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Historic standoff: an awkward, stone-faced handshake but no progress

NEW YORK – Bristling with impatience, President Barack Obama sternly prodded Israeli and Palestinian leaders to relaunch Mideast peace negotiations, grasping a newly personal role in their historic standoff. He won an awkward, stone-faced handshake but no other apparent progress beyond a promise to talk about more talks.


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas shake hands. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Neither Netanyahu nor Abbas spoke publicly at the meeting site. In a moment deep in symbolism, however, they engaged in an unsmiling and seemingly reluctant handshake at the start of the sitdown, with dozens of cameras clicking to record the moment.

Despite months of effort, the sides remain far apart on a staunch Palestinian precondition for talks: that Israel halt all construction of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory. Obama has publicly echoed that demand to Israeli leaders — though the Palestinians noted with displeasure that he used the word “restrain” on rather than “halt” or “freeze.”

[MSM forgetting staunch Israeli precondition for talks:

  • recognition of Israel as a Jewish state
  • no talks about Jerusalem, eternal city of Jews
  • Arab states should move towards recognition of the state of Israel – Oui]

    The president hosted the two foes at his New York hotel during a marathon day of diplomacy on the sidelines of this week’s United Nations General Assembly gathering. It was a high-stakes gambit that could prove to be a timely personal intervention into a decades-old dispute that Obama has made a presidential priority or a flop that damages Obama’s global credibility on a broader scale.

    Obama’s Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, said the president took the risk because he believes the moment is uniquely ripe for progress — and because he felt an in-person display of his rising impatience could help.

    He tasked Mitchell with continuing to meet with Israeli and Palestinian officials while in New York this week, invited negotiators from both sides to come to Washington next week and asked Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to report to him in mid-October on the status.

    According to Mitchell, Obama told the leaders at one point: “The only reason to hold public office is to get things done.”

    • The waiting game …

    Jerusalem Post: Building drama-less diplomatic paradigms

    Tuesday’s tripartite meeting at the gilded Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan ushered in the end of the dramatic age of Middle East diplomacy.

    Good-bye to the dramatic summits that raise expectations sky-high. Gone are the days when a three-way handshake is interpreted as a “tipping point.” Hello to the long haul and drudgery of trying to change the reality on the ground.

    Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a seminal interview with Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post at the beginning of the summer – one quoted again Monday by a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office on the way to New York – said he was in no hurry. He said that his negotiations with former prime minister Ehud Olmert had left gaps “too wide,” that life was improving in the West Bank, and that he could wait until the US pressure on Israel led to the collapse of the Netanyahu government.

    In short, he was willing to wait.

    Paradoxically the waiting game also serves Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, as long as – and this is indeed taking place – the Palestinians continue institution-building: improving their ability to govern, improving their security apparatus with the help of US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton, and improving their economy.

    There may be little high-profile diplomatic drama right now, but on the ground, there are changes. The story is not in New York, but in changes in the West Bank.

    The Palestinians are doing this so that in two years’ time, they will have the ability to declare a state – unilaterally if necessary – and actually have institutions in place that would make that statement not completely void of meaning.

    Should Israelis be declaring victory After the summit?

    "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."