Israelis fear that Clinton visit will be payback time
Saturday October 31 2009
When thousands of Israelis this weekend attend the annual ceremony to mark the assassination in 1995 of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who died attempting to make peace with the Palestinians, they will be shown a pre-recorded message from Barack Obama urging them to re-engage with the peace process.
At the same time they will be reminded of just how far relations between Israelis and Palestinians have deteriorated since those heady days in 1993, when Mr Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in front of a beaming Bill Clinton.
The collapse of the Oslo initiative, which was precipitated by Mr Rabin's untimely murder by a Jewish extremist, has led to a dramatic polarisation. Israel is now run by arguably the most right-wing government in its 61-year history and the Palestinians are turning in increasing numbers to the Islamist militancy of Hamas.
The deterioration in relations culminated in the military offensive Israel launched last January in Gaza in retaliation for Hamas firing rockets at Israeli towns close to the Gazan border. A recent UN report into this nasty little war found that both sides were guilty of war crimes; but this has only served to exacerbate tensions further, as Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, will discover when she flies to Tel Aviv today in a desperate attempt to rescue the peace process.
White House officials have hinted that Mr Obama had been seriously contemplating a visit of his own, such is his concern at the way the situation has unravelled.
After all, persuading the Israelis and Palestinians to agree a permanent peace deal is supposed to be one of the pillars of the Obama presidency: the policy featured prominently in his much-vaunted speech in Cairo in June, when he sought to end the "cycle of suspicion and discord" between America and the Muslim world.
Yet the prospects were deemed to be so unpromising that the White House decided to send Mrs Clinton instead, who, together with Senator George Mitchell, Washington's Middle East envoy, has the daunting task of trying to coax the two sides back to the negotiating table. The omens are not good, not least because relations between Mrs Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, could hardly be described as cordial.
Many in the US State Department have bitter memories of dealing with Mr Netanyahu when he served as prime minister in the 1990s. Senior officials, such as Dennis Ross who is heading the negotiations on Iran's nuclear programme, accuse Mr Netanyahu of wilfully obstructing Bill Clinton's attempts to negotiate a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, which eventually collapsed at Camp David.
For their part, the Israelis say they are being unfairly singled out, pointing to the uncompromising language Mr Obama used in Cairo to criticise Israel's continuing construction of settlements in the West Bank. "They picked on the settlement issue deliberately because they wanted to cause Israel maximum embarrassment," remarked a senior official. "But we don't see them putting the same pressure on the Arabs, which hardly makes us feel comfortable about the way Washington is restarting the peace process."
There is certainly a feeling within Israeli government circles that the many Clinton-era officials working for the former president's wife regard the current process as payback for Mr Netanyahu's past misdemeanours, an attitude that has served only to persuade him to dig his heels in even further. During his recent visit to London, Mr Netanyahu spent much of his time in private meetings justifying the need to increase construction to meet the needs of the expanding settler population. Israel's opposition to trading land for peace -- the basic formula that has underpinned all previous attempts to negotiate a deal -- has also hardened under Mr Netanyahu.
Yitzhak Rabin lost his life trying, as he used to say, to "give peace a chance". One fears that unless Mrs Clinton can find a way to break the impasse, many more lives are going to be lost. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Con Coughlin
Irish Independent
