How did the administration falter in the Middle East?

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler examines why the Obama’s administration’s efforts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have faltered:

"There was an excess of zeal at first," said Edward S. Walker Jr., who was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the Clinton administration. "It is a noble endeavor to try to hammer out peace. But you have to look at the relationships. You have to read the players. They got out in front of studying the problem and were anxious to show progress."

Daniel Levy, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator now at the Century Foundation in Washington, summed up the administration’s efforts in recent days as "amateur night at the Apollo Theater." He said the administration did not game out the consequences of its demands on the parties — and then flinched. "They just dug deeper and deeper their own grave," he said. "All of this talk of negotiations doesn’t cut the mustard in the region."

The main stumbling block? The call for a strict settlement freeze, Kessler writes:

 The administration’s key error, many analysts say, was to insist that Israel immediately freeze all settlement growth in Palestinian-occupied territories. The United States has never accepted the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, but the Obama administration took an unusually tough stance. It refused to acknowledge an unwritten agreement between Israel and Bush to limit growth in settlements, with Clinton leading the charge to demand a full settlement freeze.

U.S. officials say that in the wake of the war in the Gaza Strip in the winter, they wanted to send a signal of toughness and push both sides to take positive steps to build an atmosphere for talks. By that measure, there has been some progress: Israelis and Palestinians have been deep in conversations trying to set the parameters for negotiations.

But Abbas, emboldened by the U.S. rhetoric, announced that he would not begin negotiations until settlements were frozen. Facing Israeli opposition, the administration appeared to back off the demand for a full settlement freeze, first exempting East Jerusalem and then signaling approval of an Israeli plan to exempt nearly 3,000 housing units on the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Abbas got into political trouble at home when he succumbed to U.S. pressure to delay U.N. consideration of a report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza; he later reversed himself. When Clinton met him Saturday and pressed him to accept the limited Israeli settlement plan as a basis for talks, he refused.

The Washington Post editorial page agrees that the administration’s call for a settlement freeze was a big mistake:

Has Mr. Abbas suddenly realized that settlements are the key obstacle to a Palestinian state? Hardly: In private, senior Palestinian officials readily concede that the issue is secondary. Instead, the Palestinian pose is a product of the Obama administration’s missteps — and also of the fact that the opportunity Mr. Obama said he perceived to broker a two-state settlement is not so visible to leaders in the region.

The editorial suggests that the best idea right now might be to back a Palestinian initiative to build institutions for a future Palestinian state:

The Obama administration’s working assumption has been that energetic diplomacy by the United States could induce both sides to move quickly toward peace. In fact, progress in the Middle East has always begun with initiatives by Israelis or Arabs themselves. At the moment, the most promising idea comes from Mr. Abbas’s prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who has vowed to build the institutions of a Palestinian state within the next two years, with or without peace talks. Negotiations between the current Israeli and Palestinian leaders could provide indirect support for that initiative, even if there is little progress. But the administration would do well to refocus its efforts on supporting Mr. Fayyad.