Yesterday Meryl observed that once again:
Mahmoud Abbas has said the Palestinians will not resume direct talks until… and now you get to fill in the blank, because he keeps on changing the rules.
Rabbi Kaufman wondered if the administration has taken note:
That said, the Obama administration seems to have taken a different track lately, one less conducive to this Palestinian goal and at a distance from J Street’s lobbying position. …Yet, one cannot infer too much from the reports of the recent meeting between Netanyahu and Obama because they could be motivated by a desire by both men to hide problems that are occurring behind closed doors. On the other hand, the change in public is important in and of itself.
What is clear from this meeting is that the administration’s position of publicly pressuring Israel to make concessions, as if primarily their lack is preventing the advancement of peace, is no longer American policy. In fact, the Obama administration seems to have abandoned the entire tactic of pressuring Israel in the hope of eliciting movement from the Palestinians and Arab League toward concessions on either the peace process or on Iran sanctions. If anything, the Obama administration’s aim seems to be to promote direct talks which the Palestinians do not desire and unilateral actions against Iran which Israel has sought.
Quoting from Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel and Aluf Benn in Ha’aretz, Yaacov Lozowick reaches a similar conclusion.
What is the lesson of all this? As some readers may recollect, I have been saying all along that it takes two years to learn the job of American president. As Obama passes his 18th month in office, he may finally be learning. (Here’s hoping). The second comment is that after being a disastrous prime minister first time around (1996-99), Netanyahu seems to have learned his job, too. He understood better than Obama how things might go, and he mostly stood his ground until reality trumped vacuous idealism.
There’s one other thing that Netanyahu has done that’s probably helped him. When Clinton was President, Netanyahu went to speak before a group organized by Jerry Falwell, a very vocal political opponent of President Clinton. To be sure Netanyahu was treated unfairly by Clinton, but some of his actions clearly antagonized the President. In retrospect, Netanyahu indulged his pique against the President and that hurt him politically.
Then there’s this from Ehud Yaari (via Daily Alert Blog)
They have reached the conclusion that keeping a distance from Israel, picking unnecessary fights with Israel, was not going to advance the peace process. They are not getting anything in return from the Arab world. This is why Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Obama, when he came to Israel recently on a private visit, a bar mitzvah for his son, said in so many words, “We screwed up”.
There has also been a change of heart in Washington concerning Iran. I have solid information indicating that the top echelons of the administration — National Security Council, Pentagon, State Department — have reached the conclusion that the US cannot adopt the option of containing a nuclear Iran.
So what’s going on?
The option of accepting a nuclear Iran, unwillingly of course, and then trying to contain it, was advocated by many important players on the American foreign policy scene. This option is now apparently off the table.
There is a change of policy not only in terms of sanctions, both at the UN Security Council and those unilateral sanctions now imposed by both the US, the EU and others; but also an understanding by the administration that in no way can Iran be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.
And most surprising:
How do we know this? Among other things, because this is what the Americans have been telling Arab leaders over recent weeks.
And Walter Russell Mead has provided a context for understanding the President’s apparent shift:
The dream that the great powers of the world will ever form a kind of universal European Union also strikes many observers of world politics as naive.
The cynics may be right (and in fact I fear they are) but that isn’t the point just now. Henry Kissinger may not believe in the creation of a post-Westphalian order, but President Obama does — at least he believes that without these noble hopes as guiding lights we will lose our way amidst the countless pitfalls of the world’s long night. And he believes this deeply enough to continue to do his best to set American foreign policy in the service of these two transcendent goals. The President of the United States is a serious and strong-willed man; these values are the rocks on which he stands.
The problem is that Iran’s success means the complete, utter and historic destruction of everything President Obama wants to build.
Make no mistake about it. If Iran gets nuclear weapons on his watch, the dream of non-proliferation comes to an end and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who lost the fight to stop nukes.
It won’t just be Iran: if Iran defies western pressure to get nukes, every self-respecting country in the Middle East will want and need nukes. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and even some of the smaller fry will have to make their moves. They won’t all get the bomb but enough of them will. This will have a disastrous impact on America’s ability to carry out one of its principle global tasks and ensure the steady and uninterrupted flow of oil to the great industrial and commercial centers of the world — but that isn’t all. The decisive failure of the nonproliferation agenda in the Middle East undermine nonproliferation everywhere, not only because the Bomb will become even more of a coveted symbol of first class international status than it already is, but because with all those proliferating states buying and selling the technology, it will be harder to stop countries from moving ahead. The global black market in nuclear tech will spread like kudzu; there will be so many sources and so many destinations that the traffic will be harder than ever to stop.
