Shrugging Off Past Setbacks, Obama Plans Personal Role in Middle East Peace Bid

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Shrugging Off Past Setbacks, Obama Plans Personal Role in Middle East Peace Bid

By MARK LANDLERFEB. 26, 2014

WASHINGTON — President Obama, after avoiding a hands-on role in Middle East peacemaking since the setbacks of his first term, plans to plunge back into the effort, his advisers said this week, starting with an urgent appeal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

When he welcomes Mr. Netanyahu to the White House on Monday, these officials said, Mr. Obama will press him to agree to a framework for a conclusive round of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations that is being drafted by Secretary of State John Kerry.

On Thursday, the administration announced that Mr. Obama would meet the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, at the White House on March 17 to make the same pitch. The president’s goal, officials said, is to announce the framework, a kind of roadmap for further talks, by the end of April, the nine-month deadline Mr. Kerry set last summer for a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

For Mr. Obama, the decision to thrust himself into the talks is fraught with risk. He made Middle East diplomacy a centerpiece of his first term, bringing Israelis and Palestinians together at the White House in September 2010 for face-to-face talks, only to watch those negotiations collapse three months later in acrimony.

Since his re-election, Mr. Obama has left the Israeli-Palestinian issue almost entirely to Mr. Kerry, who has made the process a consuming priority, making nearly a dozen trips to the region and holding countless meetings with Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas in an attempt to bridge gaps that have separated the two sides for more than three decades.

“Now is a very timely opportunity for him to get involved,” a senior official said of Mr. Obama, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. If the two sides agree to the framework, which would set out general terms on issues like Israel’s security and the borders of a future Palestinian state, the negotiations could be extended, with a new target of completing a treaty by the end of 2014.

Administration officials said Mr. Obama never lost interest in the diplomatic effort, pointing to an impassioned speech he gave in Jerusalem last March. But after his failed effort in 2010, and the failure of a follow-up push in May 2011, Mr. Obama’s relationship with Mr. Netanyahu soured, and other issues, like Iran’s nuclear program, pushed peacemaking aside. With his own re-election bid nearing, he showed little appetite for expending further political capital on the issue.

The challenge for the White House has been to redeploy the president only when it is believed he can make a critical difference. With Mr. Kerry’s self-imposed deadline nearing, and with little indication that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas have resolved key differences, that moment is now, the officials said. “The president wouldn’t want to run any risk that it was the lack of his involvement that would make the difference between success and failure,” a senior official said.

It is far from clear, however, that Mr. Obama can pull off what has so far eluded his secretary of state — not to mention several of his Oval Office predecessors. While Mr. Kerry and his special envoy, Martin S. Indyk, have held intensive meetings with Israelis and Palestinians in recent days, the two sides have not met face to face for weeks. That suggests, analysts say, that there has been scant progress in closing some of the core differences, like the status of Jerusalem or the contours of a new Palestinian state. It is difficult to know the exact status of the talks because the participants have largely kept a promise not to air the details publicly.

Skeptics say Mr. Kerry’s decision to opt for a framework is itself a sort of concession — or at best, a way to buy time. Some worry that if Mr. Obama puts his prestige on the line to coax approval for an interim step, he will have less leverage to push through a final deal.

Administration officials said the framework will cover all the major final-status issues, though Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas will be able to express reservations about individual provisions, so long, an official said, “as they don’t vitiate the framework.”

American officials trying to sell the framework to both sides have shared some details with Jewish groups. The document foresees the creation of a security zone along the Jordan River that would be fortified with high-tech fences, electronic sensors and unmanned drones, to protect Israel from attacks. But it will not deal specifically with the status of Jerusalem, claimed as a capital by both Israelis and Palestinians.

“Kerry is running into much heavier water on the substance,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator who is a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Either he feels the need, or they do, to deploy the president.”

On one level, Mr. Miller said, the president’s involvement is a promising sign, “because it shows he is more risk-ready.” On another, he said, it underscores the hurdles to even a “generalized framework,” which he said raised the question, “What is it going to take to get to a comprehensive deal if the president has to do heavy lifting?”

By re-engaging, Mr. Obama may deflect some of the blows his secretary of state has taken lately. When Mr. Kerry warned last month that if Israel did not resolve the Palestinian issue, it would fuel an anti-Israel boycott, he was criticized by several Israeli officials, who said Israel would never negotiate under pressure. Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, was quoted by an Israeli newspaper as saying that Mr. Kerry was driven by “misplaced obsession and messianic fervor” in his quest for a peace accord. Mr. Yaalon later apologized for the remarks.

Mr. Kerry has met with skepticism from Palestinians as well. While he was meeting with Mr. Abbas last week in Paris, another senior Palestinian official, Hanan Ashrawi, offered a bleak assessment of his efforts to reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

A framework that allowed each side to voice reservations, she said, would be “self-negating,” adding, “It will be a nondocument.” Any document not based firmly on international law, she said, “will become a box of chocolates: You can pick and choose what you want.”

Ms. Ashrawi did not say the Palestinian Authority would actually reject the framework, if it came to that. But she asked: “Why have it? Is it just to maintain a semblance of progress? Is it meant to buy more time? Or is it not to admit we have failed?”