US Secretary of State John Kerry is making efforts to renew negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians and declared in Amman on July 17 that certain progress has been made by the parties. Even before this declaration on negotiations, the Palestinians registered yet another achievement, and they are pleased. Very pleased. The target was well defined, the direction clear, and the results followed apace. All of Europe is against the settlements. The European Union has decided to demarcate the Israel-Palestine border, distinguishing between Israel within the Green Line and Israel of the settlements. In fact, it is imposing significant economic sanctions on Israel, at least until it gets back to serious negotiations.

Europe was first marked as a target more than two years ago, when Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and senior Palestinian officials, including Saeb Erekat, Yasser Abed Rabbo, Hanan Ashrawi and then-prime minister Salam Fayyad, discovered much to their chagrin that the United States had decided to impose a veto on a proposal to admit the Palestinians to the United Nations as the organization’s 194th member state. At the time, all of Abu Mazen’s efforts had been to no avail in explaining to then-secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton that the move at the United Nations was being taken out of sheer desperation and disappointment over the absence of a diplomatic process. The same held for his promise to put the move on hold if negotiations were renewed.

Senior Palestinian officials had come to view the United States as a significant obstacle and started looking for a way to circumvent it. Disappointment arrived in May 2011, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States and on May 24 delivered a speech that was received enthusiastically by both houses of Congress. “The status of the settlements,” Netanyahu declared, “will be decided only in negotiations. But we must also be honest. … In any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders. … But … the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. Israel will not return to the indefensible lines of 1967.”

The prime minister’s statement was met with resounding applause. After watching the speech live on television, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, secretary-general of the PA and a close confidante of Abu Mazen, summed up the desperation he felt: “If Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were to come back to life, they would not get the same reception that Netanyahu got. … What happened in Congress reminds me of the parliaments of dictators old and new. It bolsters and encourages the Israeli right.” Abu Mazen, already busy with an alternative plan to get the PA accepted as a UN observer state (but not as a full member), instructed senior officials to launch a major effort to obtain European support, hoping that Europe would influence US President Barack Obama.