Mid-East talks have no chance

THE preliminary peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Amman were suspended after the latest session adjourned last week, and at the time of writing it was not clear whether the Jordanian and Quartet organisers could persuade the PLO leaders to come back for more this month.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas intends to consult the Arab League before deciding.

Whether or not the talks resume, the realistic expectation of their outcome will almost certainly not be to usher in final status negotiations. So what are the sponsors and participants up to? In reality, every concerned party put on a good show in Amman for reasons not related to a two-state solution.

Beginning with the hosts, the Hashemite kingdom sees a useful opportunity in Cairo's preoccupation with revolutionary transition - it can present Jordan as an alternative patron of Israeli-Palestinian peace. This enables King Abdullah to appease the Palestinian sector of Jordan's population by showing that Amman can play a positive role.

By taking the international stage, the king presents an enhanced leadership profile to other sectors in Jordan that have been critical of his leadership. And by working with the non-Islamist PLO, it is easier for him to fend off Islamist pressure to enhance the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, or to host the Hamas leaders for anything beyond a photo-op visit, which is precisely what he did.

That the king has no real hopes for Israeli-Palestinian peace can be gleaned from his decision to delegate Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh to run the Amman meetings. Judeh functions as little more than a high-level information officer for the kingdom: he is no Kissinger.

The PLO leadership under Abbas has understood ever since the conclusion of its talks with Israel's Olmert government in 2008 that the substantive gaps between the two sides on issues such as access to holy places and the right of return are unbridgeable.

Renewed talks with Israel have no chance of success if the objective is a two-state solution that ends all claims. Hence Abbas is working on alternatives, such as UN recognition of Palestine and resolving Fatah's differences with Hamas.

The PLO is also waiting to see how the Arab revolutions affect its standing and capacity to negotiate. Basically, its agenda in Amman has been to humour King Abdullah and the Quartet, whose goodwill it needs, particularly in fending off possible inroads by Hamas.

The Netanyahu government in Israel also has an interest in boosting the Hashemite kingdom. Israeli governments have traditionally seen Jordan as a strategic buffer between Israel and aggression from the east, and a potential moderating factor in the Palestinian equation. Under present circumstances, Israeli refusal to attend the talks in Amman could have provoked further deterioration in already poor Jordanian-Israeli relations.

As for the international factor, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands the Obama administration will not put serious pressure on Israel over the Palestinian issue in a US election year, he does not wish to take on the Quartet needlessly, especially when he knows PLO impatience with these negotiations plays in Israel's favour. He knows the gap between the sides makes serious negotiations - the kind that might compromise his hard-line government - very unlikely.

Netanyahu is contemplating elections in Israel this year, and wants to appeal to centrist voters by demonstrating how "reasonable" Israel can be in negotiations with the Palestinians. Accordingly, on January 26, Netanyahu's delegate to the Amman talks, Yitzhak Molcho, finally presented an official position on territorial issues. He sketched out a two-state border not close to the 1967 lines, with no Palestinian capital in Jerusalem. Not only is this completely divorced from the Palestinian position, and not only does it not approach the demands of the Quartet, but Molcho's lines are unacceptable to the more hawkish factions in the Netanyahu coalition.

Netanyahu apparently reasons that he can take chances with his coalition in an election year and can defend this position to Israeli voters, while Washington will not bother him at least in the year ahead. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat refused even to listen to a presentation of Israeli security concerns by an Israeli army general, thereby rendering Netanyahu's negotiating life even easier.

Finally, there is the Quartet and its component members: the US, the EU, the UN and Russia. The raison d'etre of this body and its representative, Tony Blair, is a peace process. Ostensibly any process will do, even the frustrating, pointless one we are witnessing, especially in US, French and Russian election years.

Yet the Quartet can assert that "any kind of dialogue is better than none" only up to a point. Rather than reassessing the failures of the Oslo formula and coming up with a new model, the Quartet pursues a path of folly.

If I didn't know better, I would invoke that definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein: "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

Yossi Alpher is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University