Watching Tuesday's three-way meeting in New York between President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas -- and the administration's effort to spin it into a success -- reminded me that when breakthroughs in Arab-Israeli peacemaking come, they come with unforeseen and unpredictable urgency driven by big men and big events.
Today we have neither, just the prospects of a long, hard slog -- a thousand days of root canals created for the would-be mediator by Israeli and Palestinian leaders who are prisoners, rather than masters, of their political worlds, and by gaps on the core issues, such as Jerusalem, that are galactic in scale. In the middle sits a potentially transformative American president who somehow hopes to compensate for their absence of leadership with his own strength and vision.
Having spent the better part of a quarter of a century as a negotiator working on the Arab-Israeli conflict, I know how easy it is for longtime observers to get cynical about the prospects for peace. But that's unfair; after all, the wheel turns, and with it comes a new administration, new circumstances and new ideas that can sometimes lead to movement in an all-too-often stagnant process. Still, when William Faulkner wrote that "the past is never dead; it's not even past," he cautioned all of us to respect history's power.
And history, when it comes to the Arabs and Israelis, is worth pondering. It teaches that only when the regional table is set with the realities of pain and gain can America, pursuing relentless and reassuring diplomacy, forge agreements between the two sides.
It was the 1973 war, for instance, that allowed Henry Kissinger to use crisis, pressure and incentives to broker three disengagement agreements in 18 months; it was Jimmy Carter, rescued by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's extraordinary trip to Jerusalem in 1977, who brokered an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. And it was Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that triggered Operation Desert Storm and opened the way for James Baker's tough and smart diplomacy that compelled three strong but recalcitrant leaders (Yitzhak Shamir, Hafez Assad and Yasser Arafat) to send their negotiating teams to Madrid in October 1991.
The challenge, of course, for the Obama administration is that it lacks the stuff of which Arab-Israeli breakthroughs are made, particularly the leaders who must make the tough decisions.
