By Deng Yushan
As the United States is expected to unveil in the coming weeks its prescription for the ill-starred Middle East peace process, recent remarks and gestures made by Israel, the Palestinians and other regional parties suggest that hurdles are still numerous and tall ahead.
Following the visits to this region by a string of U.S. officials last week, including President Barack Obama's special envoy, George Mitchell, U.S. Department of State spokesman Philip Crowley told a news briefing earlier this week that Mitchell would likely finish the current phase of extensive consultations and present his peace plan in "a matter of weeks."
Back in Israel, defense minister on Tuesday also said in the parliament that "in the coming weeks, the Americans will complete their meetings with various parties in the region and formulate their position" and then will present a plan for regional peace.
Noting that the Obama administration has been testing water and gathering data in the region since taking office in January, Shlomo Brom, a senior researcher at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, said that the U.S. government now can analyze the situation on the ground and present its own approach, but the road ahead is still not easy.
The Obama administration invested a large portion of recent peace efforts in demanding Israel to totally freeze construction in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem and asking the Arab states to take "confidence-building measures" toward Israel in return, which might include conducting academic exchanges between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, allowing Israeli commercial planes to fly over Arab countries and opening trade offices.
However, both of the two sides have so far failed to meet the U. S. expectations.
After meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington on Monday, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh expressed reservations about the so-called "confidence-building measures" called for by the Obama administration and voiced doubt over their effectiveness.
He said that the past years have seen "an over-investment" by the parties in pursuing confidence-building measures and "an over- emphasis" on gestures, which came perhaps "at the expense of reaching the actual end game."
On Tuesday, Judeh clarified that Jordan strongly supports the Obama administration's peace efforts and is "committed to creating the right atmosphere." Yet he meanwhile stressed that the steps envisioned by the U.S. government must be carried out with the " end game" of final-status talks in sight.
The Jordanian foreign minister's remarks followed a more blunt statement by his Saudi counterpart Saud al-Faisal, who late last week said that "incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and will not achieve peace" and that "temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace."
On the Israeli side, the Jewish state has not yielded to U.S. pressure on the settlement question, although the thorny subject, one of the core issues impeding the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, has generated notable tensions between the two close allies.
On Thursday, Israeli daily Ha'aretz revealed that Mitchell last week asked Israel for a commitment to a one-year-long freeze on settlement construction, which he said would pave the way for Arab states to make compromises and confidence-building gestures toward Israel.
Israeli leaders did not reject the idea, but claimed that the Israeli side would only agree to a settlement construction freeze of six months at most, the newspaper quoted "a senior source" as saying.
Meanwhile, gaps still remain between Israel and the United States on the future of the 2,500 housing units already under construction in the settlements. While Israel wants to complete all of these homes, the U.S. government seeks to reduce the number to be completed as much as possible, said the report.
Settlement is a sensitive issue in Israel. Right-wing parties, which dominate the current government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, traditionally oppose concessions to the Palestinians and back construction in settlements, leaving Netanyahu with little room for maneuvering.
Amid mounting pressure from the international community, Netanyahu has pledged not to build new settlements, but insisted that he has to allow certain construction in existing ones to accommodate the normal life of the residents.
In light of the current intensive efforts by the United States, Israel's most import ally. Brom told Xinhua that he thinks Israel will finally agree to some kind of settlement construction freeze, but just for a short period of time.
With a similar viewpoint, Professor Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, a prominent expert in Middle East studies and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that should it be a total settlement construction freeze, Israel might agree to it for three months. Should the U.S. side ask for a longer one, then Israel would want it to be just a partial suspension.
Meanwhile, the two Israeli scholars also noted that how far Israel would go also depends on how the Palestinians and Arab states would respond, and that the responses Israel has been aware of so far are not very positive.
Some other analysts questioned the manner the Obama administration is handling the settlement issue. Douglas Bloomfield, a columnist with local daily the Jerusalem Post, wrote on Wednesday that before going public, Obama should have approached both Israeli and Arab leaders privately with a package deal, which could have made them all look like heroes.
"Instead he came out sounding more hard-line on the settlements than the Arabs, who adopted his call for a freeze as a minimum demand and anointed him their surrogate negotiator," he wrote, hinting that the U.S. position leads to tougher stances of Arab nations.
Echoing many in Israel, Bloomfield said that a big challenge facing Obama is that he has to regain the trust of the Israeli public and disabuse the Palestinians of the notion that he is their chief negotiator, while noting that Obama should have talked about the settlement issue directly to the Israeli people.
An apparent sign of Obama's lack of trust in Israel is an opinion poll conducted in June, which found just 6 percent of Israelis regarded him as "pro-Israel," while 88 percent saw his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, that way.
Even though the Obama administration could introduce his peace plan soon, it is unlikely that his prescription would at least blow away the pessimism hovering around the decades-old conflict. Given the internal struggle between Fatah and Hamas on the Palestinian side and the outstanding Iranian nuclear issue and many other factors, a solution is still elusive.
"In the Middle East, we need miracles. Without miracles, just forget it. I am not being pessimistic. I am just realistic," said Bar-Siman-Tov.
(Xinhua News Agency August 7, 2009)
