Enough Mideast speeches

Opinion: June 3, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Anyone who has worked as a reporter in the heart of the Middle East knows the drill: You write an article, you make someone mad. And, in this case, “someone” always means thousands and thousands of people.

If you’re a journalist, the phenomenon usually has relatively minor consequences. If you’re a politician, a world leader, your words have enormous, often unpredictable consequences. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is much too complicated, much too emotional, much too important for politicians to fire words — always dangerous weapons — into the heavily charged air. Whether they discharge their words as sniper fire, carefully aimed at a specific target, or wildly, as the spray of a machine gun, their impact can have disastrous consequences.

Politicians who want peace in the Middle East; who want reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, need to put an end to the speech-making. Enough. And that goes triple for President Obama.

Negative consequences

Every time Obama has made a public pronouncement about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he has made the situation worse. He can say as much as he wants, but saying it in public, before microphones and cameras, has been empirically demonstrated to have only negative consequences.

Publicly pressuring one side or the other only increases the suspicions of the side he wants to pressure. It can add to that side’s fears of offering a compromise, it can make it doubt it can trust the United States. It makes hardliners take an even harder line. It makes the other side less willing to make concessions. It creates new obstacles and new fears of overcoming old obstacles. It empowers the political forces that object to the compromises. It puts a bright light on the very specific items that must be relinquished, without shining an equally powerful light on the vague benefits of what might be gained from that loss.

When Obama publicly demanded that Israel stop building settlements, he unleashed a chain reaction that continues to this day. He caused Palestinians to refuse to talk unless Israel stopped all settlement construction; something Palestinians had never before demanded. He sent a jolt through Israeli settlers, who felt suddenly endangered and pressured Prime Minister Netanyahu to resist Obama’s demands. He made the rest of Israel — the majority who are willing to see major withdrawals from the West Bank and would probably support a stop to most settlement construction — feel that they could not trust Washington, making many of them side with the settlers on this issue. And that’s just a brief summary of the consequences, all of them counterproductive to the peace process.

When Obama told Israel to negotiate on the basis of the 1967 lines he triggered yet another series of unintended consequences. And the point he made was rather pointless. Are the 1967 lines the starting line for negotiations? Yes and no. Have they been a tacit starting point for many years? Yes and no.

Does it matter? Everything the president of the United States says matters profoundly in the Middle East, particularly to Israelis, who feel that if they lose Washington’s support they could ultimately lose their country. It matters to the region’s anti-Israel extremists who feel that if Israel loses Washington’s support there’s a chance they might succeed in finally getting rid of the Jewish state.

Wrong way

It’s not wrong for Washington to pressure the sides. But this is the wrong way to do it.

And it’s not just President Obama and his top aides who need to put down the microphone and back away from the cameras if they want to talk to Israelis and Palestinians. Top Israeli and Palestinian officials, too, need to give up their addiction to the limelight.

Every time a top Israeli or Palestinian official makes a demand in public, he (or she) makes it much more difficult to compromise on that point. Every time he (or she) hints at a concession, he (or she) energizes those who oppose that particular compromise within their own camp.

It’s time to put an end to the speeches. It’s time to stop the public negotiation. Or, in this case, the public lack of negotiations. If talks ever resume, if an agreement is reached, the details should be released as a package, together, with costs and benefits announced simultaneously.

Frida Ghitis writes about global affairs for The Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.