Obama stirs the Middle East cauldron
By Victor Kotsev
It is still not clear how exactly the bargaining between United States President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the other regional and international protagonists is turning out. It is beyond doubt, however, that Obama's visit to Israel, Palestine and Jordan is intended to stir a cauldron red-hot with intrigue and tensions.
There are several urgent items on Obama's agenda: the Iranian nuclear crisis, the Syrian civil war, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Egypt is also in turmoil, with many experts
predicting a financial - and perhaps also a social - collapse within the next months. The entire region is in a state of chaos.
It is widely believed that Obama wants Netanyahu to hold off from attacking Iran longer, allowing for a meaningful effort to resolve the crisis after the Iranian elections this summer. The assumption is that in the run-up to the vote no one in Iran would be willing to make significant concessions, and the hope is that after the election, the Iranian leaders would come to their senses.
Yet it is unclear how much time remains before Iran will attain a nuclear weapon capability. Tehran is racing toward that goal, not only through recent advances in uranium enrichment, but also through a parallel program to produce plutonium at the Arak heavy-water complex. It is unlikely that Obama would be able to hold the Israelis back forever, and it is practically certain that he would have to pay a price in return for any delay.
From the statements issued by Obama and Netanyahu over the past two days, it appears that the two are close to a consensus. "I would not expect that the prime minister would make a decision about his country's security and defer that to any other country, any more than the United States would defer our decisions about what was important for our national security," the US president said on Wednesday, in a statement that was also interpreted as an indirect threat to Iran.
Many analysts believe that the Iranian issue is closely tied to the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in the talks between the two leaders. Netanyahu has shown little enthusiasm for serious negotiations in the past, but pressure from the international community has been growing recently, and even his new settler-friendly government is paying lip service to the idea in its coalition agreements.
Much speculation took place recently over whether Obama would seek to kick-start the peace talks by presenting, for example, his own outline for a deal. So far this hasn't happened, even though one argument goes that he would wait until he reaches Jordan, Friday and Saturday, to do that.
Such a high-profile step could prove to be controversial and counterproductive. "There is no scenario in my mind that Israelis and Palestinians could succeed through public diplomacy, only through secret negotiations," Gershon Baskin, a veteran Israeli peace activist and negotiator who brokered the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap deal in 2011, said in a recent conversation.
Yet the visit could lend legitimacy and jump-start other, less public initiatives: it is worth mentioning Netanyahu's recent secretive visits to Amman and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's surprise trip to Riyadh earlier this month to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry. In the same spirit, a report in the New York Times on Wednesday claimed that Abbas would be satisfied with a "secret" Israeli settlement freeze in order to return to the negotiating table.
Though Israel's newly inaugurated government has the most settler advocates in decades, this can be an opportunity as well as an obstacle. Many of Israel's hawks, including ardent supporters of the settlement movement, have turned dovish in recent years (think Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, or even the former top Israeli security officials who appeared in the documentary The Gatekeepers), and if their close allies desert them, the settlers would be less able to mount an effective response against a peace deal. The same is true for the entire Israeli right, in view of the fact that Netanyahu's party, the Likud, is its largest representative.
For the record, Habayit Hayehudi ("Jewish home"), the party most closely associated with the settlers, has indicated that it would not torpedo any negotiations, though it would demand a referendum before any significant territorial concessions are made.
In some ways, the current Israeli government may be the most credible peace partner Abbas and Obama could wish for.
But whatever consensus may emerge on the Iranian and Palestinian issues, more direct regional instability is interfering with both tracks. Recent reports of the use of chemical weapons in Syria - either by the government or by the rebels - highlight only one of the dangers coming from the war-ridden country. Monday's bombing raids in northern Lebanon by the Syrian air force as well as the security vacuum that has engulfed all of Syria's borders also illustrate the ease with which the conflict can spill out into the rest of the region.
Israel worries particularly about the danger of chemical weapons or advanced conventional arms falling into the hands of Hezbollah or the rebels, and also about the withdrawal of international troops and the presence of jihadists in the Golan Heights. The Israeli raid in January on a weapons convoy intended for Hezbollah - or, as the other main version of the story goes, on a Syrian chemical weapons facility - demonstrates how seriously the Israeli government takes this threat.
According to a recent report in The Guardian, the Israeli prime minister intended to ask Obama for military and diplomatic support against these threats.
"Netanyahu's office concedes that it is more likely to succeed in securing US support over Syrian missiles than to persuade Obama to share the Israeli prime minister's position on Iran," the Guardian reported.
Yet there are still other factors under consideration - for example, Obama's "leading from behind" policy in the Middle East, Egypt's descent into chaos and Jordan's declining stability - and it is difficult to guess what the secret understandings between the two leaders are. With so many conflicts at a boiling point, one thing is certain: as usual, instability in the Middle East opens many dangers, but also many possibilities.
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