of equality and liberalism. The right is striving for a binational state in the name of the Greater Land of Israel, fulfilment of the Bible's promises and the security afforded by dominating the hilltops.
The Israeli political centre ... in effect accepts the assessment of Netanyahu and foreign minister Lieberman that a solution to the problem is not possible, that the Arabs will never recognise a Jewish state and that Israel's only strategic option is deterrence backed by the use of force.
Benn also argues that there is a similar lack of enthusiasm and support for Obama on the Palestinian side. Based on a recent survey conducted by the International Peace Institute (IPI), Benn points out "that 70% of Palestinians do not support the US president, and 56% do not expect Obama to achieve progress in the establishment of an independent Palestinian state."
What Benn doesn't mention is that some of the other results of this survey actually undermine the view that Obama's efforts to push for a breakthrough are doomed to fail because of a persistent ambivalence toward a negotiated two-state solution on the Palestinian side. It was only in June that Agha and Malley argued:
Today, the idea of Palestinian statehood is alive, but mainly outside of Palestine. Establishing a state has become a matter of utmost priority for Europeans, who see it as crucial to stabilising the region and curbing the growth of extremism; for Americans, who hail it as a centrepiece in efforts to contain Iran as well as radical Islamists and to forge a coalition between so-called moderate Arab states and Israel; and even for a large number of Israelis who have come to believe it is the sole effective answer to the threat to Israel's existence posed by Arab demographics. Those might all be good reasons, though none is of particular relevance to Palestinians; and each only further alienates them from the vision of statehood, the purported object of their struggle.
While this assessment was doubtlessly based on solid evidence, the results of the recent IPI survey indicate a change in Palestinian attitudes:
The poll shows that Palestinian views have shifted considerably since 2000 when polling after Camp David showed that the Palestinian street also opposed the peace proposals that its leaders had refused to accept. Now, the Palestinian public has shifted from rejection to acceptance of the overall package and of provisions for Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian demilitarisation, and mutual recognition.
These results obviously raise the question if Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas made the right decision when he turned down Ehud Olmert's proposals during the Annapolis talks.
Likewise, it was apparently misguided to put so much emphasis on a freeze in settlement construction, since the survey shows that among several proposed confidence-building measures, a settlement freeze ranked among the lowest priorities.
It remains to be seen if the trends visible in this survey will survive the current tensions about the Goldstone report and other setbacks that are sure to occur, but taken together with Fayyad's ambitious two-year plan for Palestinian statehood, the results of this survey bode well for Obama's quest for Middle East peace.
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