Peace plan may not be derailed by latest hurdle

Never say never, when it comes to the prospect of peace in the Middle East. Yet even the most straw-clutching of optimists must wonder whether the Israelis and Palestinians will ever agree to live side by side in two secure and sovereign states. This week the Americans declared that the latest direct talks, stalled since September, would not resume.

It is a blow all around. For US President Barack Obama it is a bitter failure. When he came into office, he was hopeful that he could orchestrate a peace treaty before the end of his first term. For the Palestinians, the prospect of a real state now looks bleaker than ever. Among the Israelis the feeling is more mixed.

Hawks, perhaps a majority, think fortress Israel is pretty strong just now and that concessions are therefore unnecessary. Doves think the Jewish state will never be safe unless the Palestinians have the satisfaction of a state of their own. For outsiders, who have been striving for decades to put those twin states in place, there is no obvious plan B, no easy way out of the impasse.

Already voices in Israeli and American circles, especially Republican ones, are holding Obama primarily responsible for what has gone wrong.

It is widely argued that he was foolish, even reckless, to make the talks contingent on a freeze of building or expanding Jewish colonies on the West Bank, the heartland of any future Palestinian state. That is unfair. Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, were right to put down a marker.

Any peace deal will require the removal of colonies from a future Palestinian state. Each new building therefore makes it harder for that deal to be done. Besides, the colonies are plainly illegal under international law.

The Palestinians and Americans were right to insist that, as a minimal token of intent, Israel must stop expanding or building them if talks are to progress. By refusing to do so, the main blame for the impasse rests with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israelis — and especially the enigmatic Netanyahu — should think again. Some of his oldest detractors reckoned he might astonish everyone by switching from populist hawk to pragmatic dove.

Hawkish stance

In exchange for American fighter planes and diplomatic assurances, he seemed poised to stop the colony-building for at least another three months, risk the ire of the colonist camp and the collapse of his right-wing-cum-religious coalition, and bring in his rival, Tzipi Livni, from the more peace-minded centre.

But evidently his hawkish instincts, for the moment, have got the better of him. Israel, says the right, is under no immediate threat, except from Iran. The Palestinians are weak and divided.

However true that seems today, in the long run it is folly. If you look ahead, the doves are right: the sole guarantee of both Israel's security and its Jewish identity is the creation of a proper Palestinian homeland in a largely colony-free West Bank.

Obama must not give up. For a restart, he must once more seek an agreement to adjust the 1967 border, whether the two adversaries bargain directly with each other or not. That way, the bulk of those colonists will come within a redrawn map of Israel, whereas the Palestinians will get new territory through equal compensating swaps of land. And Obama should go to occupied Jerusalem and present his own blueprint.

Meanwhile, Israel should not count on his unconditional support for ever. The notion of a UN resolution to recognise a self-declared Palestinian state along the 1967 border is catching on, even in countries friendly to Israel. As things stand, America will block it.

Yet this week leaves Israel more isolated. Netanyahu's inflexibility over the colonies may have got him out of a political jam; it also militates against the peace that would guarantee the Jewish state's long-term survival.