Jackson Diehl’s End the Spat with Israel, is a very important op-ed. It’s also interesting that both Diehl and David Ignatius are showing skepticism of the administration’s tactics regarding Israel. That’s not to say Diehl’s column is perfect – it isn’t, but he makes some very important observations:
But, starting with a statement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in May, the administration made the mistake of insisting that an Israeli settlement “freeze” — a term the past three administrations agreed to define loosely — must mean a total stop to all construction in the West Bank and even East Jerusalem.
This absolutist position is a loser for three reasons. First, it has allowed Palestinian and Arab leaders to withhold the steps they were asked for; they claim to be waiting for the settlement “freeze” even as they quietly savor a rare public battle between Israel and the United States. Second, the administration’s objective — whatever its merits — is unobtainable. No Israeli government has ever agreed to an unconditional freeze, and no coalition could be assembled from the current parliament to impose one.
Finally, the extraction of a freeze from Netanyahu is, as a practical matter, unnecessary. While further settlement expansion needs to be curbed, both the Palestinian Authority and Arab governments have gone along with previous U.S.-Israeli deals by which construction was to be limited to inside the periphery of settlements near Israel — since everyone knows those areas will be annexed to Israel in a final settlement. Before the 2007 Annapolis peace conference organized by the Bush administration, Saudi Arabia and other Arab participants agreed to what one former senior official called “the Google Earth test”; if the settlements did not visibly expand, that was good enough.
(I’m not sure I buy the “Google Earth test” as presented by Diehl; the Saudi “peace plan” makes no exceptions, even for sections of Jerusalem such as Ramat Eshkol, Ramot or Gilo.)
Diehl doesn’t come out and say it, but the Obama administration has taken a strong anti-Israel posture in its dealings with in the Middle East. The premise of the Obama administration is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the heart of the instability in the Middle East, that Israeli intransigence is largely responsible for prolonging the conflict, so that pressure on Israel is the most effective way to solve the problems plaguing the Middle East. In other words, the Obama administration has fully adopted the premises of J-Street/ Peace Now/ Israel Policy Forum. (President Clinton subscribed to this view also, but since there was a Labor government in power when he became President, he was able to work with Israel with few excuses until 1996.)
Diehl’s also saying that adopting this position is self-defeating. He also realizes:
The result of such posturing is that the administration now faces a choice between a protracted confrontation with Israel — an odd adventure given the pressing challenges from Iran and in Iraq, not to mention the disarray of the Palestinian camp — or a compromise, which might make Obama look weak and provide Arab states further cause to refuse cooperation.
However, there’s a lot that Diehl gets wrong. For example:
Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position — and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration’s demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.
Israel has changed a lot since 1996. Netanyahu – who wasn’t even such a right winger then – is certainly not one now. Still the portrayal of Netanyahu shows a myopic view of the Middle East that is so prevalent in the Washington press corps.
Barry Rubin writes:
Fayyad is prime minister for one reason only: to please Western governments and financial donors. Lacking political skill, ideological influence, or strong support base, Fayyad does keep the money flowing since he’s relatively honest, moderate, and professional on economic issues.
But his own people don’t listen to him. Most PA politicians want him out. International pressure keeps him in.
So here’s the Fayyad paradox. If he really represented Palestinian stances and thinking, there’d be some hope for peace. Since he’s so out of tune with colleagues, though, Fayyad sounds sharply different from them. And even he’s highly restricted by what’s permissible in PA politics, limits which ensure the PA’s failure, absence of peace, and non-existence of a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian political culture is so far removed from the Western premises of peaceful coexistence that it really doesn’t matter who the Israeli Prime Minister is. If Tzippi Livni had been able to form the most recent coalition, we would be no closer to resolving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. And yet, even as Diehl argues that the administration’s pressure on Israel is excessive, he refuses to see the other side: the Palestinians in the nearly 16 years since Oslo are no more prepared to live peacefully with Israel than they were in 1993.
Finally Yaacov Lozowick sounds a warning that would serve the administration well:
American Pressure on Israel can Cost Lives.
I’m skeptical that this administration would take Diehl’s or Lozowick’s warnings to heart. It is too ideologically committed to its positions. I don’t believe that the President believes that a “spat” with Israel is counterproductive or a distraction from more pressing matters
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
