Israel Matzav: Michael Oren states the obvious

Michael Oren states the obvious

Jackson Diehl has a column in Monday's Washington Post in which he discusses the prospects for 'negotiations' between Israel and the 'Palestinians' in 2010. The consensus is that George Mitchell's claim that negotiations can be done in under two years is a fantasy.

The fundamental obstacles that tripped up Mitchell nevertheless remain. Netanyahu's vision of Palestinian statehood is a non-starter: It rules out shared sovereignty in Jerusalem, for example. Mahmoud Abbas, the weak and aging Palestinian leader in the West Bank, has already rejected a far more generous offer from Netanyahu's predecessor. Arab states, which spent last year waiting for Obama to crack down on Israel, have recently begun nudging Abbas to resume negotiations. But they still aren't willing to take political risks of their own.

Netanyahu's ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, told me that Israel doesn't like Mitchell's two-year timetable, which he said "is unrealistic and might prove counterproductive." "We know from our experience that state-making takes a long time," he said.

Mitchell's response to such objections is to recall his brokering of the 1998 Irish peace accord -- which, he pointed out to Rose, took him just under two years. "One thing I learned in Northern Ireland is, you don't take the first no as a final answer," he said.

Fair enough. But Mitchell has a way of brushing off the lessons his many predecessors acquired the hard way. For instance: Breakthroughs in the Middle East don't start with the United States but with the parties themselves. And: Big, ambitious attempts to settle the whole conflict in one set-piece negotiation not only fail but often are followed by violence -- such as the Palestinian uprising after Bill Clinton's Camp David summit, and the war in Gaza after George W. Bush's Annapolis process.

Another lesson Mitchell says he learned from the Irish is that "timing is everything in life. What constantly happens is when one side is ready, the other side is not." At the moment, the United States is ready in the Middle East -- something that hasn't always been true. But it's not clear that any of the other parties -- Palestinian, Israeli or Arab -- are. As Mitchell himself put it, "what we have to do is find the formula that gets them both ready at the same time on all these fronts." If he does that in two years, he'll prove me and most other Middle East watchers wrong.

If Abu Bluff thinks he's going to get a better offer than he got from Olmert, his fantasy is as far off as Mitchell's.

What could go wrong?

Israel Matzav: Michael Oren states the obvious