Rashid Khalidi: How Obama Enables Israel's Worst Impulses

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of six books on Middle Eastern history, including "Palestinian Identity", and "Resurrecting Empire". Khalidi is a former advisor to Palestinian negotiators at the Madrid and Washington peace talks and is the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

The old Arabic proverb has it that the dogs bark but the caravan goes on. President Obama's comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speeches last week at the State Department and then at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) produced a great deal of sound and fury in Washington. However, the sense I had being in Beirut and the Gulf when they were delivered was that they meant much less to Arabs than they did in Washington or in Israel. There is little sense in the Arab world or among Palestinians that the United States has a constructive role to play in resolving this conflict. Indeed, if anything, it has only succeeded in making itself even more of a roadblock to progress than it was before.

In both speeches the president reiterated a position taken by every one of his predecessors since Lyndon Johnson: that the United States considers the 1967 lines the basis for a settlement, as per Security Council Resolution 242. Only in Israel and on Capitol Hill was this considered news, because Obama failed to mention George W. Bush’s concession to Ariel Sharon in 2004: "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949." The speech to AIPAC reprised that important concession, albeit in a slightly less fulsome form, referring simply to "new demographic realities on the ground."

This provision aside, the speech repeated every key talking point of the current Israeli government....