A Test of Israel’s Character

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

NEW YORK — At a dinner hosted by American Jewish leaders for the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, I was seated with a senior U.S. diplomat to my left, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization to my right, and Abbas opposite.

It was like listening to a rousing peace overture as an ominous leitmotif of disaster keeps returning with ever greater insistence.

While Abbas referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his “partner in peace” and said it would be “criminal” if Palestinian and Jewish leaders failed, the American diplomat and Yasir Abed Rabbo of the P.L.O. kept whispering in my ear that the mother of all train wrecks was looming. “Netanyahu is playing games,” Rabbo said.

I came away from the dinner convinced the United States is on the brink of a diplomatic fiasco. Less than a month after President Obama put the imprimatur of a White House ceremony on renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks, the negotiations are close to breakdown. If that happens, as Netanyahu and Abbas know, Obama would look amateurish.

The two leaders need the United States, an incentive to avoid humiliating Obama. But with just a couple of days to the expiration Sunday of an Israeli freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank, both sides are digging in. Despite Obama’s public plea to Netanyahu — “It makes sense to extend that moratorium” — the Israeli government seems to have rejected a formal extension.

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