Palestinians remove some eggs from the American basket

Foreign Policy- This year may bring a close to American mediation of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. Expectations, usually low, have collapsed in the face of an unwilling, and increasingly self-impeding, U.S. peace broker. Indeed, freezing settlement expansion, as opposed to removing them altogether as mandated by international law, was long regarded as the lowest hanging fruit in peace negotiations. President Obama himself emphasized that the Jewish colonies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories hindered peace efforts and securing Palestinian statehood.

Yet, on the heels of a rekindled peace process, the Obama administration failed to successfully push Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend a ten-month partial moratorium on settlement expansion. More tellingly, the U.S.'s failure was marked by Israel's public rebuff of its military aid incentive. Suffering no consequences, Israel chose to continue its expansionist policies and to retain its existing U.S. aid package, thereby demonstrating the hollow nature of American pressure.

The crumbling negotiations and unwillingness of the United States to exact legally required Israeli obligations has finally compelled Palestinian negotiators to look beyond a U.S.-brokered peace and to a multilateral one overseen by the United Nations.

The Palestinians' loss of faith in the U.S. was inevitable given the superpower's myopic focus on absolute support for Israel at the expense of even the bare-bone statelet desired by PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority. The American position led to the ludicrous notion of establishing a Palestinian state without sovereignty, territorial contiguity, control over air space, borders, trade, security, democratic governance, fair water allocation, and diplomatic relationships in the region and beyond -- all of which Israel deems national security threats. Arguably willing to compromise on security matters, land swaps, jurisdiction over East Jerusalem, and the return of Palestinian refugees, even Abbas could not accept continuing negotiations in the face of a defiant Israel and its supine American benefactor.

As 2010 closed more and more observers of the conflict experienced a long overdue epiphany: the U.S. administration is allowing Prime Minister Netanyahu to strike the final blow against the two-state solution -- casting it, for better or worse, into the mounting bin of missed opportunities. Read more