Middle East peace efforts: lessons from healthcare reform

It took a year of trying for President Obama to persuade Israelis and Palestinians to enter into "proximity talks" to resolve issues standing in the way of a final peace plan. But as we learned from the stunning announcement this week -- during Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the region -- that Israel had approved 112 new settlement units in the West Bank and 1,600 new settlement units in East Jerusalem, there is a lot that can go wrong.

Assuming the Israeli announcement doesn't derail the process before it gets underway, the Obama administration will need to move decisively. And in doing so, it should keep in mind three valuable lessons from the fight for healthcare reform.

The first is the importance of maintaining ownership. The administration made clear that getting affordable healthcare to all Americans was a top priority. But it then farmed out the details to legislators, who spent a year making a hash of things.

Similarly, James L. Jones, Obama's national security advisor, has made it clear that the Israeli-Arab conflict is a top priority for U.S. national security interests in the Middle East. And it should be. Nothing would help us more in every theater of operations than a U.S.-engineered resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In contrast to that assessment, however, other U.S. officials -- including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton -- have said that although the United States wants an agreement, "we can't want this more than the parties." But, in fact, the U.S. may want an agreement more than this particular Israeli government.

Israel's Likud leadership may have agreed to resume talks, but their actions seem designed to ensure failure. In addition to approving new settlements, Israeli officials have signaled that they want to reopen issues that have already been resolved in previous talks -- such as where borders should be drawn -- rather than taking up where things last broke off, as called for by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Tzipi Livni, leader of Israel's Kadima party.

This is oddly similar to the Republican demand that Congress go back to the beginning on healthcare in the wake of Scott Brown's election to the Senate. Revisiting issues that have already been settled is not part of an honest attempt to reach an agreement, but rather an effort to run out the clock on this president.