Israel Debates No. 6 8 February 2011 How the Direct Peace Talks between Netanyahu and Abbas that began in September 2010 came to a Quick End On 7 December 2010, US Secretary of State Clinton had to acknowledge that the direct peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas that had started in the presence of US President Obama, Egypt‟s President Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan only three months earlier had been suspended without a sign of success. On the eve of the direct talks Netanyahu had stunned both his counterpart and public opinion as he addressed Abbas in an unusually conciliatory tone with the words: “President Abbas, you are my partner in peace. And it is up to us, with the help of our friends, to conclude the agonizing conflict between our peoples and to afford them a new beginning.” It quickly became apparent that this was nothing but pure rhetoric. Despite considerable political pressure on both sides, Barack Obama had failed to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to essential concessions towards a peace deal. A sense of doom and gloom set in, since no one knows how to overcome the deadlock. Ever since Netanyahu‟s right wing governing coalition came to power in April 2009, th ere has been virtually no progress in the peace process. Netanyahu responded to the Obama administration‟s continuous pressure with tactics of limited concessions aiming to maintain the status quo. If it hadn‟t been for the US pressing both sides, neither the commitment to the two-state solution in the Bar-Ilan speech of June 2009, nor the 10 month halt in settlement construction in the West Bank announced in November 2009 or the resumption of the – at first indirect (May 2010), then direct(September 2010)- peace talks with the Palestinians would have come about. Netanyahu never took concrete steps towards a two-state solution, since he would have had to expect his right wing coalition partners, especially Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, to walk out of the government. In addition to this, Netanyahu's course can count on broad support amongst the Israeli population and, as a result of the crisis within the Labor Party and the Israeli Left, meets with hardly any resistance worth mentioning. At the same time, the Palestinians failed to take advantage of the settlement freeze – the first construction halt of this extent ever to have been announced by an Israeli government- and the possibilities it created. Instead, they stuck to their and the Americans‟ in itial requirement that there would have to be a halt to all building in Israeli settlements including East Jerusalem and maintained that direct talks were subject to this condition. Furthermore, since Mahmud Abbas failed to overcome the rifts between the Hamas and Fatah movements, any type of agreement would have been valid for the West Bank but not for the Gaza Strip. Israel emphatically rejects such an arrangement. When the settlement freeze ended in September 2010, Israel resumed construction in the West Bank. The Palestinians thereupon, while not declaring the talks as terminated- there had been only three meetings between Abbas and Netanyahu – did not return to the negotiation table either. Following the mid-term elections for the US congress in early November, the US made one last move to avoid a final breakdown in negotiations. In return for a continuation of the Jewish settlement freeze in the West Bank and – but this was not officially confirmed – an unofficial construction freeze in East Jerusalem, the US offered Israel generous security assurances, including 20 1