Israeli television is reporting that Netanyahu is going out with a peace plan that refers to the ’67 borders, apparently in an effort to stem the Palestinian bid for statehood at the U.N. I’m told that the plan is much like a US plan given to the Quartet in July, which Daniel Levy described last week at Foreign Policy– yes referring to the ’67 lines but annulling them by asserting that settlements must be part of the future Israeli state. The draft also says that Israel is the state of the Jewish people. And honors Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the new Palestinian unity government!
Below are accounts of the news at AP and Reuters, and then Levy’s description of the U.S. draft plan.
In a speech about the Middle East in May [May 19], Obama proposed negotiations based on the pre-1967 line with agreed swaps of territory between Israel and a Palestinian state. Netanyahu reacted angrily, insisting that Israel would not withdraw from all of the West Bank, though that was not what Obama proposed.
Now Netanyahu is basically accepting that framework, according to Channel 2 TV, offering to trade Israeli territory on its side of the line for West Bank land where its main settlements are located.
The official [who confirmed the TV report to AP], who has been briefed on the talks, spoke on condition of anonymity because the contacts are still in progress. He said he would not deny the TV report, while refusing to confirm the specifics. He emphasized that Israel would not withdraw from all of the West Bank.
“We are willing in a framework of restarting the peace talks to accept a proposal that would contain elements that would be difficult for Israel and we would find very difficult to endorse,” he said, answering a question about the Obama proposal.
Part of the reason, he said, was that Israel is seeking to persuade the Palestinians to drop their initiative to win U.N. recognition of their state next month, something the Palestinians are doing out of frustration with stalled peace efforts.
Palestinian officials said they had not received such a proposal from Israel.
Israel has told Middle East power brokers it was ready to discuss a proposed package on borders with Palestinians to help Western powers revive stalled peace talks, an Israeli official said Monday.
The official denied reports by Israeli and other media outlets that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had backed down from an earlier rejection of President Barack Obama’s proposal to negotiate a pullback to so-called 1967 borders.
But he suggested Netanyahu had signaled a new readiness to aid last-ditch U.S. and European efforts to renew talks frozen since last year in anticipation of a Palestinian threat to seek a unilateral United Nations mandate for statehood in September.
The U.S. presented to its Quartet “partners” a suggested one page text that looked rather like an exercise in cherry picking Obama’s recent speeches by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office (given the recent traffic between Jerusalem and Washington and the end product it is reasonable to speculate that that is precisely what happened). The American pitch went something like the following: the proposed text is a reflection of the President’s speech, the Quartet had encouraged the President to give such a speech, the President had taken some political heat for the speech, the Quartet had even endorsed the speech (which it did in a May 20 statement), therefore the Quartet should now stand united behind the American draft, demonstrate to the Palestinians that they have no alternative but to accept the Quartet position, resume negotiations, and drop the U.N. idea. The text was quite clearly pre-cooked with the Israeli leadership, so no problem of acceptance from Israel.
Except that the U.S. text was not a faithful rendition of what the Quartet had endorsed — namely, the May 19 State Department speech of the president — but rather a hodgepodge of language from that speech, from the May 22 speech at the AIPAC conference, and of elements never before endorsed by the Quartet and even contradicting the existing positions of the EU and others. Hence the stalemate — and not altogether a shock given Jerusalem’s apparent co-authorship of the text.
So here are the details. To recap: President Obama’s May 19 speech spent 1,040 words addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama described the conflict, touched on Israeli and Palestinian aspirations, and made a case for a solution being more urgent than ever in the context of the Arab awakening. The President then made news when, in calling for a resumption of negotiations, he stated that “the basis of those negotiations is clear,” and then spent 170 words providing the parameters of a borders and security first approach to achieving two-states (his reference of the 1967 lines in particular drew attention). He closed out this part of the speech by saying “these principles provide a foundation for negotiations.” The U.S. draft proposal presented to the Quartet did include the President’s language from the May 19 speech, but it also included a whole lot more, all of it skewing, extremely uni-directionally, in Israel’s favor. To the simple May 19 border language of “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” the U.S. added the following from the May 22 speech:
“The parties themselves will negotiate a border between Israel and Palestine that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967, to take account of changes that have taken place over the last 44 years, including the new demographic realities on the ground and the needs of both sides.”
This is essentially America asking the Quartet to endorse illegal Israeli settlement activity that has taken place since 1967 (and in phrasing this as “the parties themselves will negotiate a border…” the U.S. is deviating from its own previous policy of not dictating to the parties). Compare that to the official position of the European Union: “The European Union will not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties.”
Remember, the Quartet issued a statement endorsing the president’s May 19 speech; it has never endorsed the May 22 speech.
The U.S. text also included language about Israel that was spoken on both May 19 and May 22 but was not part of the principles or foundations for negotiations set out on May 19 (and it is these principles that the Quartet endorsed). As follows:
“A lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland of the Jewish people.”
Again, this is terminology that neither the EU nor the Quartet has endorsed in the past.
