Our Last Best Chance_ The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril - King Abdullah II [155]
Shortly before my trip to Washington, I attended an Arab League Summit meeting in Sirte, Libya. The summit reiterated its support for the Arab Peace Initiative, but with every passing day that sees no progress, pressure builds to abandon negotiations as a means to solve the conflict. Tensions in the region are running high on more than one front. Gaza continues to be a virtual prison, with its more than one and a half million people living in desperate conditions. Jerusalem is a tinderbox and Israel is playing with fire by trying to change its identity and empty it of its Christian and Muslim population through house demolitions and evictions, and by refusing to allow Arabs to build in the city. Further afield, on the Lebanese-Israeli front, we appear to be on the verge of witnessing another confrontation as Israel continues to occupy Lebanese territory in the south and Hezbollah develops its military capabilities. In the background of all of this is the crisis with Iran and its implications for regional security.
Proximity talks were officially launched in May after a number of visits by Mitchell to the region. Abbas went into the talks with the support of the Arab League, whose ministerial committee on the Arab Peace Initiative met on May 1 and said it would reconvene in four months to assess progress. The hope was that these talks would agree on terms of reference for direct final status negotiations.
We supported these talks, as they seemed to be the only alternative to complete disengagement, which would have been a dangerous blow to our decades-long efforts to achieve peace. The hope was that the talks would bring the two sides close enough for them to resume direct negotiations. And yet by July, no agreement had been reached on the terms of reference for direct negotiations. Jordan’s position was that failure was not an option, and we continued to work with all parties to ensure that progress was made to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
Senator Mitchell worked with the Palestinians and the Israelis to an agreement on conditions for the resumption of direct negotiations. His efforts hit a deadlock. The Palestinians wanted the proximity talks to address the borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, and other complex final status issues. Abbas presented Mitchell with fully developed position papers on all these issues. He told him that he wanted borders and security addressed first, because an agreement on the borders of the future Palestinian state would facilitate the resolution of the problem of settlements, while an agreement on security arrangements would tackle Israel’s top concern.
Netanyahu, however, would not engage in any substantive discussion on the issues. He continued to speak in general terms about his commitment to peace but would not put any ideas on the table. He held that such engagement would have to be made in direct negotiations.
The Palestinians and others in the region were growing more frustrated by the day with the failure to make progress. Hopes that the U.S. administration would salvage the situation by putting forward its own proposals to get the process moving vanished as Mitchell and other U.S. officials made it clear that Washington would not risk offering proposals that either party could reject out of hand.
As the September deadline for the end of the settlement moratorium loomed, in what many in the region saw as a major turnaround in the U.S. position, Washington stopped demanding a total freeze of settlement building as a requirement for the two sides to engage in direct negotiations. The Obama administration started to push for a resumption of direct talks even absent a settlement freeze, and to pressure Abbas to agree to the new terms. The Palestinians