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The Obama-Netanyahu Meeting and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking

[Washington Institute for Near East Policy] Robert Satloff - The new innovation the Obama administration seems ready to inject into Arab-Israeli peacemaking is the transformation of the Saudi-inspired Arab Peace Initiative (API) into an operational plan that could incentivize progress on the bilateral track. The relevance of such an approach will depend on whether the Arab contribution to peacemaking is connected to political realities. Today, in the jaded era of suicide bombers, Kassam rockets, and the Hamas coup in Gaza, Israelis are far more concerned with basic security matters than with peripheral political achievements. If Arab states can contribute on that front - by taking unprecedented action to cripple Hamas, strengthening the Palestinian Authority, and working with Israel to prevent smuggling of weapons, money, and technology to anti-peace elements - then a regional initiative has a real chance of bolstering peace prospects. The same is true of Arab states providing a diplomatic umbrella for Palestinians to make historic compromises on key issues of refugees and Jerusalem. A second key element of the Obama-Netanyahu exchange was, effectively, the resurrection of the Roadmap as a point of reference for progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations. Israel welcomes a return to the Roadmap because it offers a sequence of performance-based peacemaking steps. The elephant in the room was the absence of any common strategy for dealing with the division between Hamas-controlled Gaza and the PA-led West Bank. The structural impediment to peace is the persistence of Hamas rule in Gaza and the threat that Hamas poses to PA governance in the West Bank. Without a solution to this problem, diplomatic progress between Israel and the PA has no chance. The writer is executive director of The Washington Institute.
2009-05-22 06:00:00
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