WORLD SEPTEMBER 28, 2009
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With apologies to Winston Churchill, President Obama may not have presided over the beginning of the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last week in New York, but he seems finally to have marked the end of an embarrassing beginning to his Middle East diplomacy.
The president and his senior advisors came to office nine months ago eager to say and do what George W. Bush didn’t. In place of regime change, Islamo-fascism, and "you’re either with us or against us," Obama focused instead on behavior change, engagement, and an emphasis on "mutual interests and mutual respect."
Early on, one of the biggest policy shifts came on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Obama said he wanted action from day one, in contrast to the perception—however erroneous--that Bush waited until the Annapolis conference, seven years into his presidency, to throw himself into the hard work of peacemaking. The result was Obama’s appointment, on the first day of his administration, of former senator George Mitchell as Middle East envoy and his own personal commitment to push the process forward.
Mitchell was a sound choice and the president’s sense of urgency was itself inspiring. However, the strategy that he, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Mitchell’s team together adopted to jumpstart a diplomacy with a weak Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the old-new Likud prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was anything but.
Under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the recipe for peacemaking began with a heavy dose of U.S.-Israel partnership. Because the peace process is, at its core, about asking Israelis to give up the tangible asset of land for the intangible and inherently revocable promise of peace, building Israel’s confidence in the strategic alliance with Washington has long been considered elemental.
The Obama team adopted a different approach. The process itself had gone stale, they surmised, and was in need of new energy. The jolt would come from securing two huge concessions. First, the White House would win from Israel a public commitment on a total freeze in construction in the "occupied territories"; then, the Administration would leverage that concession to win from Saudi Arabia, arch-guardian of Muslim sensibilities, an agreement to take unprecedented steps toward normalization with Israel.
here was a certain logic to this approach. Bringing Arab states into the process was a wise move; the divided Palestinians almost surely would never make the necessary movements to achieve peace without wider Arab backing. And targeting Jewish settlement activity was certainly meaningful to many Arabs, who saw rising numbers of Israelis in the West Bank as the antithesis of what a peace deal was supposed to promise.
But, remarkably, before the president went to Cairo and declared that "it is time for these settlements to stop" and before the Secretary of State characterized a freeze as "essential," no one in either the White House or Foggy Bottom seems to have asked some obvious questions. What does a freeze actually mean--no expropriation of land? no new settlements? no building in existing settlements? Would such a freeze apply equally to building in Jerusalem, the capital city that Washington does not recognize as such, as in some remote hilltop outpost? And would the eventual expiration of an agreed-upon period of freeze imply Washington’s tacit approval to start building again?
On the political level, the failure to think through the freeze idea was even more damning. Was the freeze really necessary to re-start negotiations, given that Palestinians--from Yasser Arafat on down--have had no compunction negotiating with Israel for the last sixteen years without one? Once Washington went out on a limb and articulated its demand for a total freeze--including, as Clinton said, no "natural growth exceptions"--could the Arabs accept anything less? And wouldn’t Washington’s direct bargaining with Israel over a freeze relieve the Arab side from having to contribute anything to this process?
The result was a diplomatic train-wreck. In June, after Obama and Clinton publicly demanded a freeze--but before the Americans reached a deal with the Israelis – the president flew to Riyadh to ask Saudi King Abdullah to ante up in terms of incremental normalization with Israel. The king reportedly sent the president packing. As the former Saudi ambassador to Washington wrote recently in The New York Times, "For Saudis to take steps toward diplomatic normalization before this land is returned to its rightful owners would undermine international law and turn a blind eye to immorality." Translation: "We aren’t going to pay anything to help you Americans achieve a settlement freeze. You are on your own."
