Clinton denies shift in settlements policy

Matt Bradley, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 04. 2009 11:04PM UAE / November 4. 2009 7:04PM GMT

CAIRO // What began last week as a US effort to revive the stalled Middle East peace process ended yesterday with some hasty diplomatic damage control.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, made an unplanned stop in Egypt’s capital yesterday to reassure Arab diplomats that her comments last week in Jerusalem, which described Israel’s offer to partially stop settlement expansion in the West Bank as “unprecedented”, did not represent a climbdown from statements by the president, Barack Obama, that he considers all settlement activity to be illegal.

But Mrs Clinton’s troubleshooting may have fallen on deaf ears. For many Arab diplomats and experts, Mrs Clinton’s comments represented far more than a one-time verbal gaffe: they revealed a policy shift away from Mr Obama’s original pledge to rein in Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a precondition for bringing both sides back to the negotiating table.

“I think it is a sign of retreat by the Obama administration from positions they have taken previously and that retreat is causing a lot of damage to the Obama administration. Its credibility is at stake,” said Abdel el Raouf el Reedy, a former Egyptian ambassador to the US.

“The people are comparing what Obama said in his speech on the fourth of June to what his administration now is doing,” Mr el Reedy said, referring to Mr Obama’s address to the Muslim world from Cairo University last summer.

Mrs Clinton’s Cairo visit, which the US state department tacked to the end of a Middle East tour that included stops in Abu Dhabi, Jerusalem and Marrakech, was meant to ease growing perceptions that Mr Obama no longer considers halting Israeli settlement expansion as a necessary first step for renewing talks between the Palestinians and Israelis.

The Israelis had told Mrs Clinton that they would agree to stop all settlement building in the West Bank except for several thousand residential units for which construction has already begun. Settlement considerations in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians consider their rightful capital, did not figure into Israel’s proposition.

It was Mrs Clinton’s characterisation of Israel’s offer as “unprecedented” during a press conference on Saturday that so irked Arab leaders, who have insisted on a complete halt to settlements on Palestinian lands before negotiations can resume.

Faced with the intransigence of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, Mr Obama has effectively backed down from his original demands on the settlement issue. Although many in the Middle East see the new, adjusted position as a capitulation to Israel, Mrs Clinton tried yesterday to recast the policy shift as a new approach to peace that will sidestep the intractable impasse over settlements.

“We do not accept the legitimacy of settlement activity and we have a very firm belief that ending all settlement activity, current and future, would be preferable,” Mrs Clinton said at a press conference after meeting Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president, according to the Reuters news agency. “Getting into final status negotiations will allow us to bring an end to settlement activity.”

“Final status negotiations” is a catch-all term for the sundry questions that have complicated Palestinian statehood for decades and of which settlements are only one component. They also include the status and return of an estimated four million Palestinian refugees, final borders and the status of Jerusalem, and security arrangements for a future Palestinian state.

But as the Obama administration has turned away from its focus on settlements as a precondition for further negotiations, Palestinian voices are objecting. To negotiate the status of the Palestinian people before resolving the settlement issue would allow construction to continue, said Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian negotiator and the commissioner of foreign affairs for Fatah, the main party in the West Bank.

“There is a retreat from the Obama position enunciated in Cairo and in the United Nations and there is a retreat of Mrs Clinton on the question of the necessity of ending all settlement activities including natural growth, including Jerusalem,” Mr Shaath said. “That will not go well, neither with us nor with our Arab brothers. That is why we continue to say that we have tried that before – 18 years now – exchanging land for peace, getting no peace and the land is being lost to settlements. We are not going to make that mistake again.”

The settlement issue has been a cornerstone of the peace process since the “quartet” of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations settled on a “road map for peace” in 2003.

So far, the preconditions listed in the road map have proven too onerous a burden on negotiators.

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Right now, 10 months later, we can’t actually agree about the freeze of settlements. How are you going to negotiate the removal of settlements, dealing with the refugee issue, Jerusalem as the capital of both states, what borders?” said Yossi Mekelberg, an associate fellow for the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, a think tank in London. “If one issue of freezing settlements takes 10 months, if you take in context all the other issues, it will take 100 years.”

Mr Mekelberg said that although Mrs Clinton’s comments in Jerusalem were probably a “tactical mistake”, they do represent a genuine policy shift, despite Mrs Clinton’s reassurances to the contrary in Cairo yesterday. What Mr Obama has probably realised, Mr Mekelberg said, is that the peace process requires a focus on both long-term problems and short-term preconditions. “I think that freezing settlements won’t bring peace,” he said. “Peace will bring a freezing of settlements.”

mbradley@thenational.ae