In recent months, veteran Middle East experts such as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley or Aaron David Miller have done a good job explaining why peace between Israelis and Palestinians is likely a long way off. But it seems that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, begs to differ: Haaretz reported that Abbas declared negotiations could be completed "within six months" if Israel halted all settlement construction.
This is clearly meant as a challenge to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been repeating for months that he is ready for serious negotiations. However, except for critics and opponents on the right, few seem willing to believe Netanyahu – though Haaretz readers were in for a big surprise last month when Aluf Benn, one the paper's senior columnists, declared that Netanyahu had convinced him that his desire to achieve a peace agreement was indeed sincere. Apparently, this turned out to be the most controversial column Benn has ever written.
In a subsequent article in early December, Benn argued that Netanyahu had never been a strong ideological supporter of the settlements, and that he had become convinced that Israel's long-term interest was best served by a two-state solution that would include serious security guarantees for Israel.
Benn's colleague Ari Shavit endorsed this analysis and argued that "Netanyahu has crossed the Rubicon, on both ideological and practical levels, and reinvented himself as a centrist", but Shavit complained that Abbas "isn't giving Netanyahu anything he can use to put the centrist worldview he has adopted into action".
If one accepts the view that Netanyahu has indeed moved to the centre, it's time to revisit the situation his predecessor Ehud Olmert was in last autumn when he presented his proposals for a Palestinian state – that would comprise all of Gaza and, through land swaps, the equivalent of the pre-1967 territory of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as capital and a guaranteed safe passage to Gaza. Olmert has given a fairly detailed account of his proposals in an interview during a recent visit to Australia and he suggested that the Palestinians should still be asked to respond to his proposals.
To some degree, Abbas has done this now by revealing some of the details of the negotiations. According to Abbas, the Palestinians offered 1.9% of land for swaps, while Israel wanted 6.5%; Abbas also confirmed that the negotiations included proposals for the division of Jerusalem, solutions for refugees and security arrangements, but he stressed that no final agreements were reached. It is noteworthy that Abbas described the gaps as "wide" in an interview with the Washington Post in May; now, however, he seems to believe these gaps could be bridged in six months of negotiations.
This timetable would of course require the Netanyahu government to simply pick up where Olmert left off – and this is hardly Netanyahu's intention. There is no good reason to reinvent the wheel, particularly since the conventional wisdom that the outlines of a solution are well known has been repeated so often in the wake of the negotiations in Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001. But Netanyahu's coalition would hardly hold together if it was clear that he continued negotiations on the basis of Olmert's offers.
A recent Haaretz report on a planned new initiative by the US, Egypt, and France to restart the negotiations early next year provides a glimpse of the wrangling behind the scenes, noting that Netanyahu and Abbas disagree "on the very definition of the negotiating process".
Netanyahu demands the process be defined as 'starting' negotiations, aiming to disregard understandings reached in talks between the Palestinians and his predecessor, Ehud Olmert. Abbas insists the process must take those understandings into consideration, and demands it be defined as a 'resumption' of negotiations.
While the Americans have reportedly come up with the obvious compromise formula by suggesting a "relaunching" of the negotiations, this rhetorical placebo can hardly distract from the fact that if negotiations got under way, the public on both sides would have a relatively clear picture of the proposals on the table. There is no doubt that on both sides, the opponents of an agreement resembling Olmert's offers would mobilise a vociferous and even violent opposition; by contrast, the proponents of peace would probably find it much harder to mobilise similar passions to cheer an agreement that would involve considerable uncertainties and risks and require the so often invoked "painful compromises".
Those willing to give peace a chance would be greatly helped if the Arab states gave up their convenient place on the sidelines and stepped forward to shoulder the responsibilities they have due to their role in opposing Israel's establishment. In his widely praised speech in Cairo, President Obama expressed his conviction "that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors".
One of the things supposedly often said behind closed doors in the Middle East is that the millions of Palestinians who have been told for decades to hold out for a "right of return" to the homes their parents or grandparents left in 1948 will have to make do with a "return" to a future Palestinian state or alternatives such as naturalisation in their current country of residence.
Another issue that is too often mentioned only behind closed doors is the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict resulted not only in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, but also in a roughly equal number of Jewish refugees who were forced to abandon their ancient communities in Arab countries. Indeed, when Obama spoke in Cairo, some Egyptian-born Jews hoped he would mention the fact that just like Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Arab countries suffered displacement and dispossession.
Agha and Malley are doubtlessly right to emphasise that a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians must address the problems created in 1948, but it is obvious that these problems can only be solved when all the parties that created them are ready to do their part.
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