COUNTERPOINT: CAN PRESIDENT OBAMA BRING PEACE TO THE MIDDLE EAST?
Obama’s Middle East Policy Is A Failure
Last September, when President Obama invited Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the White House to launch a new round of peace talks, he invoked the great historical figures on both sides of the conflict who had come before them. “Each of you are the heirs of peacemakers who dared greatly - Begin and Sadat, Rabin and King Hussein - statesmen who saw the world as it was but also imagined the world as it should be,” the president said. “It is the shoulders of our predecessors upon which we stand. It is their work that we carry on.”
What Obama failed to mention is that for all of their effort, none of those brave statesmen managed to bring the Israelis and Palestinians one step closer to peace. Arguably, we are further than ever from achieving a viable two-state solution to this seemingly intractable conflict.
During his two years in office, President Obama has offered no substantive policy shift from previous administrations, no specific proposals for achieving peace between the two sides, no framework for dealing with final status issues, nothing fresh or new whatsoever save for an unbounded sense of confidence that he could achieve in a year what all of his predecessors failed to achieve in their entire tenures in office.
It didn’t have to be like this. When Obama visited Cairo last year, he spoke eloquently about the daily struggle of Palestinians living under Israeli “occupation” (the first sitting American president ever to use that word). He followed that historic speech by calling for an immediate and unconditional halt to all Israeli settlement construction in the Occupied Territories —“not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions,” as Hillary Clinton famously put it.
When that demand was ignored, the Obama administration immediately backpedaled, accepting a ten-month moratorium on new settlement construction in the West Bank. As that moratorium expired last month, President Obama sent a letter to Netanyahu in which he offered more aid, more weapons, and more attention to Iran’s nuclear ambitions in return for a 60-day extension of the settlement freeze. That too was rebuffed, leaving Obama looking weak and ineffectual to both allies and enemies in the region.
Since then, another 600 settlement units have been authorized for construction, adding to approximately half a million Israelis who currently live over the Green Line, in what is supposedly designated as the future Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian president has walked away from direct negotiations while, according to a Netanyahu aide, the Israeli prime minister is content to wait for a Republican majority in the House of Representatives to assist in “repelling the American president’s initiative.”
If there is any other way to describe the present state set of affairs other than utter failure, I do not know it.
All is not necessarily lost. The president still has an opportunity, particularly after the midterm elections, to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process. It means breaking from the Bush-era policy of pitting Hamas and Fatah against each other and instead using intermediaries to bring Hamas into the negotiations. It requires spelling out the consequences for both sides if America’s demands are not met. There is no reason why the US should not link the billions of dollars in American taxpayer money that is sent to the Israelis and Palestinians every year to their respective obligations in working toward a two-state solution. And finally, it necessitates doing more than merely talk about a Palestinian state. The United States should join with the European Union and the United Nations in stating that its intention to officially recognize the existence of an independent Palestinian state in two years if negotiations toward a two-state solution are not put back on track. Netanyahu cannot ignore that statement.
These may be bold, unprecedented steps. But that is precisely what is needed if Obama wants to avoid the same fate as the “peacemakers” upon whose shoulders he claims to stand.