Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
It was a trajectory – Washington to Cairo, and then Jerusalem – similar to the one made nearly a half century earlier by a predecessor of Antony Blinken.
Starting in 1974, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” would bring an accord of sorts and a degree of stability to the region following the catastrophic and bloody Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
But it would bring little real, lasting peace.
Today, 49 years later, there is still no Palestinian state, relations between Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors are as fraught as ever, blood runs in the streets of both places, and the most obdurate, certainly the most right-wing government in Israeli history has just taken power in Jerusalem.
On Tuesday, Blinken wound up three days of meetings with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
And in the end, it seems, all sides seemed quite content to stand on some long-entrenched and hardly softening positions.
As Blinken was winging his way home, Netanyahu told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, “For 25 years, the Palestinians who don’t want peace with Israel, want to see a peace without Israel, who don’t want a state next to Israel, but a state instead of Israel – they had an effective veto on Israel’s expansion of the circle of peace around it.” Netanyahu insisted that he wants negotiations with the Palestinians, which the Palestinians don’t want.
The prime minister also told CNN he believed his priority of cementing amicable arrangements with all Arab nations, as the Abraham Accords provided, would eventually drive the Palestinians to the peace table, effectively on his terms.
“If we make peace with Saudi Arabia, [which] depends on the Saudi leadership, and bring effectively the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end, I think we’ll circle back to the Palestinians and get a workable peace with the Palestinians. I think that’s possible,” Netanyahu told Tapper.
By contrast, Abbas emerged from his meeting with Blinken and asserted, “the Israeli Government is responsible for what’s happening these days, because of its practices that undermine the two-state solution and violate the signed agreements, and because of the lack of international efforts to dismantle the occupation and the settlement regimes, and the failure to recognize the Palestinian state and its full membership in the United Nations.”
Throughout his visit, and especially at its end, Blinken was most careful to treat Palestinians and Israelis even-handedly, promising America’s “support [for] all efforts to move us closer to peace, expand the horizon of hope, advance equal rights and opportunities for Palestinians and Israelis.”
But he was quite clear on the profound challenges in all three cities he’d visited where “I heard a deep concern about the current trajectory.” And he was equally clear that America continues to support a two-state solution – independent states of Israelis and Palestinians – a concept that Palestinians believe is not shared by the Netanyahu government .
“Restoring calm is our immediate task, but over the longer term we have to do more than just lower tensions,” Blinken explained. “It’s President Biden’s firm conviction that the only way to achieve that goal is through preserving and then realizing the vision of two states for two peoples. The United States will continue to oppose anything that puts that goal further from reach, including but not limited to settlement expansion, legalization of illegal outposts, a move towards annexation of the West Bank, disruption to the historic status quo on Jerusalem’s holy sites, demolitions and evictions, and incitement and acquiescence to violence.”
Quite a heavy lift considering what Netanyahu told Tapper.
Indeed, it would seem that the government Netanyahu leads is determined to press forward on initiatives only calculated to inflame passions on both sides. His public security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has been convicted for inciting anti-Arab racism. While Aryeh Deri, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi party Shas, was forced to step down as interior minister by the nation’s high court, he is expected to return after Netanyahu’s ruling coalition pledged its support.
At the same time, the right-wing dominated Knesset awarded to Bezalel Smotrich – a religious-Zionist leader of the settler movement – supervision of the Jewish territories that Palestinians have long claimed for themselves.
Passions continued to rise, as an Israeli army raid on the Jenin refugee camp last week left 10 Palestinians dead and was followed by an attack by a Palestinian gunman on a Jerusalem synagogue that left seven dead.
In the past week at least 22 people have been killed in violent incidents.
Amid such a tense atmosphere it seems unlikely that some key Middle East nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, will have any incentive to establish a working relationship with Israel that could lead to a lasting peace.
At Davos, before the latest deadly confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told the World Economic Forum, “Palestine remains an important evocative issue in our region… the focus really needs to be on a pathway to resolving this conflict.”
Netanyahu clearly has staked out consistent priorities that could make any such accommodation unlikely. “Israel should have the overriding security responsibility [for Israeli territories] because every time we moved out, say from Lebanon, basically Iran came in with its proxy Hezbollah,” he told CNN. “We moved out of Gaza and other radical Islamists, Hamas, took over. And if we just walk away as people suggest, then you’ll have Hamas and Iran move into the hills around Jerusalem, overlooking Tel Aviv.”
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Hardly a recipe for any quick or easy diplomatic breakthrough. But if the overarching purpose of Blinken’s visit was to engage with the government of Netanyahu – who has had a longstanding, sometimes fraught relationship with President Biden – without burning any new bridges, then the Secretary of State may have left in the nick of time.
In April, as they often do, Ramadan and Passover will overlap. A recipe for another round of a conflict that is little closer to resolution.
Still, as Netanyahu pointed out to Tapper, and negotiators harking back to Kissinger have recognized, deeply flawed though Israel may be, it is the only working democracy in the Middle East.
The US has little alternative, then, to support it and do its best to hold up a mirror to its faults, praying it will do the right thing for all who live within its borders and abroad.