U.S. can't make Mideast leaders want peace

The Obama administration needs to chill — and stop being so hard on itself when it comes to Arab-Israeli peace making.

No sooner has one approach to the peace process failed than the administration gets busy launching another. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week outlined one more new approach to broker an Israeli-Palestinian framework agreement — by tackling borders and security first. And the tenacious Amb. George Mitchell is now in the region promoting it.

Message to President Barack Obama: Yes, Arab-Israeli peace is important; and no, you don’t want to abandon the effort. But unless the Israelis and Palestinians own their negotiations and are ready for big tough decisions — right now they're not — there is little you can do to manufacture a breakthrough. And a lot you can do to make matters worse.

The administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian problem has so far been long on commitment and rhetoric — and short on results. From the beginning, the president’s tough talk raised expectations he could never meet. In the process, he convinced the international community, particularly the Arabs, that U.S. policy would be different — tougher and fairer when it came to pushing Israel.

It was not. The drive for a comprehensive freeze on settlements — a veritable mission impossible — zigged and zagged. In the end, it collapsed. The administration could never figure out whether it wanted to pander to the Israelis or punish them.

Neither course of action was appropriate — particularly the final offer of exchanging 20 F 35s for a 90-day freeze. In the end, the Palestinians and the Arabs were disappointed and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again got the best of the president. And after 20 months, the administration could claim no negotiations, no settlements freeze and no prospects of an early breakthrough.

The new approach — to focus on the core issues, particularly borders and security — is worth a shot. But it faces long odds. Both former Israeli prime ministers — Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert — offered Yasser Arafat and Mahmud Abbas up to 96 percent of the West Bank. Yet, there were no takers.

This Israeli prime minister is bound to offer a lot less. Nor will security arrangements be easy to negotiate under the shadow of Hamas and Hezbollah rockets.

With the Israeli government focused on Iran’s nuclear threat, no Israeli prime minister will deliver most of the West Bank (even in principle) to a Palestinian leader who can’t silence all of the guns and rockets of Palestine.

This is a sad state of affairs. But the administration shouldn’t beat itself up unnecessarily, or let others make it feel guilty or even primarily responsible for an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because we’re not.

Larry Summers has been cited as saying, “In the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rental car.” Why? Because you care only about what you own. Neither Netanyahu nor Abbas own this process now, or is prepared to make the tough decisions and concessions required to make it work.

Ownership is driven not by Washington’s entreaties; but usually by the prospect of gain or pain that is homegrown. No matter how bad the status quo appears to us, it’s a lot less scary to Abbas and Netanyahu than making bad decisions on Jerusalem, refugees and security in front of their constituents — and history itself.

In their neighborhood, politics is existential. And the ghost of the fallen peace makers, Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, hover ominously.

The lesson in this for our can-do president is not to abandon Arab-Israeli peace making; just be careful about how he manages it.

A faltering peace process is a terrible thing. But it’s still better than one that has completely collapsed — and convinces everyone that negotiations are an illusion and will never produce anything.

As long as the administration doesn’t overreach — as it did on the settlement issue — the current approach is right for now: Help Palestinians build a state from the bottom up and engage Israelis and Palestinians on all the core issues from the top down.

The challenge is to keep the process alive and believable. The president should avoid bridging proposals — let alone a U.S. plan — unless he is certain that the parties are close to an agreement, and that he is prepared to spend the political capital pushing Israel to bring it about.

Above all, the administration should avoid a premature moment of truth (Camp David, July 2000). Because right now, that moment is likely to be a nasty one — revealing just how far apart Israelis and Palestinians are.

It might also demonstrate just how feckless the U.S. has become in trying to bring them together.

Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations, is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.”