Obama and Netanyahu's 70 minute one-on-one, and dumping "unprecedented"

Laura Rozen
Politico
http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/1109/Obama_and_Netanyahus_70_minute_one...

When Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Bill Burns spoke to the Middle East Institute on Monday, he used some subtly but notably different language on the Israeli offer for a partial settlement moratorium and related issues than key senior U.S. officials had used recently.

Burns: "We seek to create the best possible circumstances for negotiations, working with the parties, working with key regional partners like Egypt and the Quartet. We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements; we consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing road map obligation for a full settlement freeze. We seek to deepen international support for the Palestinian Authority’s impressive plan to build over the next couple years the institutions that a responsible Palestinian state requires. And we also seek progress toward peace between Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon, as part of a broader peace among Israel and all of its neighbors." (emphasis added)

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's offer for a nine-month moratorium on new West Bank settlement construction or further land expropriations as "unprecedented" in a Jerusalem news conference late last month, language she explained and qualified at further stops in Cairo and Morocco, while noting that U.S. policy had not changed and still did not recognize the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.

But since Palestinian President's Mahmoud Abbas's threat last week to not run in next year's Palestinian elections, and the prospect of the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. seems to have decided to toss the "unprecedented" language altogether, even with all the qualifiers. Diplomatic sources say Abbas, his threat to quit and the prospect of the PA's collapse and what it would mean were major topics of discussion in a meeting between Barack Obama and Netanyahu on Monday night, about which very few details have emerged, in either the Israeli or American press.

The one-on-one meeting between Obama and Netanyahu was supposed to last 30 minutes, but it went on for 70 minutes, a diplomatic source said — a very long one-on-one meeting with POTUS. There was also a 20 minute meeting between the larger U.S. and Israeli PM delegations.

There's other language in Burns's speech that seems to try to appeal directly to Palestinian concerns, as relayed by American diplomats, that any Israeli-Palestinian final status talks "not start from zero." Burns' reference to "continuing road map obligation" is interesting. While the Obama administration has now joined Netanyahu in calling for peace talks to begin "without preconditions" — e.g., without a full Israeli settlement freeze — the Palestinians do not consider a settlement freeze a "precondition" but an Israeli obligation under the road map.

The Obama administration now seems to be trying to desperately signal to Abbas that it is trying to give him more to work with -- and hoping it is not too late."Almost everything cited here shows a subtle but noticable shift back towards the Palestinian perspective," says the American Task Force for Palestine's Hussein Ibish.

UPDATE: If Abbas doesn't run, Ibish adds, the cabinet, including Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad would resign en masse, thus formally disolving the Palestinian Authority, and foreclosing an effort to put the Hamas speaker of parliament in as president, and switch back to operation through the Palestinian Liberation Organization only.