The illusion of complacency in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks
The only one who seems in a hurry is US Secretary of State John Kerry.
The peripatetic US Secretary of State John Kerry is at it again. Kerry will be traveling to see PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Amman today, March 26, and will talk with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu via video link soon thereafter. The issues — finessing a couple of self-imposed deadlines — are for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners by month’s end and for negotiations to continue past the end of April, both set when discussions commenced in July.
Notwithstanding Kerry’s famously frenetic pace, negotiations between Israel and the PLO, which will celebrate their 21st anniversary in September, have never been marked by hard and fast deadlines. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli architect of this process, famously insisted that “there are no sacred dates” — and the process since then has followed his instruction.
As Norway’s ambassador to Israel, Svein Sevje, noted in a September 2013 interview with Al-Monitor, " … [W]hen Rabin said that there were 'no sacred dates' regarding the implementation of Oslo … this took a lot of the pressure off the process, and eventually gave time for the spoilers on both sides who aimed at damaging the process."
For more than two decades, deadlines have come and gone, and yet the wheel keeps turning — witness Kerry’s latest push. It’s never too late, the clock seems to be stuck somewhere short of midnight. No big decisions have been made, and despite the current American push for progress, none are expected.
