The decision by President Obama to allow UN Security Council adoption of a resolution sharply condemning Israeli settlements, and Secretary of State Kerry’s gratuitous speech painting Israel as the prime obstacle to peace, are the latest indications that U.S. foreign policy has been in the hands of two individuals who are at best naïve about the dynamics of the Middle East.
The country should be thankful that change is in the offing, beginning on Jan. 20. It appears the incoming administration will take the approach that Israeli settlement policy is not an impediment to peace but that dismissing Israel’s interests is.
It should have long ago become apparent to both Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry that their approach to bringing about peace between Israel and the Palestinians was doomed to failure. It was premised on the notion that there had to be rough political equivalency in how Israel and the Palestinians were treated.
Thus, the fact that Israel successfully defended itself (and then some) in the aggressive wars launched by its Arab neighbors in 1948, 1967, and 1973 was not part of the Obama calculus. No; Israel would be denied the political and diplomatic upper hand military victors ordinarily enjoy vis-a-vis the losers and instead be cajoled and even intimidated into retreating behind its old indefensible borders.
Similarly, Israel was to be cut no slack despite the abject weakness of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority – the PA could not conceivably implement any agreement with Israel – and the growing threat posed by Hamas. Israel’s horrific experience over the past couple of decades with intafadas, suicide bombings, rocket attacks from Gaza, and serious military confrontations with Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon seemed to matter little or not at all to America’s policymaking elites.
Nor were Israel’s concerns about the threats posed by Iran’s overarching militarism and burgeoning, if perhaps stalled, nuclear program to be seriously entertained.
The uncertainties bred by the advent of the Arab Spring and the reality that radicals were on the move in various Arab countries likewise would not be factors to which the administration paid serious account. To policymakers who insisted on judging Israel as though it were situated somewhere in Scandinavia, the bloody upheavals in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan had no legitimate bearing on Israel’s security concerns.
The persistent Palestinian refusal to negotiate without prior conditions would count for nothing, and neither would the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state and their insistence on a limitless Palestinian “right of return.”
Perhaps most fundamentally, the Obama worldview virtually ignored the depth and length of the historical Jewish connection to the Holy Land.
In light of everything going on in the Middle East, it’s hard to fathom how two reasonably intelligent men could come to the conclusion that Israeli settlement building is the only thing preventing a mass breakout of peace in the region. And while we fully realize it will take some time before anyone will be able to offer even a preliminary assessment of the new administration, Jan. 20 cannot come soon enough.