In reality, of course, the two leaders don’t agree on very much at all. Back in 2011, there was the famous slip, when a microphone caught Obama grumbling about Netanyahu with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French President. And earlier this year, as Netanyahu was preparing for a general election, there was another flap when Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic, reported that, in the weeks after a United Nations vote on the status of the Palestinians, “Obama said privately and repeatedly, ‘Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are,’” and that the President believed the Israeli leader, with his policy of constructing new settlements in the West Bank, was leading his country down a path, in Goldberg’s words, “toward near-total isolation.”
Despite calls from the Financial Times and other international observers for the President to deliver some home truths during his trip, I doubt we’ll hear anything much from Goldberg’s Obama this week, although it will be interesting to see what, if anything, he does say about the settlements. (Signaling his intentions pretty clearly, the reëlected Netanyanu just appointed a settler, Uri Ariel, as Israel’s housing minister.) From Obama’s perspective, the immediate purpose of the visit is to bolster his credibility, in the eyes of Israelis and of Israel’s supporters in this country, as an implacable friend and ally. Thus his speech at the airport, in which he said, “I see this visit as an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bond between our nations,” before adding that “our alliance is eternal, is forever.”
The White House has billed Obama’s trip as a listening tour, a phrase that Hillary Clinton popularized. On Wednesday, he is meeting with Shimon Peres, the Israeli President, and attending an official dinner with Netanyahu. Thereafter, he will inspect the Dead Sea Scrolls; visit the tomb of Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern Zionism; and deliver a speech to thousands of Israeli students. He is also set to chopper over the West Bank to Ramallah, where he will meet with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, and Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister. If things don’t go off smoothly throughout the trip, it will be a big surprise. At this stage, it’s not in the interest of any of the three parties—American, Israeli, and Palestinian—to have a public row.
By far the most interesting question about the visit will be discussed, if at all, only behind closed doors: What is Obama really up to? Is he merely fulfilling one of the periodic obligations of his job—visiting a close ally—and playing to the Israel lobby? Or is this trip a precursor to something more serious: a determined effort to restart the peace process and achieve a two-state solution before it’s too late?
The tea leaves can be read both ways. During his first term, Obama adopted a safety-first approach to Middle East policy. After creating high expectations with his June, 2009, speech in Cairo, in which he said “America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own,” he conspicuously failed to follow through. Evidently, he came to the conclusion that until the Israeli government—i.e., Netanyahu, primarily—was seriously interested in cutting a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians, there wasn’t much point in him getting involved.
Since Netanyahu has just been reëlected, the same depressing calculus would appear to apply going forward. The obstacles to a peace deal remain as formidable as ever. In fact, given the current settlement-construction program, they are getting more formidable by the day. The second-term White House foreign policy team looks just as cautious as the old one. And Obama is the same Obama: a savvy and calculating politician who doesn’t take on missions he believes to be doomed.
On the other hand, he’s also an ambitious and well-meaning fellow with a keen eye for his role in history. LIke Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before him, he’d doubtless like to be remembered as the President who solved the Arab-Israeli conflict. And anybody who wants to grab that mantle had better get cracking soon. As a lengthy and well-reported article in this week’s issue of The Economist makes clear, developments inside Israel and the Palestinian-administered territories mean the mere possibility of a two-state solution is fast receding. Content behind their security wall, many Israelis see little reason to make concessions to the Palestinians. In the Knesset, two-thirds of Netanyahu’s colleagues in the Likud party have joined a “Greater Israel Caucus” that wants to keep the West Bank forever. In Gaza, meanwhile, Hamas continues to rule out any accommodation with Israel.
Whilst Obama hasn’t given much indication of his second-term intentions, his appointment of John Kerry, who is also in Israel this week, as his Secretary of State would suggest that he hasn’t given up hope of reaching a peace deal. A longtime supporter of Israel in the Senate, but a vocal opponent of its settlement policies, Kerry criticized the Obama Administration in 2011, saying it had “wasted a year and a half of potential peacemaking.” According to a recent profile in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Kerry “favors an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that first deals with borders and security and would thus ‘solve the settlement problem,’ as he put it.”
The idea of going straight to negotiations over a final territorial settlement clashes with the views of some Middle East experts, who think relations between the two sides have deteriorated to such an extent that there will have to be a series of initial confidence-building measures. Writing in the Times earlier this month, Dennis Ross, the veteran United States diplomat who worked in the Obama Administration from 2009 until 2011, called for a series of initiatives such as organizing classroom exchanges between Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren, restricting new construction to existing settlements, and including Israel on Palestinian maps.
Such an approach sounds like small ball. A President who came to office on a platform of breaking down old divisions and inspiring hope, and who no longer has to worry about getting reëlected, can surely aim for something larger. During Bill Clinton’s second term, he tried his best to achieve an over-all peace deal, and, at Camp David in 2000, he came pretty close to succeeding. Obama, having enhanced his standing in Israel on this trip, and with his resolute support over the past four years, will have the standing to launch a similar effort. But it may be another while before we find out whether he’s up for it.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: John Cassidy
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