On the surface, ongoing peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders seem to be promising. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met amicably at a summit hosted by Egypt on Tuesday. Wednesday, Netanyahu amiably played host to Abbas and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at his Jerusalem home. Appearances, though, can be deceiving. Despite the apparent cordiality, the major players in the Mideast are no closer today to resolving the issues that separate them than they were a month or a year ago.
The old problems – Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugee question, the borders of whatever Palestinian state might emerge from the talks and guarantees of Israeli security – remain. Discussing them, though, might be difficult given events elsewhere in the region on Wednesday.
Almost at the same time that Netanyahu, Abbas and Clinton were meeting in Jerusalem, Gaza militants hit Israel with eight mortar rounds and a rocket. There were no reported injuries, but the timing and severity of the attack – the highest daily total since March of 2009 – is hardly a coincidence. It is a signal that Hamas, the terrorist group that denies the right of Israel to exist and that opposes any Palestinian peace plan, will carry out its promise to escalate violence in order to subvert any discussion of peace.
Israel’s response was swift. Jets bombed smuggling tunnels on the Egypt-Gaza border. Hamas reported one dead and four injured. The tit-for-tat exchange is unlikely to derail talks. It certainly makes them more difficult, however, in an atmosphere already strained by concern about what will happen when a 10-month Israeli moratorium on new housing construction in the West Bank expires Sept. 30. The fate of the talks and the political power of all involved, in fact, could turn on the answer to that question.
Abbas says he will leave the talks if building resumes. Netanyahu, pressured by the Israeli right wing, now says he’ll end the moratorium but hopes to somehow limit the scope of construction. That is unlikely to mollify Palestinians or to sit well with the Obama administration, which has made Mideast peace a focal point of its foreign policy. Clearly, the settlement issue will have to be addressed before the two leaders can begin serious talks about a permanent peace.
The current meetings have produced little discernible movement. Not to worry. There’s still time for the first direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians since 2008 to prosper, even with sounds of rockets and bombs in the background. Indeed, the fact that Netanyahu and Abbas met at all should be counted as a triumph in the difficult world of Mideast diplomacy. Many knowledgeable observers predicted such an event would never take place.