When US President Barack Obama meets Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sep. 23, then sees Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sep. 30, most likely Abbas will complain about the lack of progress in the current peace talks whereas Netanyahu will not. This is because Netanyahu does not want progress nor does he seek it. Netanyahu has one - if only one - great virtue: He is absolutely honest in not professing any desire, however insincere, to see the creation of a Palestinian state or to engage in any talks about that possibility. Israel's recent demand to keep control of the West Bank's Jordan Valley for 40 more years in the event of a peace deal, among so many other preconditions, shows that Netanyahu has slammed the door on the illusion of a two-state solution. Earlier proof of Netanyahu's insincerity was the very little that Israel offered to tempt the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. However, evidently Abbas was reluctant to let even that small window of opportunity pass, especially once Israel acceded to Washington's request to offer some goodwill gestures. The most significant of these was Israel's agreement to release 104 Palestinian political prisoners. Abbas suspended all unilateral measures vis-à-vis the UN agencies to give Secretary of State John Kerry time to jump-start a new round of talks, and the Palestinians also decided to put off applying to the International Criminal Court in The Hague by signing the Rome Statute and thus obtain standing in the court as a state. Friends of Palestine may legitimately wonder why the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah bothered to go to the UN General Assembly on Nov. 29 last year if it did not intend to follow up and build on its triumph in any useful way, most obviously by seeking to balance its huge disadvantages in the realms of power politics and brute force with its huge advantages under international law. As for Obama himself, it is strange that in spite of the train of failures in American attempts to broker a peace between the Palestinians and Israel, every successive president has dreamed of being the one to go down in history as the president who brought peace to the Middle East. Obama clearly entertained this dream during his first term but came to a rude awakening in the wake of the savage attacks by Israeli and Jewish lobbies against him and his administration. When he resumed this dream after beginning his second term, he realized he had to be more cautious, which meant that he had to placate the Israelis first before calling for new talks. In this context, he dispatched Kerry to do all he could to get the two sides to agree to a new round of negotiations and to generate an artificial climate of optimism marked by the earnestness and determination to reach tangible results, none of which will have any bearing on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The political horizon for a decent two-state solution on the ground is ever-receding as the solution becomes less practical with each passing year of expanding settlements, bypass roads and walls. It is weighed down by a multitude of exceptionally difficult final status issues that Israeli governments have consistently refused to discuss seriously, preferring to postpone decisions until the end of a road that is never reached and which, almost certainly, is intended never to be reached.
