Walter Russell Mead: Obama Throws Palestine Under The Bus As World Hails His Courage
Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.
...It is important to grasp something that many commentators, puzzled and distracted by the buzz, have missed: this was by any standards a very, very pro-Israel speech. It offered far stronger backing for core Israeli positions than any other speech this President has given. More, it came just as the Obama official widely seen as most sympathetic to the Palestinian position (George Mitchell) stepped down, leaving Dennis Ross — widely seen as more sympathetic to Israel — on top. From a Palestinian point of view, it was a bitter disappointment. President Obama stressed that he does not support the Palestinian plan to have the UN declare Palestine a state in the fall, and that the US will work to block that strategy and resist efforts to isolate Israel. That is a very clear statement of policy and it is one that he didn’t have to take at this time. It is a significant pro-Israel move by the White House.
The President also made clear that Hamas needs to recognize the Jewish state’s right to exist before the US will accept Hamas as a negotiating partner. That was not a shift in policy, and it is not particularly surprising given Hamas’ condemnation of the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Clearly, Hamas is not particularly interested in talking to the US at this time and is doing everything possible to nail the door shut. Still, the clarity of the President’s words on this topic represent an attempt to reassure Israel about its American support.
And in another major concession to Israel, the President did not mention the condition that he once declared essential to the resumption of peace talks: a total settlement freeze. This was his one innovation in the peace process, President Obama’s highly touted original contribution; it was an embarrassing flop and he now just wants it to go quietly away.
No doubt the core pro-Israel and pro-democracy elements of the speech are why distinguished conservative writers and thinkers like Victor Davis Hanson and my old CFR colleague Max Boot have dismissed the claims that Obama threw Israel under the bus. This is perhaps also why ADL leader (and leading pro-Israel figure) Abe Foxman didn’t object to the perfunctory and formalistic invocation of the 1967 ‘frontiers’. No doubt this is also why Jeffrey Goldberg recognized the speech as pro-Israel and cites a long list of conservative, pro-Zionist voices who agree....
The volcanic response to the speech helps the White House in other ways. The attention to Obama’s alleged pro-Palestinian shift has taken attention away from the truly controversial elements of the President’s speech: the harsh rhetoric towards Syria and Iran, and the open breach with Saudi Arabia over the crackdown in Bahrain and indeed over the future political direction of the Middle East. The relative absence of attention on these points is helping the Saudis swallow their anger over the rhetoric about Bahrain and democracy as they focus more constructively on the signs that the president at long last is coming around to their point of view on Iran. The commentariat’s obsession over the not-news border declaration also reduced what might well have been a major domestic and international brouhaha over the President’s references to Iraq as a model of democratic development that the rest of the region should emulate. For a President facing an increasingly tough re-election fight, a speech about how the war in Iraq might have important and positive results that could affect the whole region is probably not the best message to send to the base.
But if the White House has rather neatly finessed the politics of the moment, it is still a long way from managing the turbulence in the Middle East. Peace between Israelis and Palestinians will almost certainly not come on Obama’s watch; he can forget about peace — he will be lucky if he can get a peace process of some kind back on track. The economic meltdown in Egypt darkens prospects for the Arab spring. President Obama’s endorsement of the democratic revolutions could come back to haunt him if the ultimate beneficiaries of the revolution are the radicals. The death spiral of America’s Pakistan policy continues to accelerate. The American response to the Syrian turmoil still looks weak and unconvincing given the stakes. The engagement in Libya (“days not weeks” said our Prognosticator-in-chief) has stretched out into months with no end, and no democratic alternative in view. It is still true that American interests are served by a peace process, almost any peace process, while Israel would prefer to put the whole thing off for a while......