MIDEAST: Peacemaking Goes Into Deep Coma

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Oct 10 2006 (IPS) - The Qatari foreign minister proposing a six-point plan for a Fatah-Hamas government of national unity, including a two-state solution to the Mideast conflict. The U.S. Secretary of State visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a bid to revive long-moribund peace talks. Leaks to the press regarding a meeting between Olmert and a “very senior” figure in the Saudi regime, just as the Saudis are said to be actively trying to renew peace talks in the region.

Sounds like diplomacy in the Middle East is in high gear. Fact is, peacemaking in the region has been in a deep coma for several years now and all the recent diplomatic shuttling has done nothing to resuscitate it.

With Abbas, who heads Fatah, locked in a bitter – and lately bloody – power struggle with Hamas, with Olmert struggling to survive in the wake of the military campaign he launched in Lebanon and which the Israeli public believes he mismanaged, and with the U.S. administration jittery about mid-term elections, it is hardly a propitious time for trying to get Israelis and Palestinians to gather again around the negotiating table.

When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Jerusalem and Ramallah last week, she expressed concern about the economic plight of the Palestinians, and a vague hope that it would “not be long” before Olmert and Abbas met. After her meeting with the Palestinian leader, she told reporters that the United States would “redouble efforts to improve the conditions for the Palestinian people.” She did not, however, outline specific steps that the administration was planning.

When she met Olmert, the agenda was dominated less by discussion on how to renew Israel-Palestinian talks and more by Israeli fears over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But Olmert is largely preoccupied these days with problems at home. With his popularity ratings consistently low in the wake of the war in Lebanon and with his senior coalition partner – the Labour Party – equally weakened, he has begun casting around for ways to strengthen the government.

Getting the 2007 budget passed – failure to do so would trigger early elections – now appears more pressing for Olmert than articulating a new diplomatic horizon. To this end, he has been flirting with Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party, which draws much of its support from Russian immigrants. If Lieberman joins the ruling coalition – one of his demands is that the government not evacuate unauthorized settlement outposts in the West Bank – it would represent a further blow to any future peace efforts.

In the wake of the conflict with Hizbullah in Lebanon, Olmert dropped his plan for a unilateral withdrawal from much of the West Bank, which had been his key promise to voters in elections earlier this year. In an interview on the eve of the Jewish New Year holiday, he said that a prime minister “does not have to wake up every morning with an agenda” – a comment that raised eyebrows abroad and earned him scorn from newspaper columnists at home.

Not that the Palestinians are in a peacemaking frame of mind. After talks between Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh over a unity government broke down last week, gun battles erupted between Fatah and the more radical Islamic movement in which 10 people were killed and dozens injured in the worst internal Palestinian violence in years. With the Palestinians embroiled in internecine violence, Rice could hardly have expected her visit to yield anything substantive.

For weeks, Abbas and Haniyeh have been holding talks on a unity government, which the Palestinians hope will convince western countries to lift crippling economic sanctions imposed on the Palestinian Authority after Hamas, which does not recognise Israel’s right to exist, formed a government earlier this year. The sanctions, along with Israel’s arrest of dozens of Hamas legislators in July after militants from the Islamic group kidnapped an Israeli soldier, have made it almost impossible for the Hamas-led government to function.

Anti-government protests by public sector workers who haven’t been paid their salaries for months have also become an almost daily occurrence in Gaza and the West Bank. The political impact of sanctions is also becoming apparent: a recent poll showed Fatah and Hamas with equal support among the public, after the Islamic movement thrashed the more moderate Fatah in parliamentary elections in January.

With western countries demanding that a unity government recognise Israel if sanctions are to be lifted, an agreement between Fatah and Hamas, which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state in its charter, has proven elusive. The latest effort at brokering a Palestinian unity government was launched Monday by Qatari foreign minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. The proposal is said to include acceptance of the two-state solution as the way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a move that would imply recognition of Israel.

Late Monday, al-Thani said Fatah and Hamas had yet to reach agreement on the principles of a unity government. The main sticking point – recognition of Israel.

An aide to Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo, was pessimistic, saying that agreement was not close on “the core issues”. He described the Qatari initiative as “the last political effort” to forge a unity government, adding that if it fails, “the alternative is an early election.” Last week, Abbas intimated he might use his presidential powers to spark early elections if unity talks failed.

With Palestinian and Israeli leaders consumed by their respective domestic woes, envoys arriving in the region with aspirations of rejuvenating peacemaking efforts are unlikely to find too many attentive clients.