After Failing At Peace, Kerry Again Weighs Into Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

After failing to secure an Israeli-Palestinian accord during his tenure as U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry has apparently jumped back into the deep end of the peace process. Israeli media reported that the former American envoy recently met in London with a close associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Hussein Agha, himself a veteran peace negotiator. Kerry was quoted as telling Agha, “he [Abbas] should stay strong in his spirit and play for time, [so] that he will not break and not yield to President [Donald] Trump’s demands.” It comes amid a major row between the U.S. administration and the PA, which imposed a boycott on the White House in the wake of its recognition in December of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Thereafter, Abbas effectively disqualified Washington from its historical role as mediator of the peace process and, instead, has attempted to secure international support—primarily from European nations, but also from Russia and China—for the development of a new multi-lateral paradigm for talks. According to the report, Kerry offered to help in this endeavor before uniquely blaming President Trump for the current impasse. As top diplomat in the Obama administration, Kerry formerly led a major American peace push, which, in 2009, included pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to implement an unprecedented ten-month construction freeze in Jewish communities located in the West Bank. Despite the concession, Abbas still refused to negotiate for the first nine months of the building suspension and, when he finally did, demanded that the policy be renewed indefinitely, effectively scuttling the process before it took off. This pattern repeated itself during Obama’s second term, when a new initiative spearheaded Kerry forced Netanyahu to release more than 100 terrorists from Israeli jails—but once again Abbas found a pretext to walk away from the negotiating table. A White House official revealed on Tuesday that there has been no contact between the PA and American Mideast negotiators Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt since Trump’s Jerusalem declaration.