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“It will be the policy of my administration to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians,as well as between Israel and its Arab neighbors,” President Obama said last week.He also remarked: “Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians.”A day earlier Obama had made his first phone call as president to President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. And on Wednesday this week, his new-old Middle East envoy George Mitchell is already due here to meet with Israeli and PA leaders.In other words,Obama means business. Yet each of his above-quoted statements has something fundamentally wrong with it.First, by saying his administration will “actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as between Israel and its Arab neighbors,”Obama is saying he has an agenda for Israel.But is it Israel’s agenda?Of course, at least out of diplomatic propriety, all of Israel’s current prime-ministerial aspirants—from Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni on the Center-Left to Binyamin Netanyahu on the Center-Right—will say that it is.They’ll say how delighted they are that Mr. Mitchell has come for a visit and that Mr. Obama is so eager to work with Israel in solving its problems.On February 10, though, Israel is holding elections, and all the polls say a Center-Right bloc led by Netanyahu will win. That will mean most Israelis have become skeptical enough about a “lasting peace” between Israel and its Palestinian and other Arab neighbors that they see “aggressively” pursuing such an outcome—certainly at this stage, with Hamas ruling Gaza and a weak, corrupt PA, its collapse to Hamas prevented only by the Israeli security forces, ruling the West Bank—as out-of-sync with reality.In other words, Obama has announced an agenda for Israel even though, for one thing, he’s not Israel’s president, and for another, it’s not Israel’s agenda. In this Obama is continuing the practice of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who in June 22 announced his “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian peace to which Israel later attached 14 reservations that were subsequently ignored.What gets lost in the shuffle is that Israel is supposed to be a sovereign country with the right to set its own policy. If Obama, as many expect, ends up clashing with Netanyahu, he’ll actually be clashing with an Israeli electorate that, having experienced the results of 15 years of “Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking” up to the latest rocket bombardments, supports leaders who stand for a more cautious, security-conscious approach.To this electorate-and to Israeli democracy itself-Obama’s promise to “actively and aggressively seek” an outcome that, if pursued rashly and heedlessly, can spell grave security consequences for Israel is, in effect if not in intent, an expression of contempt. Obama’s words connote that Israel is a mere instrumentality of U.S. policy, its elections meaningless, its people’s hard-earned experience irrelevant.As for Obama’s statement that “Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians”—the first discordant bell it rings is that of moral equivalency... By P. David Hornik
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/.
To read more go to:P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/.
As in the days of Noah...
