Israel has turned down a proposal by the Biden administration to facilitate a high-level peace summit with US, Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian participation.
The American media outlet Axios reported that a senior Israeli official told US counterparts last week that conditions are not ripe to restart the peace process at that level.
Israel’s current government has repeatedly pointed out that the Palestinian leadership isn’t ready to make peace.
See: Israel-Palestinian Peace Process is Dead, For Now, Says Bennett
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid also know that their own coalition, made up of disparate ideologies, won’t be able to reach a consensus on such sticky matters as final status borders, Jewish settlements and who controls eastern Jerusalem.
The concern is that a big photo-op event along the lines of the failed Camp David summit in 2000 would create an “expectation crisis” that would see Israel compelled to make more dangerous concessions with little or no Palestinian reciprocity.
So for now, Israel is quietly asking America to back off.
A must-read on this topic is Stan Goodenough’s piece from late last year:Washington to the PA on ‘Palestine’: “We’ve got this”
Ongoing incitement
Interestingly, even as Washington is pressing Israel to return to the negotiating table, it is also acknowledging that the Palestinians continue to violate one of their primary peace commitments: to halt all incitement against Israel and the Jews.
A US State Department report dated June 2 features research by a Jerusalem-based monitor of educational material in Palestinian Authority textbooks and their systematic messaging regarding the promotion of violence, martyrdom and jihad.
Research by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Culture Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) found that textbooks made for “all grades and subjects” in Palestinian schools contained such incitement.
In fact, the American report concluded that textbooks in the official Palestinian school curriculum had in recent years become “more radical than those previously published.”
Perhaps Biden should learn the lessons of his predecessors and not get ahead of himself. Unless foundational problems like institutionalized Palestinian incitement are first corrected, high-level summits will ultimately accomplish little.
With reporting by JNS.
