Want That Israeli-Palestinian Peace Deal, Mr. President? Perform a C-Section
This piece was originally published at The Huffington Post.
After more than 20 months of trying, the Obama administration will this week convene direct Israel-Palestinian peace talks in Washington D.C. Even if it is well founded (and it is), the administration must be understandably irked by the barrage of skepticism that is greeting this week's peace summit, with reaction mostly ranging from scorn to yawn -- with only a few exceptions.
This time around the parties are perhaps setting a record in starting the blame game even before they start the talks. And this unpromising picture got even more gloomy in the last days and hours with the shooting attack that left four Israeli settlers dead near Hebron and the comments over the weekend by an Israeli religious leader who has more Knesset members to deploy than any other (Shas spiritual guru Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who said of Palestinians that "God should strike them with a plague.")
While the Obama team is approaching these talks with requisite displays of caution, they are nonetheless engaged in an exercise that raises expectations and have now set a one year timeline for concluding peace talks. Don't expect "mission accomplished" banners either tonight during the Iraq address or tomorrow at the Iftar White House peace dinner. But this is an administration that set out its stall on the importance of Israeli-Arab peacemaking from day one and has doggedly pursued that goal ever since. The proximity of these two Middle East-related presidential diary entries -- the Iraq end of combat operations speech and the Middle East peace summit -- might be coincidental, though one hopes that they are not.
Continue reading at The Huffington Post.
