Analysis: Pessimism abounds over Palestinian leader’s White House visit

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is due to visit the White House Monday as U.S. President Barack Obama turns his attention to a U.S.-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process that no longer generates much optimism on either side. The aging Palestinian leader is locked in an increasingly urgent battle against time and ever-diminishing faith among Palestinians in what talks with Obama and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can deliver.

Obama will lend his weight to recent efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry to broker some form of framework agreement — an accord on the broad outlines of a future peace deal — but on terms that have elicited pushback from both sides. 

Kerry waxed pessimistic during a congressional hearing last week. "The level of mistrust is as large as any level of mistrust I've ever seen," he said. Neither side "believes the other is really serious. Neither believes that ... the other is prepared to make some of the big choices that have to be made here."

A senior State Department official said on Sunday that Kerry, who met with Abbas a day before the White House meeting, pressed the urgency of finalizing a framework for final peace negotiations, saying it was "a pivotal time in the negotiations."

In September during their last meeting, Obama publicly thanked Abbas for having "been willing to enter into negotiations" — an acknowledgment of the difficult position in which the Palestinian leader has found himself after two decades of a peace process that has achieved no final results but during which Israel's grip on the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem — conquered by Israel in the war of June 1967 — has tightened through the steady expansion of settlements.

At that meeting, Obama restated the U.S. policy that "the border of Israel and Palestine should be based on 1967 lines with mutually agreed-to swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states, with robust security provisions so that Israel retains the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threats." 

The Netanyahu government has refused to accept the 1967 lines as the basis for negotiations, and it dismisses the Palestinian argument that ongoing settlement expansion signals bad faith. Most important, the Palestine Liberation Organization — under whose auspices Abbas negotiates with Israel — is demanding a clear endgame and timetable to what has, until now, been a peace process whose open-ended nature, the group says, has jeopardized Palestinian interests.

Differences over core issues — borders and security arrangements, how or whether to share Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees forbidden from returning to homes they fled during the war over Israel's creation in 1948 — bedeviled previous negotiations. Since his election in 2009, Netanyahu has demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel as "the national home of the Jewish people." 

Palestinians, with the backing of the Arab League, have rejected that demand, arguing that they have already recognized the state of Israel.

They believe that defining Israel as a Jewish state diminishes the rights of those Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship — some 20 percent of Israel's population — as well as the claims of millions of Palestinian refugees to a right of return. The Israeli side argues that allowing the refugees to return would imperil the state's Jewish majority.

Prospects for bridging the divide seem to be growing worse despite the stop-start efforts at Middle East diplomacy. Obama admitted as much in an interview earlier this month. "There comes a point where you can't manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices," he told Bloomberg's Jeffrey Goldberg. "Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement?"

The Obama administration has repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Israel risks becoming increasingly isolated as well as subjected to mounting calls for sanctions and other pressure if the status quo of the occupation is maintained. 

In his first term, Obama had made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a major priority, appointing seasoned diplomat George Mitchell, Maine's onetime senator, as a special envoy to the Middle East on his second day in office in 2009. But Mitchell resigned two years later, after it had become clear that Washington had admitted defeat in efforts to press Netanyahu to halt settlement construction in order to restart talks.

Kerry's effort, launched last year, has involved considerable shuttling to and from the region, but there's no sign so far that the stalemate is likely to be broken anytime soon. Indeed, despite the official blackout imposed on discussing the content of the Kerry negotiations, Palestinian officials have been harshly critical of some of what has been put to them. 

"By extending talks even one more year, they will finish the Greater Israel project, given the alarming escalation of settlement activity," PLO official Hanan Ashrawi told Reuters. Referring to a draft set of principles ostensibly being prepared by Kerry as a basis for a framework agreement, Ashrawi added, "If the document is what we have seen [up until now], then it is not even a starting point."

The Palestinian political context is further cause for concern among outside powers hoping to see the conflict resolved through negotiations with Israel. The International Crisis Group warned last year that the stalemate and deteriorating conditions are creating tinder for a fresh surge of instability, saying, “Many conditions for an uprising are objectively in place: political discontent, lack of hope, economic fragility, increased violence and an overwhelming sense that security cooperation serves an Israeli — not Palestinian — interest."

Abbas has not faced his own electorate since 2005, and his Palestinian Authority maintains an authoritarian political order in the West Bank, while his rivals in Hamas do the same in Gaza. It's far from clear that Abbas could sell any agreement to his constituency even if Obama could persuade the Palestinian leader to accept a solution based on terms less favorable than those that Palestinians previously rejected.

And when Abbas arrives at the White House on Monday, he will be a man mindful of the clock running out on a negotiation process to which he has dedicated his political career.

"I am 79 years old and am not ready to end my life with treason," Abbas said last week in a meeting with political allies in Ramallah last week, offering a harsh assessment of the peace terms currently on offer.

Obama has often warned both Abbas and Netanyahu that they are going to have to make tough choices to break the impasse in the peace process. But if they remain unable to do so, it will be hard to sustain the illusion that there is, in fact, a process underway that will settle the decades-old conflict. And that will leave Obama himself facing some tough choices. 

With additional reporting by Reuters.