Kerry indefatigable in pursuit of peace

John Kerry has been US Secretary of State for precisely one year, and he has already 1) rescued President Obama from his ill-considered promise to bomb Syria if it crossed the "red line" and used poison gas; 2) opened serious negotiations with Iran on its alleged attempt to build nuclear weapons; and 3) taken on the job of brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

Getting Obama off the hook was useful, and may yet lead to the US ending its support for the insurgency in Syria, which at this point would probably be the least bad outcome. Opening negotiations with Iran was long overdue, and makes the nightmare prospect of an American or a joint US-Israeli air attack on Iran daily less likely.

Kerry is indefatigable. He has been to Israel/Palestine eleven times in the past year, and spent as much as a hundred hours face to face with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas or their close advisers. Unlike all the previous "brokers", he has been astoundingly discreet: not a hint of what has been said in private has leaked into the public domain. And yet there is almost no hope of a real peace deal.

If persistence in the face of all the odds were enough, Kerry would be the man who finally made it happen. (Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon recently complained that his approach is "obsessive and messianic.") But Kerry has no leverage: he has to rely on the desire of the two leaders to make the "peace process" work, and it just isn't there; not, at least, on any terms that both would find acceptable.

The list of deal-breakers includes almost every topic under discussion: the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, whether Jerusalem can be the joint capital of Israel and Palestine, whether Israel can maintain a military presence in the Jordan Valley, the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes, and Israel's demand that the Palestinians recognise it as an explicitly Jewish state.

This last demand, which was only raised in the past couple of years, seems deliberately designed to be unacceptable to the Palestinians. Not only are they required to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Israeli state (which they have already done), but also to give their blessing to the ethnic and religious character of that state.

It is not normal in diplomacy for one state to comment upon the internal arrangements of another, let alone to give them its public support. Even the United States, Israel's closest ally and supporter, does not officially recognise it as a "Jewish state". The Israeli demand is an attempt to rub the Palestinians' noses in their defeat, and why would you set out to do that if you really wanted a deal?

The Palestinian insistence on a "right of return", however rooted in natural justice, is equally self-defeating in practice. Everybody knows that a peace deal must mean compensation for the refugees of 1948 and their descendants, not a general right of return to what is now Israel, for that really would mean the end of the "Jewish state". But no Palestinian leader has ever dared to say so out loud.

So why, then, has John Kerry embarked on his quixotic mission to make the "peace process" work? It has been effectively dead for at least a dozen years, although it remains unburied because the pretence that it is still alive allows everybody to avoid hard decisions. But Kerry, with his nine-month deadline to achieve a comprehensive "final-status agreement" (which expires in April), is taking it seriously.

His own explanation is lyrical but opaque: "I believe that history is not made by cynics. It is made by realists who are not afraid to dream." But the business about "making history" - that, perhaps, is sincere. Kerry has had a long and interesting career as a senator, and even took a shot at the presidency, but this is probably his last big job, and he wants to make his mark.

As the reality of what he is up against strikes home, he has scaled back his ambitions a good deal. For some months now he has been talking about a more modest "framework" deal by April that would establish a set of basic principles for further talks.

Such deals commit nobody to anything, and are therefore a popular way of pretending to make progress, but he'll be lucky to get even that.

The French general Pierre Bosquet, watching the suicidal charge of the British Light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854, said: "It is magnificent, but it is not war. It's madness."

Kerry's foredoomed quest for a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians is magnificent too, in its own peculiar way, but it's not diplomacy. It's hubris.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.