Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [147]
We opposed the war on Gaza but could do nothing to stop it. We demanded that Israel halt all military operations against Gaza and strongly protested to the Israelis that they should not target civilians. We also provided a channel for relief that was used to deliver most of the Arab, European, and international relief supplies. Hundreds of tons of humanitarian and medical supplies from Jordan and the rest of the world entered Gaza by way of Jordan. We also dispatched a military field hospital—still operating in Gaza—that treated over a thousand patients a day immediately after opening. As of October 2010, 340,000 Gazans have received medical care at the hospital.
On January 19, 2009, Arab heads of state gathered in Kuwait for what was intended to be an economic summit that would devise a response to the global financial crisis. But we could not ignore the continuing crisis in Gaza. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia voiced the concerns of many when he said, “The Arab Initiative will not remain on the table indefinitely.”
The emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, resisted the pressure from countries calling for the Arab Peace Initiative to be scrapped, and the final communiqué confined itself to calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, immediate Israeli withdrawal, and an investigation into possible war crimes committed by the Israeli army.
The next day, as Israeli troops at last withdrew from Gaza, around a million people gathered in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. President Obama honored his campaign promise, and his first calls the following morning were to the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority.
Typically, recent U.S. presidents have waited until the middle of their second term to take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with one eye on the present and the other on their historical legacy. But by engaging forcefully from day one, Obama seemed to be presenting the region with a rare opportunity to make progress on this most difficult and intractable of problems. We all had to wonder: Would leaders in the region be able to seize this chance?
Developments in Israeli politics were not encouraging. The optimistic spirit of Annapolis was long gone. The negotiations that had been launched at Annapolis in late 2007 ended in July 2008, when Olmert, following allegations of corruption, announced that he would not seek reelection as Kadima leader and that he would resign as prime minister after the party elected a successor. In September, his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, won the leadership of the Kadima Party. But Livni was unable to form a coalition. Olmert stayed on as prime minister in accordance with the law, which mandates that the incumbent remain in office until a new prime minister is sworn in. On February 10, 2009, Israelis went to the polls. Although Kadima won the most seats in the Knesset, Livni was again unable to form a coalition. So Israeli president Shimon Peres asked the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, to attempt to form a coalition government.
On March 16, Netanyahu signed a coalition agreement with Israel’s third largest party, Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home), a far-right nationalist party led by Avigdor Lieberman, who was offered the position of foreign minister. In a sign of the changing sentiments of the Israeli public, the historic Labor Party, home of my father’s old peace partner Yitzhak Rabin and of Ehud Barak,