The Mideast Peace Process: No Plan for Talks

This is the time for bold ideas to salvage Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel did not seize it. In his address to Congress, he showed — once again — that he has no serious appetite for the kind of compromises that are the only way to forge a two-state solution and guarantee both Palestinians their long-denied state and Israel’s long-term security.

President Obama showed more rhetorical initiative when he spoke, but he doesn’t appear to have a strategy for reviving negotiations. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is refusing to come back to the table and is apparently betting his people’s future on a misguided deal with Hamas and symbolic gestures.

This is more than just a wasted opportunity. Continued stalemate feeds extremism. And there is a deadline looming: Absent negotiations, Palestinians plan to ask the United Nations in September to recognize their state. The measure won’t get them what they want, and the United States will veto it when it gets to the Security Council. But the exercise will further isolate Israel and Washington.

President Obama vowed to revive the peace process but checked out when Mr. Netanyahu rejected his demand for a settlement freeze and Mr. Abbas refused to negotiate without it. Mr. Obama got back in the game last week. In a speech on the Arab Spring, he goaded allies, including Israel, to take political risks for peaceful change.

What drew the most attention was his call for negotiations on a Palestinian state based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders — with mutually agreed land swaps. The idea has been the basis of all negotiations for more than a decade, including those backed by President George W. Bush.

Mr. Netanyahu immediately insisted that Israel would never return to the “indefensible” pre-1967 boundaries. Playing to his conservative base at home, and on Capitol Hill, he ignored the second half of Mr. Obama’s statement about “mutually agreed swaps so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

Pretty much everyone but the hardest liners — on both sides — assumes that in a peace deal Israel will retain many of its West Bank settlements and compensate Palestinians with other land. On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged as much, saying that “in any peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders.”

His aides had raised hopes that Mr. Netanyahu would offer new ideas to revive talks, but there was really nothing new there. He insisted that Jerusalem “will never again be divided” and Israel’s Army would remain along the Jordan River. And while he basked in Congress’s standing ovations, Ethan Bronner reported in The Times that in Israel the trip was judged a diplomatic failure. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said Mr. Netanyahu’s “same old messages” proved the country “deserves a different leader.” Palestinians dismissed the visit and said they would focus on nonviolent protests leading to September.

So what happens now? More drift and recriminations, unless Mr. Obama comes up with a plan to get the parties into serious talks. We see no hint that he is working toward one. We are told that he has no immediate plans to appoint a new envoy to replace George Mitchell, who resigned, or to send Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the region. Negotiations will become even harder once the unity government with Hamas is formed and it gets closer to September. Time is running out.

The Mideast Peace Process: Washington Makes Things Worse

Only a few minutes after President Obama finished his carefully balanced speech on the Middle East last week, Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers began twisting his words to suggest that he was calling for an epochal abandonment of Israel.

“President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus,” said Mitt Romney. Tim Pawlenty wrongly said Mr. Obama had called for Israel to return to its 1967 borders, which he called “a disaster waiting to happen.” Rick Santorum said Mr. Obama “just put Israel’s very existence in more peril.”

Others went even further. Representative Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, a former presidential candidate, said Mr. Obama had “betrayed Israel.” The worst line came from Representative Allen West of Florida, who somehow believes Mr. Obama wants to keep Jews away from the Western Wall and wants to see “the beginning of the end as we know it for the Jewish state.”

Some Democrats were also piling on, evidently afraid Republicans will paint them as anti-Israel. It was not helpful when Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said that no one outside of the talks should urge the terms of negotiation, clearly repudiating the president’s attempts to do just that. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, and other Democrats have made similar statements.

Pandering on Israel in the hopes of winning Jewish support is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics, but there is something unusually dishonest about this fusillade. Most Republicans know full well that Mr. Obama is not calling on Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders. He said those borders, which define the West Bank and Gaza, would be the starting point for talks about land swaps.

Do the president’s critics even agree on the need for a Palestinian state next to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says he does? It is not clear that several of the Republicans would go as far as the prime minister, who at least noted that Mr. Obama does not want to return to the 1967 lines. But even those who do should admit that two-state proposals have always been along the lines sketched out by the president.

In 2007, for example, Mr. Romney told The Jerusalem Post that his administration would “actively work toward a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” What could the outline of that solution be if not the one Mr. Obama mentioned? Mr. Romney doesn’t address that question in his speeches. It is one thing to make noise on the campaign trail. It is quite another to lead a quest for peace.

How the Other Half Lives, Still

At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, visitors can view meticulously recreated moments in the lives of the immigrant families who lived there, like the Moores of Ireland. Their dark, stifling apartment sits ready for the wake of a baby girl, dead of malnutrition. This was in the 1870s, when America’s newcomers struggled mightily against poverty and isolation.

They still do. New immigrants crowd into derelict apartments. Parents toil, children suffer. But while most of the last centuries’ newcomers were Americans in the making, many today have no way to naturalize. They live in the shadows, so their American-born children do, too.

“Immigrants Raising Citizens,” a study by a Harvard education professor, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, followed nearly 400 of these young children in New York City. It found that while mothers and fathers showed great effort and ingenuity in trying to provide for their children, the children have paid a steep price for their parents’ precarious lives.

Depression, anxiety and crushing work schedules, plus the stress and discomfort of crowded apartments, make it hard for parents to provide adequate nurturing. Fear of deportation and lack of information keep parents from enrolling children in government programs that offer help with nutrition, child care and early education. From the start, the children’s development suffers. Their reading and language skills lag. These early results bode poorly for their future academic and job success.

If conditions are this bad in New York City, with its array of social services and nonprofit organizations, what would he have found in Arizona or Texas or other places where immigrants are pushed ever farther into the shadows? Professor Yoshikawa estimates that four million preschool-age children of immigrants are American citizens. Their hindered development will haunt this country.

End of the Line

In 1995, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred in the town of Srebrenica. It was the worst ethnically motivated mass murder in Europe since World War II. Now, finally, Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who masterminded that butchery, is where he should be — in custody, facing prosecution before the International Criminal Court and, we hope, a lifetime in prison.

The arrest should be a warning to other butchers that they, too, will be caught and held to account, no matter how long it takes. It is also a reminder that sustained international pressure works. Europe’s leaders made Mr. Mladic’s capture and delivery to The Hague a condition for Serbia’s admission to the European Union.

For more than 15 years, Mr. Mladic managed to evade capture, almost certainly with the help of some Serbian officials. Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, is a new sort of leader, and, last year, Serbia finally accepted responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre and apologized.

With Thursday’s capture of Mr. Mladic, he has proved his sincerity. Europe now has to prove its sincerity and move Serbia’s application to the European Union forward.

We hope the arrest will also facilitate reconciliation among Bosnia’s ethnic factions. There is plenty of blame. But the Bosnian Serb leadership in particular needs to abandon its fantasies about dismantling the multiethnic Bosnian state. It has few friends left in Belgrade and none anywhere else.

There is one more fugitive wanted for war crimes: Goran Hadzic. President Tadic vowed that he, too, will be arrested. But Mr. Mladic is the last of the big three butchers. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader is on trial in The Hague on charges of genocide. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president and the war’s architect, died in 2006 while his trial was under way. It is small solace for the dead, but these ruthless men ultimately are being made to answer for their crimes.