I do believe that the President is the most ideological driven man in the job in a long time, so I’m not entirely convinced that he’s changed his views towards Israel and that the warm feelings he displayed with Netanyahu were not part of a cynical political charade. But if he’s shifted his strategy from containing Iran to preventing Iran and realizes that he’ll need to work with Israel towards that end, that’s something to be thankful for.
The coming months will tell of Ya’ari and Mead are correct.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Not just the coming months. If Obama gets a second term, he will have no reason to keep Jews safely on board. His position will get much, much worse.
Agreed. But for now preventing Iran from getting nukes has to be a priority. If he’s on board for that, that’s a good thing isn’t it? (Even if we have to be suspicious afterwards.)
As a frequent reader of Ehud Ya’ari I can tell you the man is almost never right. In fact he happens to be right less times than a broken clock is able to tell the time of day.
Obama is regrouping, rethinking strategies, yes, but his objective – appeasement of the Arab\Muslim world at the expense of further weakening of Israel – remains the same. Blunt force doesn’t yield results (or least hasn’t yet) and he has the upcoming congressional elections to think about. I expect this sudden “pro-Israel” shift will therefore come to an abrupt end after November. I also doubt he cares much about Iran’s nukes – he hadn’t before, so why start now? Because suddenly he cares how he will go down in history? Please. BHO still believes in containment and nothing short of either an American strike on Iran or allowing an Israeli one to take place won’t convince me otherwise. Still, he’s not a complete idiot: he knows how badly this policy reflects on him internally, so he’s making all the right noises to make people think he’s coming around.
Let’s be realistic for a moment: we all know sanctions, even severe ones, simply won’t do the trick. A country that is willing to send truckfuls of its own children to clear out mine-fields isn’t going to be intimidated into changing its foreign policy by a further drop in its civilian population’s level of lifestyle. Yes, they’ll face some internal pressure for it; the last year had shown they can aptly deal with it, since they don’t have explain themselves to any Goldstones. In any case, they’re probably banking on the fact that such sanctions would only be temporary anyway – once they have nukes they could intimidate Europe and the Arab world into a de-facto abandonment of any sanctions, and unfortunately they’re probably right. Some believe severe sanctions will give the Iranian opposition the backing it needs to finally topple the regime. This would indeed be the best thing for everyone concerned, but sadly to this day we haven’t seen the opposition, even at its height, really amount to anything much other than to get mowed down like sitting ducks. How can they, when the regime is firmly propped up by a majority of rural Iranians who are deeply Islamic and enjoy flaunting the West even at their own expense?
I don’t know how he is now, but back 1996 he was extremely anti-Bibi. Why would he make something up that makes Netanyahu look good?
Soccer Dad, I assume by “he” you mean Yaari? If you do, please keep in mind a lot has changed since 1996 – the Olso Accords (which Bibi opposed) imploded and resulted in the Al Aqsa War and Operation Defensive Shield. Israel’s retreat from South Lebanon’s security buffer, orchestrated by PM Barak who defeated Bibi in 1999, and her disengagement from the Gaza Strip resulted in the Second Lebanon War and in the takeover of Gaza by Hamas and constant shelling of Israeli cities for years respectively – the second of which was correctly predicted by Netanyahu, but not by almost any pundit writing at the time. Bibi’s stocks had risen considerably since then.
Also remember that the 1996 elections were one of the most controversial in Israel’s history, since they came only 7 months after PM Rabin’s assassination by a right-winger, who despite all claims to the contrary did not act alone and had some right-wing rabbinical support. Netanyahu’s victory over Acting PM Peres was literally only by a few thousand votes (so much so that early polls on election night declared Peres the winner), and was only achieved after a massive terrorist campaign which had made Peres seem like a weak and ineffectual leader. Biby’s victory, therefore, left a bad taste in many people’s mouths – one that I shared at the time, and made Netanyahu one of the least popular PMs in history. His not-so-occasional stumbles and clumsy attempts at political intrigues hadn’t exactly helped him that regard either, as he himself later admitted.
Lastly, I never said Yaari made anything up – this is his genuine take on the situation, only I believe he’s reading it wrong, as usual.