Opinion Another step backward in Mideast peace talks

For a decade, the conventional wisdom has been that Israel and the Palestinians were tantalizingly close to an agreement at Camp David that could have led to peace, but that Yasser Arafat balked.

There are those who will disagree with that assessment, but that’s the way President Bill Clinton, who brought Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Arafat together in the 11th hour of his administration, saw it. And more books that have been written about the Camp David Summit of 2000 agree with Clinton than don’t.

Eight years of the Bush administration passed with little progress made in the Middle East, largely because of the administration’s preoccupation with two nearby wars through most of the Bush terms. But President George W. Bush made one thing clear, that his administration saw the creation of a Palestinian state as the baseline for a peace plan. That, however, wasn’t enough to spur any progress in talks between the Palestinians and Israel.

Another try

Now, in the relatively early days of the Obama administration, the United States once again tried to bring the parties together. U.S. special envoy George Mitchell has been working for a year to arrange indirect talks between the parties, and President Barack Obama took the extraordinary step of sending his vice president, Joe Biden, to Jerusalem.

For a brief moment, it looked like Biden might be making some headway with Israel’s hawkish prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That is until Eli Yishai the head of the right-wing Shas religious party and Israel’s Minister of the Interior, announced plans to build another 1,600 houses for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. With one announcement, Yishai managed to raise two inflammatory topics, Israeli settlements and the sovereignty of East Jerusalem. And while Netanyahu apologized for the timing of Yishai’s announcement, he effectively endorsed Yishai’s building plans.

There is nothing simple about the equation for peace in the Middle East, and at times both Palestinians and the Israelis have undercut the process.

But in this unnecessarily provocative act, Israel not only damaged the prospects for negotiations, it hurt its standing in the U.S. Congress, even among some of its most stalwart supporters.

And while the mission of George Mitchell had not risen to level of President Clinton’s Camp David talks 10 years ago, its aim was to work toward meaningful talks. Until someone else comes along and does something even more destructive to the peace process than Eli Yishai, he has taken Arafat’s mantle as spoiler. That’s not something he should wear proudly.