Bibi and Obama: hand over peace process to the UN

Palestinians now realise that neither Barack Obama nor Bibi Netanyahu are likely to outline any acceptable peace plans.

President Barack Obama and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we are told, are in a "bizarre diplomatic race" to be the first to outline a new initiative for Middle East peace. That's according to the New York Times, which last week reported that Mr Netanyahu is planning to preempt Mr Obama when he addresses US Congress next month, at the invitation of the president's Republican adversaries.

If Mr Netanyahu makes his "vision" speech before Mr Obama sets out his own ideas for a two-state solution, that will supposedly put the US president in a tight spot, according to the Times. Everyone knows that the Israeli leader's terms for a two-state agreement are not acceptable to most of the world, but domestic politics may make it difficult for Mr Obama, on the eve of his re-election battle, to get into another public spat with the Israelis. Sticking up for justice for the Palestinians is hardly the sort of stance calculated to bring in  the massive campaign contributions so vital to success in America's plutocratic democracy.

Mr Netanyahu is believed to be weighing  proposals for some troop withdrawals in parts of the West Bank and the evacuation of a handful of settlement outposts (not actual settlements, but outposts built without Israeli government permission by more extremist settlers). That won't come even close to meeting Palestinian demands, but that isn't Mr Netanyahu's purpose: his goal is to place the blame on the Palestinian leadership for the paralysis in the peace process and ease international pressure on Israel.

President Obama, for his part, is said to be weighing a speech that would advocate Palestinian statehood based on Israel's 1967 boundaries, sharing Jerusalem as the capital of both states, dropping the claim of Palestinian refugees' right of return and emphasising Israeli security needs. The 1967 lines and sharing Jerusalem are hardly what Mr Netanyahu has in mind, but even then, their differences may be less important than the strategic objective shared by both -  to head off the planned attempt by the Palestinian Authority to get the UN General Assembly, at its September annual meeting, to rule on the parameters of a two-state solution.

It's the spectre of UN action that is spurring both Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu to consider new gestures to create the illusion of imminent progress in the long-stalled peace process. Mr Netanyahu, after all, knows that the most he is willing to offer is less than the least the Palestinians could accept. And the Obama administration knows that, too, yet it  continues to demand that the Palestinians stay away from the UN and confine themselves to negotiating with Israel. "We do not support any unilateral effort by the Palestinians to go to the United Nations to try to obtain some authorisation or approval vote with respect to statehood," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week.  "We think we can only achieve the two-state solution that we strongly advocate through negotiation."

Mrs Clinton's Orwellian twist of branding the act of deferring to the international body that established Israeli independence in 1948 as "unilateral" is problematic enough. But it's even harder to sustain the contention that continued bilateral talks under US auspices  will somehow produce a solution two decades on. The Israelis reject the international consensus on terms of a two-state solution, and keeping the matter in Washington's hands allows their extraordinary influence in US domestic politics to shield them from that consensus.

A resolution recognising Palestinian sovereignty based on the 1967 lines would easily pass in the General Assembly, which includes all UN member states and which, unlike the 15-member Security Council, gives no country veto power. Palestinian officials claim to have already lined up an overwhelming majority of votes in favor. The only way the US can prevent such a vote would be if it can pressure the Palestinians into holding back from asking the UN to rule on the matter. And it failed to do that when it tried to strong-arm the Palestinian leadership into withdrawing a Security Council resolution in February that demanded an end to Israeli settlement activity on occupied land.

Even Washington's closest allies are no longer impressed by the argument that going to the international community somehow disrupts ongoing negotiations, simply because there aren't any. The US was internationally isolated when it vetoed the February resolution.

Nor is going to the UN necessarily antithetical to negotiating an agreement with Israel. All that UN recognition of Palestinian sovereignty does is to give the Palestinians leverage in any future talks by underscoring the principle that any Israeli presence on territory outside its 1967 boundaries can be legitimated only by Palestinian consent, achieved via quid pro quo. And it's precisely to avoid having its claim on occupied territory negated that Israel wants to keep the issue out of the UN. The Israelis are confident, with good reason, that in a process controlled by Washington, they can essentially set the terms of any peace agreement.

Jockeying aside, Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu both hope to block a UN vote by restoring the illusion that the same goals can be better achieved in US-led negotiations.

But it's rather odd, given the February vote at the Security Council, that either leader believes his speech could somehow mollify the Palestinians into believing that their goals can be achieved through sitting across a table,  or persuade the international community to leave the question of Israeli-Palestinian peace in Washington's hands. It is, to be frank, too late for that.

Even the Palestinian leaders most committed to negotiation may have reached the point where they recognise that they're more likely to achieve their goals if they come to the table armed with global recognition of their claim of sovereignty over all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, than if they come bearing a copy of another stirring speech by President Obama.

Tony Karon is an analyst based in New York. Follow him on Twitter @TonyKaron