Obama goes boldly, bungles badly in Mideast
All the pretty words in the world and all the high-sounding sentiments, no matter how eloquently expressed, can't change the hard, cold facts of life. On the contrary, good intentions divorced from reality can make matters worse. President Obama is learning that unhappy lesson in the collapse of his high-profile drive to jump-start peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ended her Mideast trip acknowledging the administration cannot bring Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the negotiating table with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Abbas is threatening not to seek re-election, blaming America and Israel for the failure.
Washington's scaled-back plan is to keep contacts between the two sides going at a level sufficient to prevent an outbreak of major violence. That's made harder by Iran's arms shipments to the terrorists Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The seeds for today's disarray were sown in Obama's June 4 speech of outreach to the Muslim world. It was designed to mark a break with the past. The problem is the past has history that cannot be ignored. Let's review some of it.
President Bill Clinton, in his 2000 Camp David initiative, brought the Palestinians the best deal they had ever been offered. But terrorist Yassir Arafat had no interest in peace, scuttled Clinton's designs and initiated a terrorist campaign marked by ghastly suicide bombings killing civilians.
In a 2002 address to the U.N., President George W. Bush declared U.S. support for a state for the Palestinians if they abandoned terrorism. Once again, Arafat torpedoed peace hopes -- the Israelis intercepted an arms shipment of terror weapons from Iran headed for the Palestinians.
After Arafat's death, Bush worked to resurrect talks. Meanwhile, Hamas pushed the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and established a terrorist regime that bombarded Israel with rockets. Israel responded to the intolerable attacks with its Gaza offensive last winter. Until then, the two sides were talking, with the Israelis again offering generous terms.
Enter Obama. Rather than adopting a go-slow, build-on-the-past approach to a fragile situation, he did it his way -- with a speech. Inadvertently, he exploded two grenades amid the process.
First, he declared the "aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied" -- a reference to the Holocaust. By not combining that with an affirmation of the 3½ millennia of Jewish history in the Holy Land, he fed the Arab fantasy that a guilt-ridden West imposed Israel on the Middle East.
Second, he elevated Israeli settlements into a make-or-break issue for peace talks. "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," he said. Yes, past administrations opposed settlement expansion, but it wasn't a first-tier issue. And every realistic plan for a resolution to the conflict recognizes that Israeli communities comprising 80 percent of the settlers and located near the 1967 borders (actually cease-fire boundaries from the Arabs' 1948 war of extermination) would be included in Israel in a land swap.
Whereas the Palestinians once conducted talks while settlement construction continued, Obama gave them an excuse to just say no. Even after Netanyahu proposed what Hillary Clinton accurately called "unprecedented" limits on building, Abbas refused to return to the bargaining table. The Arab world, primed by Obama's speech, erupted in outrage at Clinton, and she had to backtrack.
Abbas, unfortunately, was always a weak player hampered by the authority's history of corruption. But Obama's speech served to undermine moderation on the Palestinian side. While Netanyahu made concessions, Arab nations rejected out of hand Obama's call for them to make small confidence- building gestures to Israel.
What a tragic turn of events for a presidency built on the golden notion of hope.