Mr. Kerry’s Blame Game

In the annals of the entirely predictable, the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations must stand very high. Who could not have predicted this? That the talks would fail and that Israel would get the blame.

Earlier this week, testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry finally got there. He said that both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides bore responsibility for ‘unhelpful’ actions in stalling the progress of talks. But – and the ‘but’ is the most predictable bit of all – the event which he claimed to have led to the stalling is Jewish settlement in parts of Jerusalem. Kerry said of the Israeli building, “Poof, that was sort of the moment. We find ourselves where we are.” Which makes us have to ask, where else but ‘where we are’ did Mr Kerry ever think he’d find himself?

We have commented here before that the frenetic activity by Mr Kerry – the continuous trips to Israel, the clocking-up of air miles in lieu of an actual policy was a bad sign. It signalled two things. Firstly, that Kerry thought by all this activity he might actually solve the Israeli-Palestinian border dispute. And secondly, that this problem – of all problems – was the one which demanded most of his time. Not the massacring of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria. Not Iran, whose Supreme Leader said again this month that the Holocaust didn’t happen while other members of the regime boasted about how close they have come to nuclear capability. No, the issue which he claims to be the most important is the long defunct paradigm of the Israeli-Palestinian border dispute being the ‘key’ to unlocking every problem of the Middle East, and that the bar to solving that ‘key’ issue is Israeli building policy.

What is so disturbing in all this is what any fair observer must surely see is going. In the same period as that which Mr Kerry is talking about, the Palestinian Authority chose to unilaterally apply for membership in more than a dozen international institutions and treaties. Mahmoud Abbas chose to reach out to the Hamas leadership in the Gaza. He – the Palestinian ‘leader’ – continued to refuse to recognise the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. And the Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub declared on the official PA TV channel that Hitler “could have learned” from Israel “about the concentration camps, the extermination camps.” This is just to note a few of the more salient facts.

This, we would submit, is where the problem lies. Blame for the break-down of talks does not rely on a 2014 building decision on the Israeli side. It lies on a 1948 decision which has still not been reversed on the Palestinian side.

But the problem really starts from now. For now that the Secretary of State has blamed Israel for the breakdown of talks, it will be time for the next wholly predictable stage in this game. America has blamed Israel. Now it must punish Israel. And in the form of the EU and other allies, it finds entities willing and eager to begin that process.

Read the Henry Jackson Society Report: The Arab Spring: An Assessment Three Years On