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US and Israel Head into ‘Letters of Assurance’

With the exception of Gilad Shalit negotiations and the conclusion of an Israeli "Survivor" reality TV season, the Israeli media has focused much of the final week of 2009 on one task: reading the mind of Barack Obama.

In the eight weeks since U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Israel, there has been almost nothing of substance from the Obama Administration for local analysts to go on.

Obama’s MidEast emissary George Mitchell is expected to return to the region at some point, and the Obama administration is rumored to be preparing two ‘letters of guarantee’ – one letter to Israel and one to the Palestinian Authority -as a basis for the restarting of talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Dr Ronen Hoffman, an veteran Israeli negotiator and research fellow at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya, said much of the speculation in the media was incorrectly dubbing the potential new American move as a ‘letter of guarantee’.

"There is a difference between a letter of assurance and a letter of guarantee," he told The Media Line. "A letter of guarantee is a more concrete, strategic agreement between two states. That’s not the case here. A letter of assurance, on the other hand, is a confidence building measure written in vague language about a very specific issue."

"It basically gives you a general feeling or somewhat vague direction rather than something concrete," he said. "It’s not new and it’s not something concrete but negotiations are all about atmosphere and this is a way of creating momentum."

Dr Hoffman argued America was unlikely to take a more aggressive tack in its approach to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the coming year.

"I think in 2010 the Americans will start to put gradual pressure on both sides to resume the peace talks," he said. "But I don’t think Obama is really willing to put strong pressure with any kind of sanctions behind it."

"To be honest I don’t think letters of assurance will lead to anything special," Dr Hoffman added. "I’m not sure that the Obama administration is really aware that it has failed to build confidence on either side, so in a way they are trying to move into the second phase [negotiations] without having succeeded in the first."

David Makovsky, director of the Washington Institute’s Project on the Middle East Peace Process, argued that the letters were necessitated by a diplomatic standoff.

"We’re at an impasse in terms of setting the terms of reference for a round of negotiations," he told The Media Line. "The Palestinians would like to see a commitment that the baseline for the negotiations is the 1967 borders, so if Israel wants to add settlement blocs it takes away land swaps on the Israeli side of the 67 lines.”

"The Israelis say these are not the terms of reference they are a result," Makovsky said. "Israel says we are not going to tell you in advance that the baseline is the 1967 borders, we’ll negotiate, we’ll see, maybe we’ll end up there maybe we’ll end up somewhere else, we don’t know yet."

"The way out is that the U.S. puts forward its position on this issue as a way of breaking the impasse," he said. "The idea of a letter of assurance is a way of trying to articulate American policy… I wouldn’t use the word guarantee. It’s not about a guarantee of an outcome or of a negotiation. It’s a way of trying to articulate a set of assurances as to where America stands, but it doesn’t have the force of an agreed position of all the parties."

Makovsky speculated that America was likely to focus on territorial compromise over the coming year.

"In my view the Jerusalem issue and the refugee issue and even security are really complicated and no leader on either side has prepared their public on this issue," he said. "For the [Obama] administration to do a full blown initiative and say ‘This is the Obama plan on refugees or Jerusalem’, when the parties are not even there, for the administration that’s pretty explosive."

"I think where the differences ironically are narrowest are over land," Makovsky said. "Olmert and Abbas agreed to this 100% baseline, or some would call it the ‘one for one’, and there are elements in the [Obama] administration that see a logic in the Palestinian position that 67 plus swaps gives Israel a lot of flexibility and it’s not such a bad formula."

"If you commit to 100% the negotiations become almost mathematical," he said. "But if you don’t want to commit to the principal of 100%, the Palestinian fear is that then the negotiations become endless. So this letter of assurance could include that, we’ll have to see."

Makovsky argued that the idea of a unique approach by Obama to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had been overblown.

"There was never an ‘Obama Peace Plan’," he said. "The Obama administration I think felt that if you’re going to get into that level of detail then you better be sure there’s a good chance you can succeed in getting it."

"Basically we’re done with that first phase of confidence building and now talking about negotiations," Makovsky added. "We can debate why the confidence building failed, but when all is said and done, more was said than done."