Obama and Kerry seem likely to bring Mideast peace

By J. Zel Lurie

DELRAY BEACH, Florida — A few weeks after President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, I predicted that a peace agreement  between Israel and the Palestinians would be signed before the end of Obama’s second term eight years later.

Some people thought that I was pessimistic. Obama had promised to appoint a special envoy who would devote all his time and talent to bringing the parties together and that it would not take eight years.

Some thought that I was optimistic, that the gap between the parties was too wide to be bridged by a special envoy, no matter how clever or
diplomatic he might be.

I based my prediction on two facts. One, the gap between that maximum that Israel was willing to give for peace and the minimum that the
Palestinians would accept was wider than the Red Sea, which the special envoy could not part. But if he could convince the parties that their
mutual security was at stake, he might find a way to bridge the wide gap. Second fact. The special envoy that Obama picked was George Mitchell, who had helped the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland end their long and bloody war.

Superficially, the two wars in Ireland and Palestine resembled each other. Both were based on religion. Both were fighting for the same piece of land. And both had fervent supporters in the United States who supplied arms and lobbying power in the media and in Congress. Previous administrations had never picked a special envoy to implement their policy in the Middle East.

The secret  of Sen. Mitchell’s success in North Ireland was persistence, a crucial factor that had been lacking in the State Department’s opposition to Jewish settlement in the West Bank. For years Sen. Mitchell persisted,  talking to each side while they killed each other, making small gains and finally finding a formula for peace.

The White House supported his every move in Northern Ireland.

Unfortunately that did not happen to him in the Middle East. Obama was too occupied in his first term to pay much attention. Obama’s main
objective in his first term was to get re-elected.

The second term started off with a bang. The new secretary of state, Sen. John Kerry, is devoting an extraordinary amount of time talking to
the leaders of Israel and Palestine in Jerusalem and Ramallah. He has also lobbied for the support of American Jewish organizations.
It is not too much to say that the Jewish establishment in Washington and major cities is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Jews
settling in the West Bank. Their lobbying efforts in support offset the desultory position of the administration’s policy of opposition to Jews
imvading the West Bank from the first Jewish settlement in  the 1970s.

American observers like myself note that there was never persistence in the State Department’s opposition to Jewish settlement.

In the last four months, Secretary Kerry visited the Middle East six times. Through his staff in Washington he played a vital tole in throwing out the Islamist president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi.  Morsi was democratically elected, but so was Adolf Hitler 89 years ago, Hitler used democracy to destroy it. Morsi would not be allowed to emulate him.

While the department was occupied with Egypt, the secretary was spending 15 hours in discussions with Netanyahu in Jerusalem and with
Abbas in Ramallah with little sleep in between.

Ostensibly the object is to get the parties to resume negotiations. Ostensibly that is true but the secretary recognizes that the complex issues that divide the parties will not yield to compromise at a table without guidelines arrived at beforehand with the aid of a mediator. On his fifth visit to Jerusalem at the end of June, Kerry took on the hardest nut and cracked it . Netanyahu had said time and again that there would be no peace unless Israel could keep a sovereign enclave along the Jordan river for its sensitive radar and missiles that protect Israel and Palestine from its enemies in the East.

Kerry talked and talked hour after hour. Finally the Israelis admitted that sovereignty was not that important. A long term lease would do.

Then he had to persuade Abbas to allow Israeli troops on Palestinian territory. Abbas wanted to include Jordan and that was the object of
Kerry’s sixth visit to the area as this is being written, Kerry’s persistence is bringing results. I am therefore reducing my prediction of peace by 2016 to 2015. I will be 102 when  peace prevails.

I am gong to Chautauqua for the month of August so this is my last column until the fall.

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Lurie is a freelance writer based in Delray Beach, Florida.  He may be contacted at jzel.lurie@sdjewishworld.com