Washington’s fixation on stopping settlement activity did have a powerful echo in at least one Middle East country: Israel. America’s freeze-mania managed to transform Israel’s deep national ambivalence about the wisdom of expanding West Bank settlements into patriotic support for the right of Jews to live in their ancient capital. By giving off vibes that it wanted a freeze even more than the Arabs themselves, and that it wanted to halt building even in Israel’s capital, the administration succeeded in making Netanyahu more popular than when he came to office in March. Obama’s own approval ratings among Israeli voters fell to single digits--and this is before he had shown whether he had the mettle to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the region’s real strategic threat. Getting into a fight with Israel without having anything to show for it from the Arabs was not what the president bargained for.
In New York last week, Obama finally changed course. To the consternation of Abbas, who had been happy to watch the Americans negotiate on his behalf for the past few months, the president announced that restarting peace talks would no longer be contingent on reaching agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze. America wanted the parties to begin negotiations, without preconditions, as soon as possible, he said. And in a move replete with irony, he specifically asked Hillary Clinton--who had articulated the Administration’s most hardline stance on settlements in June--to report back to him in mid-October on progress toward resuming peace talks. Speaking in the Waldorf-Astoria, the President’s words applied as much to him as to the Israeli and Palestinian leaders sitting nearby: "It is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that's necessary to achieve our goals."
This nod to realism is a positive sign. Obama was not the first president to come into office with a policy rooted more in ideological attachment than dispassionate analysis, but, on this topic at least, he shifted gears more quickly than most. Indeed, another line from his Waldorf remarks suggests that he may now be on the right track in terms of the peace process. "I'm committed to pressing ahead in the weeks and months and years to come," he said. Yes, Mr. President, even with the best of intentions, forging peace in the Holy Land is indeed the work of years.
Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
7 comments
Obama is obviously in the middle of the path along the way to the end of the beginning of a false start along the path to a false conclusion about the middle of the beginning of the beginning the middle or the end of the Middle East as we know it. Alas, like so much else we are finding out about him his balls are rhetorical too. Why oh why can't all the problems there be reduced down to a doctoral thesis. You can't help but wonder though: He must know how the world really works in and out of the Middle East. He can't be as naive as the media that cover him. Surely he must sit down with Tim from time to time and discuss into the night all the valuable information he takes away from his pals in Bilderberg. Is he sincerely struggling to come up with a way to parry with the world's shifting ruling classes....grappling to forge something more for the rest of us while still being accepted as "one of them". Again, in and out of the Middle East. Even if none of that were true though the futility of achieving a "breakthrough" in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is as palpable as it's ever been. There are simply too many folks who have a stake in stoking the flames----religionists, ideologues, war profiteers. The "diplomatic train wreck" was inevitable because these same folks are still basically in charge of the switches that control the tracks the trains roll on. Obama against that? Right. Hasn't he learned this lesson from Wall Street? Or is he learning to write the lessons himself at home and abroad? But this should have unfolded concurrently. Why the disconnect? Who IS this guy? You can't help but ask yourself this with each new twist and turn. But he certainly is NOT someone "rooted in ideological attachments" as Satloff suggests. That's laughable. In any event, the reactionaries are still ascendant in Israel. So what does it matter what happens politically here? The "special relationship" is hardly likely to budge much one way or the other in the short run. The next 100 years, say? Satloff assures us however Obama has become a "realist". Translation: he has basically caved in to AIPAC Inc. and all the reactionaries here at home. But don't tell Marty that, of course. george walton d/a/julian
- iambiguous
September 28, 2009 at 2:44am
The Palestinians from Arafat on down not only negotiated without preconditions for 16 years; they negotiated without compliance, murderously violating the Oslo accords with the acquiescence of the Clinton administration, in particular see-no-Arab-murder Dennis Ross. When Oslo climaxed at Camp David in 2000 with the struggling Palestinian Arabs again given a (second) state carved out of Palestine, they rejected it as they did in 1947 --- with armed attacks against Israel. In the desperate efforts to salvage the agreement that Arafat on down publicly declared (in Arabic only) their intention to never accept, George Mitchell’s commission was formed. The commission was to find the facts about why the “peace process” exploded as if that were not blatantly obvious. The commission was contingent upon an end to the killing. Arafat did not end the killing, but the commission proceeded anyway. The commission’s work, like the peace process itself, was constructed to assess blame everywhere but where it was richly deserved. Predictably, Israel was found lacking in the integrity of its efforts. The rejection, again, of “the solution” did not make even a footnote in Mitchell’s report. Carrying on the tradition of declared Israeli culpability for Arab racist hate, Obama and reactivated champions of the Oslo peace farce, Mitchell and Ross, will solve a problem they adamantly refuse to identify. This, of course, has the ice cube’s chance in a hot tub of creating a real and lasting peace. Israel will pay in blood for more years of more of the same. P. S. How can you negotiate anything for 16 years ? One would think that after 6 years (or 6 months), there would be nothing new to say.
