Israel Matzav: Talks for the sake of talks aren't going to go anywhere

Talks for the sake of talks aren't going to go anywhere

Former Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams talks with the Council on Foreign Relations about the 'peace process.' Some of this is about Iran, but most of it is about Israel and the 'Palestinians.' The bottom line is that Obama, Mitchell and Clinton are going about this all wrong. Sure, they can force the parties to the table, but unless the parties both want to be there, nothing is going to happen.

Coming back to the Israeli-Palestinian situation, is anything really possible until Hamas and Fatah can get their act together?

Well, I would put it another way. There is a lot of pressure from the Saudis and some other Arab governments for Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. But the Israelis have made clear that they are not going to negotiate with a government that is half terrorist, a government that includes representatives of Hamas. So I don't think that Hamas-Fatah reconciliation would be good for negotiations. I would argue that negotiations progress only when there has been progress on the ground. Or to put it another way, diplomacy has got to reflect what is happening on the ground and not vice-versa. If the Israelis see the development of a representative system of government, a legal system, law and order, and a thriving economy in the West Bank, that is much more likely to make them willing to negotiate successfully for establishing a Palestinian state. That is what has to come first.

So you think that just trying to get talks going for the sake of talks is a mistake?

I do, and the example I would give you is Annapolis [where the United States in November 2007 launched a meeting with all Middle East nations to get peace talks started]. The United States can always get talks going if it tries hard enough. The question then is where do they go? And we saw in the case of Annapolis that they did not go anywhere. I suppose that if the administration concentrates almost exclusively on getting a negotiation going, it can get a negotiation going, but it isn't going to go very far. Both the Palestinians and Israel will ultimately decide that their relations with the United States are important enough to sit at the table together, but that's not a formula for successful negotiations; that's just a formula for keeping the United States off your back.

It does recall the efforts of the Carter administration to try to get a grand negotiation going, but it wasn't until Egypt's President Anwar Sadat took the initiative for direct Israeli-Egyptian talks that things got rolling.

That is an important point because the real impetus for those talks, which led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement in March 1979, didn't come from the United States, but from Sadat. It would suggest that when the parties are ready to have a successful negotiation, they will do it whether we like it or not. And our pressure on them, while it leads them to the table, does not lead them to successful negotiations if they're not ready.

And you think at the moment they're not ready?

That's right. I think that the Palestinians are not ready to go back to the table until there is a settlement freeze first; second, they are divided between Hamas-Gaza and Fatah-West Bank, and thirdly, one has to remember that Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which runs Fatah, are facing a generational leadership change. President Mahmoud Abbas, who is the head of the Fatah party, the head of the PLO, and the head of the Palestinian Authority, has announced that he is not going to run again. In fact this month, his term and the term of the legislature are, by anybody's definition, up. They will stay in office until an election can be held. But sooner or later, an election does have to be held, and if Abbas doesn't run again, there is no obvious candidate for replacing him. So they are in the middle of a kind of political crisis, and that is not a great moment for negotiations with the Israelis.

The difference here is that the odds of the 'Palestinians' actually wanting peace are much greater than the odds ever were for Sadat. But that's just fine because the mistake with Sadat was making peace with a leader and not with his people.

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Israel Matzav: Talks for the sake of talks aren't going to go anywhere