Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [150]
Our private meeting ended not long after that and we joined our staff members for an expanded discussion. The meeting was followed by a press conference at which Obama said:
I am a strong supporter of a two-state solution.... What we want to do is to step back from the abyss; to say, as hard as it is, as difficult as it may be, the prospect of peace still exists—but it’s going to require some hard choices, it’s going to require resolution on the part of all the actors involved, and it’s going to require that we create some concrete steps that all parties can take that are evidence of that resolution. And the United States is going to deeply engage in this process to see if we can make progress.
I took heart and dared to hope that we would soon be back at the negotiating table in earnest. I said that the task at hand was to sequence events over the next two months in order to allow Israelis and Palestinians and Israelis and Arabs to sit around the table and move this process forward.
Next I headed to the State Department to meet with Secretary Clinton. We had first met many years before, under very different circumstances, and it was good to see an old friend while on official business. We talked about how to improve conditions for the Palestinians and how to create the necessary environment for a successful agreement. I said that I believed the Palestinian National Authority was a credible partner in the peace efforts and that we would work together with other Arab countries to shore up support for the government of Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, who had submitted his resignation to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to allow for the formation of a unity government with Hamas. But talks with Hamas were not getting anywhere. A few weeks after we returned from the United States, Abbas moved to form a cabinet without Hamas, and Fayyad was sworn in as prime minister on May 19. His government, which enjoyed the support of most Arab countries, would be a ready and able partner in the peace process. Fayyad is committed to peaceful negotiations as a means to solving the conflict with Israel on the basis of the two-state solution. In his first term as prime minister, which began in June 2007, after the Hamas takeover of Gaza, he won the respect of Arab and Western governments for building Palestinian institutions and ensuring good governance.
Although the region had suffered from a brutal war in Gaza in January, in many ways the prospects for peace were better than they had been in a decade. We had a new American president who had immediately begun to engage seriously with the peace process, and who intended to approach the Muslim world on the basis of mutual respect and shared interests. We had a supportive Palestinian leadership, which was ready to make sacrifices for peace. And we had the strong support of the wider Arab world, which had signaled its desire to normalize relations with Israel and fully integrate it into the region on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative.
The one wild card was the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In his previous tenure as prime minister, he had gained a reputation as an aggressive hard-liner, unwilling to compromise. As I headed back to Amman I wondered whether the previous decade had changed him. I would have to wait and see.
On May 14, Netanyahu flew to Amman. I was not particularly optimistic about the meeting, as our previous interactions had not been productive. We began with a tête-à-tête. Netanyahu seemed a little uncomfortable, perhaps also remembering our last encounter.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” I said, hoping to break the ice, “congratulations on your election.” He smiled noncommittally and I decided to dive right in. “I know that for you the life of every Israeli is sacred,” I said, “but I believe that the best way to protect your citizens is