America No Deus Ex Machina: John Kerry Can’t Even Get a Truce Between Israel and Hamas

A year and a half ago when John Kerry took over
as secretary of state at the start of President Obama’s second
term, he set his sight on the quixotic holy grail of U.S. shuttle
diplomacy, a Palestinian-Israeli peace. Today, with Hamas and
Israel locked in a violent struggle, John Kerry has found he can’t
even negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, with The
New York Times reporting that Israel told U.S. officials they
did not need, and were not interested in, another round of “shuttle
diplomacy” by Kerry. The U.N.  Security Council has also
called on both sides to
cease fire.

Egypt has taken the lead on negotiating a ceasefire between
Hamas and Israel, a role it’s assumed on and off since signing a
peace treaty with Israel in 1979. That treaty was negotiated at
Camp David with the help of President Jimmy Carter and insured by
the promise of billions of taxpayer’ dollars in U.S. aid aid to
Egypt and Israel, an arrangement that continues to this day. That
treaty ended a state of war between Egypt and Israel that began
during the 1948 war that followed Israeli independence, and was the
first time an Arab state recognized Israel. It also involved the
withdrawal of Jewish civilians and troops from the Sinai peninsula,
which Israel occupied after the Six Days’ War in 1967. The
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty also led to Egypt being suspended
from the Arab League for a year and eventually the assassination of
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by Islamist extremist s.

Thanks in large part to the annual U.S. aid, the peace treaty
has survived nearly 40 years despite widespread disapproval among
the Egyptian population and even when the Egyptian government was
headed briefly by a president from the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohammed
Morsi vowed to
respect the peace treaty with Israel and
during the last flare-up between Israel and Hamas he tried to
broker a ceasefire, as Egypt is doing again now.

John Kerry would desperately like to be able to claim some kind
of victory in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process but his failure
to make any progress so far, even as expectations are lowered,
illustrates why the American government is a less-than-ideal, and
hardly necessary, broker in whatever “peace process” may still
exist. The U.S., for example, does not recognize Hamas so on the
Palestinian side U.S. diplomats can only talk to Fatah, which has
effectively no power in Gaza. Because of its aid to Israel, U.S.
diplomats aren’t seen as unbiased brokers. And as Israel’s defense
minister Moshe Yaalon showed when
he said he wanted John Kerry to win a Nobel Peace Prize so he
could leave Israel alone, there’s a sense that U.S. involvement in
Israeli-Palestinian peace process is more a matter of prestige than
peacemaking per se. The U.S. government should give Yaalon what he
wants: disengage from the peace process and stop
subsidizing the Israeli military. Maybe it’ll open the door for
Israel and Palestine to settle their problems on their own the way
they want.