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Yesterday I blogged about the consequences of President Obama’s pressure on Israel. Daniel Pipes sees it as a sign that the administration is prepared to precipitate a diplomatic crisis with Israel. However Barry Rubin was less concerned. He observed that despite the American pressure, there has been no consequence to Israel’s defiance of the United States and sees the pressure mostly as posturing.

There are, however, consequences to the administration’s stance. There are those who will use it to further their own agendas. For example Democratic activist, Debra Delee sees the President’s efforts as a validation of her organization’s, Americans for Peace Now, efforts.

Obama is leading. He is doing so boldly and transparently, with the kind of credibility and charisma–both domestically and internationally–that many of his predecessors lacked. I believe that if regional and international leaders rise to the challenge and the promise of President Obama, they may find in him the one who will finally broker lasting peace between Jews and Arabs.

If Netanyahu and his team seriously consider the president’s agenda, they may realize–as well they should–that it constitutes a rare opportunity for ending, once and for all, the Arab-Israel conflict, including Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. President Obama clearly stated why a freeze on settlements is imperative. He is seeking meaningful negotiations toward a final resolution of the conflict. For such negotiations to be held in earnest, Israel cannot take measures that prejudge their outcome and should not engage in actions that Palestinians and their Arab brethren throughout the Middle East view as provocative and aggressive.

And Tony Karon, the Jewish anti-Zionist who “reports” for Time Magazine has his own spin, Jerusalem Standoff Threatens Middle East Peace Plans:

Although the U.S. has routinely opposed Israeli construction in East Jerusalem – President

Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called it “unhelpful” – Netanyahu appears to be betting that by very publicly challenging Obama on Jerusalem, he can rally support from those Jewish leaders in the U.S. who have lately expressed disquiet over the President’s Middle East policies, and also from Christian conservative supporters of Israel. And the Israelis are plainly looking to make a campaign of it, with the mayor of Jerusalem being dispatched to the U.S. to rally opposition to the Administration’s position on the city. (Read “Despite Jewish Concerns, Obama Keeps Up Pressure on Israel.”)

But finding a formula for sharing Jerusalem, the eastern part of which the Palestinians claim as their future capital, is fundamental to the peace process that Obama has sought to revive; there will be no Palestinian or Arab takers for any deal that leaves all of Jerusalem under Israeli control. So by picking the Holy City as the battleground for a test of wills with Obama, Netanyahu is mounting a broader challenge to the President’s peace agenda.

Israel seized control of the eastern portion of the Holy City during the war of 1967, but its claim to sovereignty over the occupied portion of Jerusalem has never been internationally recognized. Under the Oslo peace process launched in 1993, Jerusalem was defined as one of the “final status” issues to be negotiated in a peace agreement, but finding a solution for sharing the city has been one of the thorniest matters.

There is nothing outright false in the above three paragraphs as it is mostly spin or Karon’s opinion. First of all, like Delee he assumes that the President’s vision will lead to peace. That’s hardly assured. As even Karon notes later, as Prime Minister, Ehud Barak offered to divide Jerusalem. But Karon leaves out a key piece of information: his offer was rejected by Arafat.

And it’s true that Israel’s claim to “East” Jerusalem has not been recognized, he won’t provide the rest of the story. However Jeff Jacoby does:

There was a time not so long ago when Jerusalem was anything but an open city. During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, the Jordanian Arab Legion invaded eastern Jerusalem, occupied the Old City, and expelled all its Jews – many from families that had lived in the city for centuries. “As they left,” the historian Sir Martin Gilbert later wrote, “they could see columns of smoke rising from the quarter behind them. The Hadassah welfare station had been set on fire and . . . the looting and burning of Jewish property was in full swing.”