- jimprice
September 28, 2009 at 3:06pm
Mr. George Walton, The Arab-Israeli conflict was solved twice --- in 1947 and again in 2000. The "two state solution" (really three-state solution, including Jordan, presided over dictatorially by a refugee Hashamite king) was handed to the struggling Palestinians and twice flushed down the toilet by them. The conflict is not driven or caused by AIPAC. The solution is not obstructed by AIPAC. Stand-by for the third solving of the conflict, followed by the fourth and fifth.
- jimprice
September 28, 2009 at 3:33pm
Jim, And that's not counting all the times I solved it by punting it over to you, is it? Just joshing. Yes, solutions like 1947 are the usual default mechanism...the rubicon...of choice; and throughout human history. Get the "civilized world" to draw up the boundaries [and the narrative] and let the "brutes of war" follow through. Then the winners get to call it anything they want, right? Still, over in The Spine there are still plenty of folks bent on turning the brutes into Randy Cohen. Whaddya think, are they, uh, succeeding? The civilized world always has to metasticize the Hiroshimas into a morality tale of their own making. Why not just take what you want and simply dare someone to take it back? Nope. That's just not, well, civilized, is it? But if you are going to be wiping your ass with the "truth" before flushing it down the toilet, how civilized can you be? Oh, sure, AIPAC has almost NOTHING to do with ANYTHING Washington does with respect to Israel. That's as silly as suggesting Wall Street has something to do with the Congressional and White House reaction to the economic crisis. Or that the military industrial complex plays anything other than an advisory role in manufacturing U.S. foreign policy. It's all the fault of THEM. george walton d/a
- iambiguous
September 28, 2009 at 7:02pm
jimprice, you are talking to George Walton as if he were rational. Big mistake. The guy mostly recycled Chomskyite "factoids" and otherwise has no idea about what he is talking about. He knows next to nothing about the Middle East except that he thinks "the Jews are the problem," and he is incapable of learning about it. At least Obama has changed his mind on some issues. George Walton, never changes his mind which is understandable since he doesn't have one. He is not someone about whom it can be said “a mind is terrible thing to waste.”
- jacksondyer
September 29, 2009 at 12:04am
So first of all we have Satloff telling us that the occupied territories are really only quote-occupied territories-unquote. He doesn't really explain that one, so I assume it's to mean we really don't know whether land that was originally partitioned off to the Palestinians and that Israelis now live in is "occupied." Cute. What does a freeze mean? asks Satloff. Well, Mr. Satloff, for starters, it probably means not building the 3500 units that Netanyahu is turning into facts on the ground. Furthermore, it probably means not building into East Jerusalem, especially because Israel, in the past, has shown a willingness to split Jerusalem. What Satloff calls a "nod to realism" is really just a caving to Israeli lobbying groups like AIPAC. To quote Andrew Sullivan, we give Israel money and they tell us to fuck ourselves.
- MOLLYSIMON
September 29, 2009 at 8:58pm
It would seem to me that both parties have to abide by "no pre-conditionism" and that the Obama administration has to hold them to that. Is that possible?
- wrk4kbh
October 3, 2009 at 10:45am