Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Kerry’s Coup from Mediator to Antagonist
By Nicola Nasser*
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to start
his ninth trip of shuttle diplomacy between Palestinian and Israeli leaders on this
December 11. However, the bridging “security arrangements,”
which he proposed less than a week earlier on his last trip, have backfired and
are now snowballing into a major crisis with Palestinian negotiators who view
Kerry’s “ideas” as a coup turning the US top diplomat from a mediator into an
antagonist.
Kerry’s “ideas” had provoked a “real crisis” and “will drive Kerry's
efforts to an impasse and to total failure,” the secretary general of the
Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO), Yasser Abed Rabbo, said on this December 9.
Resumption of the peace talks and U.S. involvement in the negotiations with Israel
Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy during his current
trip seems more aimed at controlling the damage his “ideas - proposal” caused
than at facilitating the deadlocked Palestinian – Israeli bilateral talks.
On this December 6, Kerry said that
(160) American security specialists and diplomats, headed by General John Allen, the former
commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, had drafted the “proposal,”
believing “that we can contribute ideas that could help both Israelis and
Palestinians get to an agreement.”
According to leaks published by
mainstream Israeli media, including Israeli Channel 10 news, Haaretz,
Maariv, Yedioth Ahronoth and DEBKAfile, as well as by the
official Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, the U.S. “security arrangements” propose:
* Demilitarization of the future State of Palestine.
* U.S.
* To put the border crossings into Jordan
* Maintaining an Israeli military presence deployed along
the western side of Jordan River after the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
* Installing Israeli early
warning stations on the eastward slopes of the West Bank
highlands.
* Postponement
of arrangements for the final status of Gaza Strip, i.e. severing the strip
from the status planned by Kerry’s proposal for the West
Bank .
* All of
the foregoing are on the background of the U.S. recognition of an understanding
that the large Israeli illegal colonial settlements on the West Bank would be
annexed to Israel, according to the letter sent by former U.S. President George
W. Bush to the comatose former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon in April 2004, to
which the incumbent administration of President Barak Obama is still committed.
Kerry and
his administration have obviously coordinated a political coup by the adoption
of the Israeli preconditions for recognizing a Palestinian state almost to the
letter, turning the Palestinian priorities upside down and changing the terms
of reference for the Palestinian – Israeli negotiations, which Kerry succeeded
to resume and sponsor late last July.
When he
announced the resumption of talks on last July 29, Kerry declared that his goal
would be to help the Israelis and Palestinians to reach a “final status
agreement’” within nine months.
Now, President Barak Obama, speaking at Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum in Washington last
Saturday, says there would have to be a “transition process” and that
the Palestinians wouldn’t get “everything they want on day one” under an
accord, which initially may exclude Gaza, and let the “contiguous Palestinian state,” which he had
previously promised, wait. The aim of the negotiations now is to reach a “framework that
would not address every single detail,” he added.
And now Kerry, on the same occasion, was
speaking about a “basic framework” and establishing “guidelines” for
“subsequent negotiations” for a “full-on peace treaty,” i.e., in his game of
words, another “road map.”
Kerry moreover hinted that the negotiations
might have to extend beyond the agreed upon nine months, thus, from a
Palestinian perspective, planning to buy Israel more time to create more
colonial facts on the occupied Palestinian ground.
Kerry’s
“ideas” alienated the Palestinian “peace camp” and negotiators led by Fatah,
which rules the Palestinian Authority (PA) and leads the PLO, who have put “all
their eggs in the U.S. basket” for the past two decades, let alone all the
other PLO member factions who are against the resumption of the negotiations
with Israel for pragmatic reasons, but first of all because they did not trust
the U.S. mediator; Kerry has just vindicated their worst fears. Non-member
organizations like Hamas and al-Jihad oppose the negotiations as a matter of
principle.
On December 8, Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas, according to The Times of Israel three days later, met
with the American consul general in Jerusalem, Michael Ratney, and formally
rejected the proposal, saying that the Palestinian position was “unequivocal”: no
Israeli presence, though the Palestinians would tolerate a third-party military
presence.
On the same day on the occasion of the first 1987
Palestinian Intifada against the 1967 Israeli military occupation of the
Palestinian territories, the PLO Executive Committee in a statement said the
Palestinian people will not accept Kerry’s proposed plan, which the committee’s
secretary general Abed Rabbo described as “extremely vague” and “open-ended.”
On the same day in Qatar ,
the PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erakat, commenting on Kerry’s proposals, said
that the Palestinian leadership “perhaps” committed a “strategic mistake” by
agreeing to the resumption of negotiations with Israel
instead of seeking first the membership of international organizations to build
on the UN General Assembly’s recognition last year of Palestine
The former second in command in Erakat’s negotiating team,
Mohammad Shtayyeh who resigned his mission recently because
there was no “serious Israeli partner,” called for replacing the U.S.
sponsorship of the negotiations by an international one, on the lines of the
Geneva conferences for Iran and Syria, because the U.S. sponsorship is
“unbalanced.”
Former
negotiator Hassan Asfour wrote that kerry’s plan, which he described as a
“conspiracy,” would “liquidate the Palestine Question and end any hope for a
Palestinian state,” adding that its rejection is a “necessity and national
duty” because it “violates the red national lines.”
Member of the PLO executive committee and former
Palestinian chief negotiator, Ahmad Qurei’, said Kerry’s plan replaces the land
for peace formula by a security for peace one as the basis for Palestinian –
Israeli talks.
Abed Rabbo said last week in Ramallah that if the U.S.
accepts that final borders are set according to what Israel
Kerry who on his last eighth trip warned
Israelis of a Palestinian third Intifada seems himself laying the ground for
one. His “ideas” clash head to head with the Palestinian repeated and plain
rejection of long or short term interim or transitional arrangements based only
on Israel
He seems obsessed with Israel ’s security as “the top priority” for
Washington, both in nuclear talks with Iran Ben
Gurion International
Airport on December 6 he used the word
“security” and “secure” twenty times in relation with Israel
George Friedman of Stratfor on
December 3 reported that “Israel Iran
will develop a nuclear weapon,” Friedman wrote: “One of the reasons Israel has not attempted an air strike, and one
of the reasons the United States
has refused to consider it, is that Iran
Despite objections to Kerry’s “security
arrangements” by the Israeli defense and foreign cabinet ministers, Moshe Ya’alon and Avigdor
Lieberman, the chief Israeli negotiator and justice minister Tzipi Livni
admitted that the proposed American security framework addresses a large part
of Israel
Obsession with “Israel
More
likely Kerry is dictating to and pressuring the Palestinian presidency with the
only option “to take” his proposal or “leave it,” to be doomed either way, by
its own people or by the U.S.-led donors to the PA. With friends like Kerry,
Palestinian Abbas for sure needs no enemies.
Ironically,
Kerry’s “ideas” create a solid political ground for a Palestinian consensus
that would be an objective basis for ending the Palestinian divide and reviving
the national unity between the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip
as a prerequisite to be able to stand up to Kerry’s “coup.”
Such a
development however remains hostage to a decision by President Abbas who is still
swimming against the national tide because he has made peace making through
negotiations only the goal of his life and political career.
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit,
West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
