Kerry’s Israeli speech — back to the past

If you lived in the Middle East in 2013, when John Kerry succeeded in bringing the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table, you knew the talks were going to go nowhere. All you had to do was to talk to an Israeli Jew in Jerusalem, or a Palestinian in Ramallah or Gaza, and you knew the jig was up before negotiators had even taken their seats at the table.

And of course, the talks did collapse. Now, some three years later, in the final days of the Obama administration, Kerry once again leaps into the valley of futility. Earlier this week, he outlined a set of principles the United States believes should serve as guidelines for negotiations. The reaction? Uproar in Israel; smug gloating in the Palestinian Authority.

So, what’s the uproar about? Is there something breathtakingly innovative about the principles Kerry espoused? A game-changing set of proposals perhaps?

Unfortunately, there isn’t. Not even a glimmer of something new, except for saying that Jerusalem should be the international capital of the two states.

Otherwise, the guidelines Kerry laid out are the same issues that are at the core of the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called on Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied during the Six Day war and established the parameters for negotiating a Palestinian/Israeli settlement. These issues were negotiated ad nauseam and to no avail at Camp David in 2000, Annapolis in 2007, and the Kerry-initiated talks in 2013 and 2014. For decades they have embodied the West’s wish list for a solution, and, no matter how circumstances change, the same wishful thinking precludes the acknowledgment of what is obvious: The two-state solution along the lines of the ’67 borders is dead. For over a decade we have been listening to ominous warnings that it was “almost” dead. There comes a point where one can delete the “almost” and call the funeral director. It’s time to make the call.

The Kerry principles negate the Palestinians’ Right of Return, incorporated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, in 1948, near the end of Arab-Israeli War that created the Palestinian refugee exodus, called the Nakba. The Kerry principles call for Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, something Palestinians cannot do without invalidating the Nakba and disavowing their historical narrative. Meanwhile, the non-Jewish population of Israel is 25 percent; in 2030 it will be 30 percent and increasing. Are these citizens, almost all of whom are Palestinian-Israelis, supposed to call themselves citizens of a Jewish state? Is this to be the source of their identity? In 2059, more than 50 percent of the population will be either Haredi or Palestinian-Israeli — a possible majority that does not believe in an Israeli state.

Kerry’s principles ignore facts on the ground and facts in the mind, and are oblivious to the distrust on both sides that has morphed into hatred, creating a virtually fathomless gulf between them. They are also oblivious to Israel becoming a religious state, and that for most Israeli Jews, in a choice between more Jewish and less democratic or less Jewish and more democratic, majorities increasingly opt for the former. The Israel of today bears little resemblance to the Israel of 1993.

Israel exists in a region where nation states are breaking apart. It is pivoted on the fulcrum of the Sunni-Shia divide. Islamic extremism is pervasive, ISIS an ever-present threat. A seasoned Hezbollah is accumulating ever greater numbers of sophisticated missiles, certainly capable of reaching Tel Aviv, and the Sinai is a hotbed of radical Islamists. Proxy wars are pervasive, great power realignments in a state of flux.

Who is Israel supposed to negotiate with? A corrupt, illegitimate Palestinian Authority, under the rule of the 80-year-old autocratic Mahmoud Abbas, who earlier this year manipulated postponement of Palestinian elections — the first since 2007, when Hamas won — because Al Fatah feared that Hamas would once again prevail? And by what stretch of the imagination can the PA negotiate on behalf of Hamas, imprisoned in its Islamic statelet in Gaza? Palestine today has little resemblance to the Palestine of Yasser Arafat. Fact: Hamas and Fatah hate each other.

The fundamentals have not just changed, they have undergone a seismic shift. To suggest as a framework for negotiations a set of principles advocated almost a quarter century ago is to turn a blind eye to the reconfiguration, not just of the region, but of the power alliances. To suggest them now — knowing Trump’s predictable response and the inevitable pushback — will merely goad him onto rash actions that make a very bad situation even worse, if that is possible.

And Mahmoud Abbas’s response to the principles? Typically, knee-jerk: He is ready for negotiations at any time, once Israel freezes settlements, just as he said in 2009.