Israel is refusing to see what Obama wants
By Niva Lanir
The most embarrassing argument came from a senior political source. "We," he complained after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned from Washington, "don't understand what the Americans want. The secretary of state said this and the vice president promised that .... So what do they really want from us?"
In a country that has more experts on American policy than on its own policies, this is a troubling question. The prime minister, the first among the Americanologists, doesn't understand; his messengers for dialogue with the administration are having difficulties understanding, so they send their advisers to meet the media and announce that they don't understand. The ambassador also doesn't understand (well, the Israeli ambassador in Washington is not meant to understand. He is meant to explain.)
The Israeli leadership's dyslexia requires no diagnosis. It's made obvious by a number of facts: The Americans have a president who can walk and chew gum at the same time. He's not evil, he changed the rules and he even bothered to announce the change. Henceforth he himself, not a ministering angel, sets the administration's policy and its handling of the economic crisis, the national health insurance legislation, the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian threat and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - all at the same time.
Why then are more and more envoys, advisers and mediators needed to tell the Israelis what is so clear to everyone? What intellectual effort is required of the forum of seven senior ministers to understand that the U.S. president sees the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the path of the Green Line, for a limited amount of time - and therefore will not show restraint where his predecessors held back for more than 40 years?What's so hard to understand? Israel's governments and their leaders have not changed their positions during the past 40 years. From the reaction in Jerusalem, you would think it's about some hidden wisdom that requires a particle accelerator to understand.
Barack Obama is nothing like George Bush, father or son. He is determined and more daring than Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and in Jerusalem, we must admit, there is no new David Ben-Gurion or even a modest copy of Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Rabin. Netanyahu and his government are behaving like the three monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil - they just don't grasp the situation. But unlike the monkey that covers his mouth, in Jerusalem they talk. How they talk. About the circumstances, the needs, the exigencies. The only thing they don't talk about is peace. And there is no plan or Israeli initiative for peace. But really, how much can you achieve in a single year in office?
more:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1160892.html
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