IT WAS a good speech by any measure, and it will go some way

towards lessening the mistrust of the world’s Muslims towards the United

States. But when it comes to the core issue that has put Americans and

Arabs on different sides of the fence over the past decades, the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will take more than words.

What Barack Obama said in Cairo sounds pretty sensible: “…The only

resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two

states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and

security….And that is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with

all the patience and dedication that the task requires.” But what was

possible twenty years ago is a lot harder now.

Twenty years ago, the ‘two-state solution’ was a dramatic

breakthrough. By resurrecting the old United Nations idea of legally

partitioning Palestine, it finally offered a way out of the endless

confrontation between dispossessed Palestinians and triumphant Israelis

that lay at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Twenty years ago, Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation

Organisation (PLO), had only recently accepted the need to settle for a

Palestinian state in the 22 per cent of Palestine that was not incorporated into

Israel after the Independence war of 1948-49. Israelis were still forbidden

by law from talking to the PLO, and there were still several years to run before

Israel would officially accept the same goal in the Oslo accords. But it

was a time of hope in the Middle East.

The two-state solution was a triumph of realism over ambition, and

the proof of its realism was the fact that both sides hated it.

Palestinians had to surrender their hopes of ever recovering their original

homeland and settle instead for a divided mini-state in the West Bank and

the Gaza Strip. Israelis had to give up the dream of a large and secure

state, stretching from the sea to the Jordan River, and remove the

settlements they had scattered all over the Occupied Palestinian

Territories, since they had conquered them in the 1967 war.

Both sides felt they were making huge concessions, but making

concessions to reality is giving up things that you never really had. The

Palestinians never had the slightest hope of recovering their lost homes in

what is now Israel, either by negotiation or by force. The Israelis could

hang onto the West Bank and the Gaza Strip militarily, but only at the cost

of ending up with a country that contained more Palestinians than Jews.

So, make the deal, and get on with your lives. That was what Arafat

and Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin decided to do when they signed the

Oslo accords in 1993, and maybe if Rabin had lived, that would actually have

happened. But Rabin was murdered in 1995 by an Israeli extremist opposed to

withdrawal from the Occupied Territories — and his successor was the same

man who re-emerged as prime minister in the recent Israeli elections:

Binyamin Netanyahu.

During his first prime ministership in 1996-99, Netanyahu

successfully stalled on delivering the steps towards Palestinian

independence outlined in the Oslo accords. By the time he left office, both

Israelis and Palestinians were becoming disillusioned with the prospect of

two states living side-by-side in peace.

That disillusionment facilitated the rise of the PLO’s greatest rival,

Hamas, which echoes the Israeli right in rejecting the whole two-state

idea. Opinion polls still find majority support for the two-state solution

among both Israelis and Palestinians, but the majorities have been

shrinking for years.

More importantly, both Hamas, among the Palestinians, and Likud and

its more extreme allies in Israel are in a position to sabotage any

two-state deal. Hamas directly controls over one-third of the Palestinian

population in the Gaza Strip. Given Israel’s proportional voting system,

it is getting harder and harder to construct a coalition government there

that does not contain one of the parties that are dedicated to blocking the

deal. The two-state solution has been on life-support for years.

Resurrecting it is not impossible, but it will be very hard to do.

However his private views may have evolved over the years, Netanyahu simply

cannot agree to the creation of a Palestinian state and the withdrawal of

Jewish settlements from the West Bank without destroying his coalition

government. Nor can the PLO deliver Hamas’s assent to the two-state

solution, and without it, the Gaza Strip is not part of the solution.

So, if Obama is as serious about promoting this solution as he

sounds, his strategy must aim at two intermediate goals: Undermining

Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel, and subverting Hamas’s control of the Gaza

Strip.

Both goals require exactly the same policies in Washington: Vocal

and resolute opposition to any further expansion of Israeli settlements

(including ‘natural growth’), and firm, consistent support for a genuinely

independent Palestinian state.

Obama has made a good start at the first task, bluntly telling

Netanyahu that the secret promises that President George W Bush made to

Likud about keeping the settlements all lapsed when the ex-president left

office. Now he has to start working on the Palestinian side of the

equation. Perhaps his next big speech should be in the West Bank.

(Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist)