Yoel Marcus / Obama has spoken about us, but not to us

[henank]

This could have been titled "How Obama is losing Israel's left".

"Letter on the way, start worrying." This saying came to mind in the wake of the discussion between U.S. President Barack Obama and a group of Jewish leaders last week, with its implied warning that Israel is liable to lose its special status in America. The truth is that our discourse with Obama is not as intimate as our discourse was with former president George W. Bush. Obama aspires to accelerate the peace process and is behaving as though everything starts and ends with the question of whether Israel will or will not freeze construction in the settlements.

Sixteen years have passed since the Oslo Accords, and we have gotten nowhere, except for the fact that the Palestinians turned us into moving targets during the intifadas and suicide attacks. Without any connection to the accords, former prime minister Ariel Sharon evacuated 21 settlements, 17 of them in Gush Katif, and the Palestinians, instead of turning the area that was evacuated into a tourist mecca, as the Egyptians did in Sinai, turned it into a base for launching Qassam rockets. And since there is still no serious partner on the Palestinian side, it is hard to get excited by the optimism of Obama, who expects a quick peace treaty not only with the Palestinians but with Syria as well. Optimism reminiscent of the cartoon character Speedy Gonzales.

With all of Obama's goodwill and all-embracing ambition, there is something naive, not to say infuriating, about his policy of rapprochement and about the whistle stops he has chosen on his travels dealing with our issue. He spoke in Turkey, he spoke in Egypt, he appeared before students in Saudi Arabia, in Paris, in England, in Ghana and in Australia. Even there the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was mentioned. His plan to begin rapprochement with Iran, which openly threatens to destroy Israel, and to reassure its fanatic leadership, which cruelly suppresses any attempt by the younger generation to get rid of the regime of the ayatollahs, is delusional.

The only place where he hasn't been is as president Israel. He has spoken about us, but not to us. That was precisely what the Jewish leaders complained about in their discussion with him last week. Obama assumed he did a great thing when he spoke in Cairo about the suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. What is infuriating about these appearances is the implied distortion: that we deserve a state because of the Holocaust. Although, as a believing Christian, Obama is familiar with the Bible, his disregard of our historical connection to the Land of Israel, and obscuring the fact that the Palestinians are unable to overcome their passions and to be worthy partners to a peace agreement, is extremely annoying.

read the whole thing

[henank]

1. On a similar subject

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2009/07/obamas-opening-gambit/

...Obama’s advisers argued that the Palestinian issue was the sine qua non for redressing the balance. Strike a powerful note on the settlement issue, they told the President, and the Arabs will gravitate toward you in response.

... Netanyahu was certainly shaken by this power play, but hardly coerced. In a step that the White House did not foresee, he quickly ran to capture the moral high ground in Israeli politics.

Shortly after Obama’s address from Cairo, Netanyahu delivered a speech of his own. In it, he tacked to the political center, presenting himself to the Israeli public as the representative of a mainstream consensus on national security. Approximately two-thirds of all Israelis support the position that their prime minister staked out. On the specific issue of settlements, Netanyahu reaffirmed the basic lines of the Bush-Sharon agreement: natural growth, yes; settlement expansion, no. “We have no intention to build new settlements or set aside land for new settlements,” he said. “But there is a need to have people live normal lives and let mothers and fathers raise their children like everyone in the world.” The warm reaction to the speech in Israel gave Netanyahu renewed political capital. He now turned to his critics in Washington with a warning of his own: “Do you really want to fight with three quarters of the Israeli public over the building of kindergartens?”

Obama is now on the horns of a dilemma. If he backs down on natural growth, he lays himself open to Arab claims that he is a hypocrite. On the other hand, if he sticks to his guns, he will become Israel’s senior city planner, rejecting building permits for a school one day, and a new home addition the next. The president can certainly win the fight over building permits, but he must already be asking himself whether it is really worth the prize. Victory will eat up at least a year of precious time, and it will not have a strategic impact.

If Obama found Netanyahu difficult to coerce, he failed to charm the Israeli Left. Israeli pundits have noted the conspicuous absence of a pro-Obama coalition on the Israeli political scene—this, despite the fact that the Israeli Left detests the settlements as much as or more than Obama himself. Many Israelis simply do not understand how the country’s security dilemmas fit into Obama’s larger scheme. With respect to the issue of gravest concern, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Obama’s strategy remains worryingly opaque. And with respect to the Palestinian question, many Israelis are skeptical about the power of any American president to overcome the Hamas-Fatah split, and to create conditions on the Palestinian side that will achieve a two-state solution capable of guaranteeing Israeli security. In a context fraught with uncertainty, Obama is inviting the Israeli Left to join with him in a fight against Netanyahu in order to achieve… well, what precisely?

In addition to the vagueness of his goals, Obama’s body language has dealt the Israeli Left a weak hand. The Cairo speech cast Israel as a bit player in a U.S.-Muslim drama. The President, stressing his Muslim ancestry, did not take the time to fly to Jerusalem, where he might have reasoned with the Israeli public about the value to it of abandoning the Bush-Sharon agreement. Instead, his advisers denied flatly (and falsely) that such an agreement had ever existed. As a consequence of this disingenuousness, many Israelis fear that the administration aims to buy goodwill from the Muslim world by distancing itself from Israel, and they wonder whether settlements are not simply the first of many concessions that will be demanded. With such doubts swirling in the air, it is difficult for the Israeli Left to trumpet the Obama agenda.

This is quite a long piece but again I would urge you to read the whole thing.

[TomClash]

2. Vomit

. . . is the best word to describe this drivel.

If you rest your existence on the Peel Commission and the Bible, you bask in the stench of colonialism and religious fundamentalism.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. What left?

The fault lies with previously left-wing Israeli groups for moving to the right, not with Obama for continuing to maintain left-wing positions.

Labour, under Barak - the man responsible for the failure of Camp David - has stopped being left-wing on the issue of the IP conflict; Kadima was founded by the man responsible for Sabra and Shatila; Likud is Likud and now even Likud is not fringe right due to the expanded presence of YB, Jewish Home, Shas etc.

On the IP conflict (Israel still has various groups who are admirably liberal on social issues, to be fair), the Israeli left is basically limited to Meretz and to the Arab parties.

The problem is not that Obama is not appealing to the Israeli left; it's that the Israeli left isn't there any more.

Israel simply is not interested in peace. That isn't Obama's fault.

[bemildred]

4. I'm pretty sure Obama is/was addressing the Israeli government.

I doubt that he spends much time thinking about what the attitude of the "Israeli left" is going to be, certainly no more than Nuttyahoo does, which is not much.

The argument presented here is old, and at some point you are going to have to admit you are not getting traction with it any more, and come up with something more consistent with reality.

The problem is that the government of the USA can no longer AFFORD to ignore the fact that the settlements and the Israeli government's "Don't ask, Don't tell" settlement policy are contrary to the national interests of the USA.