Obama Needs a Boost in his Personal Ratings
Is the PRIMARY Reason For the Tripartite Summit!
The Smiles, Handshakes, and Pictures PUSH Ratings,
But do NOTHING to advance the Middle East peace Plan!
September 22, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt from Haaretz
ANALYSIS / Tripartite summit or PR for Obama?
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent
September 21, 2009
The tripartite summit Tuesday between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama is not likely to bring about a breakthrough or so much as a line for the final-status agreement.
Both Israel and the PA have been emphasizing at every opportunity that the summit is not about negotiations, but merely a “preliminary meeting.”
The subdued tone stems from extra caution on the part of both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaders. Netanyahu faces coalition pressures and concern, and Abbas is losing support by even appearing for the summit without securing his important precondition – a settlement freeze in all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The summit serves, first and foremost, to provide the Obama administration with a much sought photo-op: Three leaders shaking hands, seemingly getting back to negotiations. This would come against the backdrop of the White House’s resounding failure to force Israel’s agreement to a complete settlement freeze or to persuade Arab states to make even tentative steps toward normalization with Israel, so a picture of the three leaders together will look like an extraordinary achievement. It might even help Obama and his administration to get the stalled peace process moving, however slowly.
This is precisely the reason why the PA realized that although Abbas set the precondition of a complete settlement freeze, as the United States demanded, he must now, according to that demand, rescind his condition without getting anything in return. The talks Abbas held in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and in Jordan with King Abdullah II brought home to him just how desperately the Americans need this summit.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder about the manner in which the American administration (and even more so Abbas himself) conducted itself over the past few weeks.
Abbas stands to lose most from the summit. He stressed to the Palestinian public at every opportunity that there is little point to a tripartite summit before there’ s an agreement on a con
struction freeze, especially in East Jerusalem.
Senior PA officials (like top negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo, who spoke to Haaretz last week) said that going to the summit without a freeze in East Jerusalem was crossing a red line, a surrender to Israel likely to provoke “a third intifada, this time against the PA.” Abed Rabbo went so far as to say there was no use in a “tea or coffee” meeting.
The hands of the American administration are not particularly clean.
The State Department envoys assured the Palestinians that Washing ton was on their side this time, and was not going
to yield to the Israelis. Only in the last few weeks did Abbas’ people in the Muqata find out the White House was, in fact, very understanding of the Israeli demand not to freeze construction in the settlements altogether, and to leave Jerusalem out of the debate.
Abbas was apparently prepared to forgo his dignity rather than replace Netanyahu as the bad boy in the peace process. He understands that no political bounty is likely to come out of t he meeting, and that
he himself is undertaking a considerable risk.
The Palestinian leader has but two things to comfort him – that the summit falls on the Muslim holiday Eid el Fitr, when the reaction in the Arab media is likely be minimal, and that the tea or the coffee at the summit will be good enough to come all the way to Washington.
Begin Four Paragraph Excerpt from Haaretz
Akiva Eldar / A summit can be a very dangerous thing
By Akiva Eldar , Haaretz Correspondent
September 21, 2009
The all-too-long history of the “peace process” has taught us that a summit can be a desirable goal, but also a place of unsurpassable danger.
When participants come with insufficient preparation, and without a safety net, the depth of the fall can be as high as the summit itself.
There is a great difference between a fruitless round of shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the part of a presidential envoy and a failed summit called by U.S. President Barack Obama with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
In the 16 years since the Oslo Accords were signed at the White House, Israelis and Palestinians have witnessed countless summits, peace conferences, negotiations and understandings and even innumerable agreements. All ended in disappointment or, at worst, in yet another wave of violence.
It can be hoped that the Americans have learned, from the bitter experience of Camp David in 2000, that a tripartite summit is not just another media event, like a speech in Cairo or a New Year’s greeting. A meeting of the U.S. president with the leaders of
the parties is the Judgment Day weapon of the diplomatic world. The term peace process has already been placed in quotation marks and absorbed heavy doses of cynicism.
Who remembers what Obama said in Cairo this spring, or the declarations made in Annapolis in November 2007
? Both parties have since lost their remaining faith in a negotiated solution. If Tuesday’s summit, too, ends with nothing but a handshake for the cameras, what will they have to look forward to?
The New York summit can move things forward or bring them crashing down; staying in place is not an option.
Netanyahu and Abbas are not the only players on the field; every failure on the part of the pragmatic Palestinian camp is a victory for the extremist Palestinian camp. Abbas has bet his credibility on the Americans and their ability to influence their Israeli friends. If Obama sends him away empty-handed it will play into the hands of Abbas’ big rivals in Gaza and Damascus. Hamas will not miss such an opportunity to present the summit as yet more proof of its claim, since the Oslo Accords, that support for Fatah is flimsy.
How much longer will Abbas’ police officers put up with being painted as collaborators with the occupation?
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