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Passover Eve Terror Attack Leaves 1 Dead as Talks Falter

A suspected terrorist attack on an Israeli family driving in the West Bank – assailants riddled the family’s car with bullets as it was en route to Passover dinner on Monday – has reportedly claimed the life of one man, left his wife and child injured, and thrown into doubt efforts to put Israeli-Palestinian peace talks back on track.

The family in the car was on its way to a Passover seder in Hebron on Monday evening, The Associated Press reported. A man was killed, and his wife and one of his children were injured. Israeli media reported that the woman was pregnant and that several children were in the car.

Israeli officials late last week had already provided grim predictions regarding the possibility that the two sides might ink a final status agreement before the April 29th deadline of a nine-month U.S. peace push spearheaded by Secretary of State John Kerry. A subsequent three hour Sunday night meeting ended without reports of progress.

Nonetheless officials on both sides – and analysts in the West – had in recent days taken to emphasizing that the parties might substantively advance the prospects for peace outside of the Kerry framework, either in concert with each other or via uncoordinated unilateral steps. The bilateral Sunday night meeting between the parties had already been held without the presence of Washington’s mediator Martin Indyk, who in any case had seen his position complicated in recent days by reports that he was driving a media campaign to scapegoat Israel for the collapse of the Kerry initiative.

Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl on Sunday made the case that “[a]lmost every positive development in Israeli-Palestinian relations has happened outside the ‘peace process,'” and that the U.S. has played a positive role when it backed up and bolstered pragmatic leaders from the two sides.

The Obama administration could have kept the forward movement going by continuing to promote the construction of Palestinian institutions — including a democratic, corruption-resistant government — and by pushing Israel to turn over more security responsibility and remove impediments to the Palestinian economy. Instead it chose to embrace the ever-failing peace process and bet that it could quickly broker a deal between two very reluctant leaders: Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas. The wager not only has foundered, but it also has partly reversed the more organic change that was underway

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas had in recent weeks abandoned the high-stakes negotiations and instead resumed a campaign of diplomatic warfare against Israel, submitting applications to 15 international treaties. The gambit put the Palestinians on the wrong side of core Oslo Accord commitments, stretching back decades, under which they committed to abstaining from diplomatic moves that would upgrade the status of disputed territories.

It risked confirming fundamental worries that Ramallah will eventually exploit a structural asymmetry in peace talks – Jerusalem is expected make irreversible territorial and security concessions, while the Palestinians are asked to reciprocate with reversible agreements – by pocketing Israeli concessions and then abandon talks anyway.

It remains unclear whether Palestinian diplomats will be able to walk back Abbas’s turn to international legal instruments, after Switzerland confirmed late last week that it had accepted the Palestinian request to accede to the Geneva Conventions.

[Photo: VimeoM / YouTube]