For the next 19 years, eastern Jerusalem was barred to Jews, brutally divided from the western part of the city with barbed-wire and military fortifications. Dozens of Jewish holy places, including synagogues hundreds of years old, were desecrated or destroyed. Jerusalem’s most sacred Jewish shrine, the Western Wall, became a slum. It wasn’t until 1967, after Jordan was routed in the Six-Day War, that Jerusalem was reunited under Israeli sovereignty and religious freedom restored to all. Israelis have vowed ever since that Jerusalem would never again be divided.

And not only Israelis. US policy, laid out in the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, recognizes Jerusalem as “a united city administered by Israel” and formally declares that “Jerusalem must remain an undivided city.”

But the point of Karon’s articles wasn’t to present the history of the Middle East as a reporter; it was to cast Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace.

But as Jeff Jacoby concludes (h/t Rubicon3) the real obstacle to peace is:

The great obstacle to Middle East peace is not that Jews insist on living among Arabs. It is that Arabs insist that Jews not live among them. If Obama doesn’t grasp that, he has a lot to learn.

The problem with President Obama’s approach of singling out Israel for pressure is that he emboldens those who wish to blame Israel for the Arab refusal to accept it. They will use his approach as an excuse to further discredit Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

President Obama has apparently decided to make a showdown with Israel over settlements his primary foreign policy initiative. Sure he offered an open hand to the Muslim world, but that was just words. The main action he has taken is to reverse his promise to AIPAC last year and effectively push to divide Jerusalem.

It hasn’t worked, so far, because, for one thing the consensus in Israel has changed.

The year 2000, the Camp David failure, the Syrian and Palestinian rejection of generous offers, and Second Intifada destroyed illusions in Israel.

Since then, Israel has groped for a new paradigm. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon offered unilateralism; Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni constantly offered more in exchange for nothing. But the more they did so, the more international abuse Israel received.

Now a new approach has finally emerged capable of reversing this situation. It goes like this: Israel wants peace but doesn’t hesitate to express not only what it wants and needs but also what’s required to create a stable and better situation.

(Even the terrorist supporting, viciously anti-Israel activist Helena Cobban recognizes this.Though she describes it as the decline of Israel’s peace movement and sees it as a flaw in the movement, rather than a recognition that their formula for peace has been shown to be obsolete.)

Even if one considers PM Netanyahu, President Obama has failed to engage Israel’s political middle or even its Left, as Michael Doran observes:

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.

And the President outreach hasn’t gotten much response from the Arab world either.

So Obama gets nowhere with the Saudis and squeezes the Israelis instead, hoping that in doing so he will, at some point, earn enough cred with the Arab street to allow Arab governments the “political space” to make real concessions to the peace process.

Even the Palestinians would rather not be forced to make any concessions to Israel.

Which is why the actual Palestinian position is to pray for Mitchell to fail. If he fails and there is no compromise deal, they are sitting pretty. Washington denounces Jerusalem, bad feeling between them continues, and Obama effectively demands nothing of the Palestinians. Of course, settlement construction continues as well, but the Palestinian leaders aren’t stupid; they know it’s a made-up issue. They know that life in the West Bank is getting better, the economy is improving, the Israelis are removing roadblocks and obstacles to movement — and they know that settlement construction provides badly needed employment for Palestinian construction workers. So, Mitchell’s failure would be sheer heaven for them, while a compromise — well, Erekat said it. Bad news.

In the end, the President has picked unnecessary fights with an ally that has benefited American foreign policy nothing.

But this leads to questions that Jonathan Tobin asks:

This is yet another moment to ask not just the ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz but also the legion of Jews who raised money for Obama, vouched for his pro-Israel bona fides, and then gave him three quarters of the Jewish vote last November: Is this what you wanted? Did the majority of Jewish Democrats who are devoted friends of Israel expect that Obama would seek to create a rift between the U.S. and Israel — not about remote West Bank settlements but over Jewish rights in Jerusalem?

For some, like J-Street, Israel Policy Forum and Americans for Peace Now, this is exactly what they hoped for. They wanted the United States to impose its will on a recalcitrant Israeli government. But for others, who are not as far from the mainstream, I suspect this isn’t what they wanted.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.