Israelis and Palestinians? Direct Talks With Whom?

After a whirlwind week for the Israeli prime minister in America, using news headlines as your only guideline you would be forgiven for assuming direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians were not only imminent, but planned; not only possible, but a forgone conclusion; not only productive, but also creative.

Which begs the questions: Are the parties willing to make the concessions necessary to advance talks, once they take place? Are direct talks the right route now? And, which parties exactly are taking part in the talks?

Observers are skeptical of all the optimism, to say the least.

"Israelis and Palestinians cannot bilaterally negotiate peace," said Daniel Levy, senior research fellow and co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation. "They tried for many years, often under more propitious circumstances and failed. The jury is in -- there is no Israeli-Palestinian directly negotiated peace deal to be had -- only an externally driven set of parameters, (U.S.-led) guidelines, or the United Nations Security Council. In fact, peace is partly the wrong framing -- the '67 occupation needs to be brought to an end -- whether it's an end-of-conflict peace deal or not. Better to focus discussions with Israel on what needs to happen for them to end the '67 occupation, than create a bizarre false symmetry between an occupying power and a stateless, occupied people whose national movement is split and the branch you are talking to faces major challenges to its credibility."

Aaron David Miller, now public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served as an adviser to both Republicans and Democrats in the region, most recently as senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations. "There is a mythology about direct negotiations," he said. "They are critically important, but they are not determinative," he explained, noting that the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty was brokered by Jimmy Carter, disengagement by Henry Kissinger and the Madrid agreement by Jim Baker.

"So the notion that somehow direct negotiation will get where we need to go is wrong. In fact they may, paradoxically, accelerate a crisis -- because (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu and (Mahmoud) Abbas will be at same table, and the gaps that exist on core issues will appear sooner. It will either force a crisis in the negotiations or force the Obama administration to come to the rescue with its own plan, and, where they are right now, it is not possible."

Those core issues are the same ones that have stumped Israeli prime ministers and Palestinian leaders for the last 20 years: settlements and territory, refugees and Jerusalem, security and borders, water rights.

"Direct talks, as currently imagined, would be with the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] -- which is Fatah," New America's Levy said. Fatah is led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. "But [talks] exclude Hamas. That split should be a key concern for all parties, but has thus far been left out of the public conversation."

Hamas, of course, doesn't recognize Israel. As Netanyahu bluntly, if fairly, told Larry King this week: "I'll sit down with anyone who will recognize my existence. Somebody who calls for our destruction, my destruction, is unfortunately not a partner for peace."

And the United States still considers Hamas a terrorist organization, which leaves the government of Gaza officially away from the table, and out of the conversation, with American interlocutors as well. "The Israeli policy, and ours as well, is to engage Fatah," said William Zartman, a conflict resolution expert and professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. "The theory is that we will do deals with them which will make them look good -- which will close out Hamas and bring in or reward Fatah."

But that essentially means dividing the problem of Israeli-Palestinian peace into its piecemeal parts, addressing the West Bank but not Gaza, and considering a Palestinian State that is not acknowledging the other Palestinian government.

Aaron David Miller calls it the Palestinian "Humpty-Dumpty problem. You have, essentially, two polities . . . I do not see any way of putting the Palestinian Humpty-Dumpty back together again." And as for the vision of talks without Gaza involved: he dubbed that Obama's "Field of Dreams" vision." The analogy here is that if Abbas and Netanyahu build a structure of peacemaking, it will feel so compelling that Palestinians will say to Hamas, 'It's this way or the highway' and will make Hamas oppose it by force, or sign up. That's the logic."

Miller doesn't fault Netanyahu for the line he used across Washington and New York this week, a militaristic note that Israel wanted a demilitarized Palestinian State. "I met with Netanyahu six weeks ago and he laid it out for me as he laid it out for Larry King. '[then Prime Minister, now Defense Minister Ehud] Barak withdrew from Lebanon and we got rockets, Sharon [withdrew] from Gaza and we got Hamas rockets. I'm not going to be number three.'"

And yet Benjamin Netanyahu talks like a man who has extended a hand and met only air at a party. As though the situation is simply that the Palestinians have left the Israelis, forlornly, at the negotiating table, rather than the reality: neither side, until now, has being particularly keen on meeting at all.

"What is there to prevent a meeting between the prime minister of Israel, in Jerusalem, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who's 10 minutes away in Ramallah? That's when you have traffic. Without traffic, it's seven minutes," Netanyahu blithely told Larry King at the end of his week in the United States "I find it perplexing and unnecessary that .... Senator (George) Mitchell has to travel halfway across the world to relay messages between President Abbas and myself. There's no need for that. We should sit down. We have very serious issues to discuss. Our security, the question of where the borders will end up, the question of settlements, the question of Palestinian refugees, the question of water. All these things are crucially important. The only way that they're going to be resolved is if we actually sit down and negotiate a peace."

And President Obama sounds like a man ready to have his version of a famous photograph, a new Begin-Sadat handshake. A Rabin and Arafat moment in the Rose Garden. Abbas and Netanyhau, hands extended.

"We probably won't have a better opportunity than we have right now," he told Israel's Channel 2 news, promising that a peace agreement was possible before the 2012 U.S. elections.

Both men have lauded the idea of immediate direct talks. President Obama reached out this week to President Abbas, to mollify him for being kept mostly out of the loop. But not every Palestinian was jumping for joy at the idea of restarted direct negotiations. "The (Palestinian) position is not just an emotional reaction -- it's a well-thought-out position saying we've talked forever and they've built settlements forever," Dr. Hanan Asharwi, a PLO executive committee member, told James Zogby on his television show. "We negotiated in good faith and what they did was negate negotiations and destroy the two-state solution on the ground. So the question is one of urgency, and one of intervention to curb Israeli behavior. It's not a question of just talks."

Says Zartman of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies: "The problem is neither side trusts each other. ... That was the Palestinian lesson after [the] Oslo [Peace Accords] -- the Israelis didn't go home and sell the document. Neither did Palestinians. Then [both] governments changed and Oslo was put in dustbin."

Netanyahu and Obama talked about confidence-building measures that will pave the way. Those, Aaron David Miller said, might include easing up on Palestinians' ability to move freely throughout the West Bank, a dismantling of checkpoints, and an extension of Palestinian security forces into areas previously patrolled only by the Israeli Defense Force. But as for Gaza, as long as Gilad Shalit, the Israel soldier kidnapped by Hamas four years ago, is in captivity, there's not much more we can expect to see regarding the blockade or current policy.

"We are just at the beginning of a very long and complicated road," said Miller, who wrote a long treatise on his own pessimism on the "religion of Middle East peace" in June's issue of Foreign Policy Magazine.

Pressed by both the looming September deadline signaling the end of the moratorium on settlement building, and the Arab League's promise to go to the United Nations by September, the Israelis and Palestinians may well find themselves sitting across from each other at a table by the end of the summer. But will those talks be productive or detrimental? Will they succeed where all else has failed? With the way things look now, no one should book the Rose Garden for a celebratory photo-op.