WASHINGTON: The Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla puts a wrench in new US-brokered indirect Middle East peace talks and exposes how the key problem of Gaza has been ignored, analysts said Tuesday.
In a sign of concern, US President Barack Obama’s administration sent its special envoy George Mitchell right back to the Middle East to preserve the fragile "proximity" talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
The raid "will complicate things temporarily," analyst Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations told AFP. "It puts (Palestinian leader) Mahmud Abbas in a bad position politically to continue the proximity talks."
However, once news media attention "is directed elsewhere, I think they’ll return to the proximity talks relatively soon," he predicted.
Cook said the deadly raid on the six-ship flotilla also exposes how "there’s no strategy" for the Obama administration in the Gaza Strip — which is left out of peace talks because it is run by the radical Islamist Hamas movement.
"There will be the outrage about Gaza… Maybe there will be a call for some sort of donors conference to figure out what to do with it and then the beat will go on," he added.
In the end, he said, the United States and its partners in the Middle East quartet — Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — will stick to its ground rules for excluding Hamas from the peace talks.
Those rules require Hamas to lift its refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, forsake violence against the Jewish state, and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
"We’ve put all of our eggs in the Mahmud Abbas basket and these proximity talks and so I don’t see any kind of major shift other than rhetorical for the moment," Cook said.
Abbas heads the Palestinian Authority, which controls only the West Bank.
Turkey, which is sympathetic to Hamas and insistent about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, dispatched the aid flotilla in defiance of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza.
The subsequent botched Israeli raid left foreign peace activists dead.
Analyst Nathan Brown said "events in Gaza could not have come at a worse time for Obama’s diplomacy" after he achieved "minor but real accomplishments" in launching indirect peace talks in the last few weeks.
"Today’s events will hurt Israel’s relations with many actors in the international community and complicate diplomacy for the next several months," said the analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"It is difficult to say how this will impact the indirect talks that are currently underway," he said.
"Few people expected great progress from the talks, so it is unclear if there is a truly viable peace process to disrupt."
Nonetheless, "Washington had invested political and international capital …to get them started in the hopes of eventually moving to direct negotiations between Israel and Palestinian leaders," he said.
And while the Obama team has tried to revive talks for a two-state solution to the conflict, it has "not paid as much attention to improving the situation in Gaza or to relations between Fatah and Hamas," he said.
"Without a solution to Palestinian divides and the crisis in Gaza, real movement on the peace process remains unlikely," Brown concluded.
Analyst Marina Ottaway, also of Carnegie, said the Obama administration, which has tried to turn a new leaf with the Arab and Muslim world, faced a difficult choice.
"Obama must decide whether to sacrifice his credibility in the region in order to continue a well-established US tradition of mild rebukes toward Israel, or break with ‘business-as-usual’ policies and condemn the Israeli action," the analyst said.
"Regardless of how the United States responds, this (raid) will make peace negotiations more difficult in the near future," she added.
