Posts Tagged Peace Process
Obama’s Speech Lacks Structural Integrity
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Iran, Israel, PPC, War on Islamism on May 22nd, 2011
I just finished watching President Obama address AIPAC’s 2011 Policy Conference, and I can’t say I was comforted.
The crowd was enthusiastic, as one might expect for a sitting US President who didn’t openly pull the rug out from under Israel. Obama mouthed all the right key phrases about not delegitimizing Israel, supporting its security, never questioning its existence or right to do so, and holding the Palestinians accountable. No President will ever say anything different.
But the speech was very much the Tacoma Narrows Bridge: beautiful from a distance, but lacking all structural integrity.
Even as he was saying, “We will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their words,” everything else he said indicated that he won’t.
Obama said that the world is impatient with a peace process, or lack thereof, that produces no results, which is why the Palestinians are pursuing their statehood ambitions through the UN. In order to forestall this, the Israelis must recognize the need for progress in negotiations.
This formulation completely ignores the fact that this is part of the Palestinians strategy, the whole Menendez-brothers-but-we’re-orphans Act, allowing them to avoid responsibility for their role in the talks’ failures. It presumes that the Palestinians had any interest in coming to an agreement under the current framework, and makes Israel to blame for Palestinian intransigence.
Moreover, by listing the regions of the world (Latin America, really?) that are frustrated with the lack of an agreement, he highlights his administration’s utter incompetence in defending Israel diplomatically, which is what a large part of his speech claimed that he had done.
Obama said that the PLO-Hamas agreement posed a “huge obstacle,” and that Israel couldn’t be expected to negotiate with people who want to destroy it, therefore, he will continue to press Hamas to fulfill the basic requirements.
Israel is expected to negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, without negotiating with Hamas? Or Hamas is to fundamentally transform itself from the equivalent of the Nazi Party into Social Democrats? One proposition betrays the conditions the President just set, the other ignores the reality to which he is supposedly so attached.
He focused again on his line concerning the 1967 borders, repeating “mutually agreed swaps,” and adding in that the Palestinians “must” recognize facts on the ground.
And if they don’t? The basic premise of everything is that there must be an agreement. After a speech that does little but reward Palestinian intransigence, why should the Palestinians do anything other than dig in their heels? If the Israelis open with an aggressive map, they’ll be quickly “reined in” by the rest of the world, that has no right to set terms, but every right to, well, set terms. And if they open with a reasonably map, it will be treated as a good basis for the beginning of negotiations.
He was silent on Jerusalem and the “Right of Return.”
But security and the Jewish character of Israel, two things Obama claims to want, are tied up inextricably with those two issues. For a President who opened the speech by congratulating himself he was remarkably silent on the two issues on which are the most zero-sum of all.
After months of having the Arab world ignore a President who repeatedly insists that they “must” do this and that they “must not” do that, the standing ovation he got in DC was probably dwarfed by the one he got in Ramallah and Gaza.
Nothing New? Tell That To Everyone Else
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Israel, PPC, President 2012, War on Islamism on May 22nd, 2011
Political apologists for President Obama didn’t waste much time in claiming that his Thursday speech didn’t really say anything new about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Too bad that none of the principal actors in the region are behaving that way.
We all know about the…tepid…joint appearance by Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama Friday. It came after a scheduled 30 minute meeting went for over two hours, leaving lunch and aides steaming outside the room.
Then, today, the Palestinians:
Following Obama’s Middle East speech on Thursday, in which he said that a future Palestinian State should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed upon land swaps, PA President Mahmoud Abbas called an emergency meeting of the PA leadership to discuss the new developments. Erekat said that the meeting could take place on Tuesday or Wednesday after Abbas, who is currently in Jordan meeting with King Abdullah, completes consultations with Arab leaders and the Arab League.
PLO Executive Committee member Hana Amira was quoted by Israel Radio on Sunday as saying that the Palestinians would cancel plans to go to the UN with a unilateral declaration of statehood in September if Israel would agree to negotiations based on the 1967 lines and freeze all building in West Bank settlements and east Jerusalem for a period of three months.
Right. The Palestinians decided to call an emergency meeting over “nothing new.” Evidently, the simultaneous translation into Democrat missed a few things.
Note also the timing and the demand. The three month building halt in Jerusalem – remember, that’s something the Palestinians had never called for before Obama did – is timed to end in September, when the UN vote could happen, anyway. The Palestinians can seize the opportunity to look amenable, continue to both obstruct and purse the UN option, and still call for a vote in September. If you argue that, well, that’s nothing new, you’re right. Except that that diplomatic angle relies on the rest of the world believing differently.
The Palestinians may be about to find out what Israelis and Jews should have discovered in 2008 – there’s an expiration date on everything Barack Obama says, everything – and on the Middle East, it can be as little as 24 hours. In the meantime, Netanyahu is already saying that the tiff was exaggerated, and Obama is already hedging and filling, at least a little, in his interview with the BBC, and I strongly suspect there will be more of the same in about 15 minutes (unless the President is late to his own speech again) to AIPAC.
Either the President really thought he was being pro-Israel, and had to have it explained to him why he wasn’t, or else he knew exactly what he was saying, and was surprised by the political blowback, especially among Jewish Democrat donors and fundraisers, who can probably still bring in more early money than Ramallah phone banks. In either case, it’s a continuation of the amateur hour that characterizes this administration’s foreign policy, 3AM or not.
