The constant drumbeat in the American press is that Israelis don’t like Obama, don’t trust him. They want him to speak to them and tell them his plan. According to the New York Times, a media campaign is about to begin.
… In coming weeks, senior administration officials said, the White House will begin a public-relations campaign in Israel and Arab countries to better explain Mr. Obama’s plans for a comprehensive peace agreement involving Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world.
The campaign, which will include interviews with Mr. Obama on Israeli and Arab television, amounts to a reframing of a policy that people inside and outside the administration say has become overly defined by the American pressure on Israel to halt settlement construction on the West Bank.
“We’re at a crucial moment now,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. “There are only so many visits George Mitchell can make.” …
Reach out is necessary, including to the Israelis. Especially since some Israelis and American Jews are suggesting a more formal speech from Obama. I think they’re a bit envious about Obama’s Cairo speech, also not having listened to his commitments to Israel that were within. It may have been a speech made in Cairo, but it had messages to everyone, though I still contend Obama feel far short of address the abuse of women, as I said at the time. But we can’t get caught up in that, now can we?
But the analysis of the Times goes a bit haywire here: In the Arab world, there is little evidence of a change of heart toward Israel.
This is not very good analysis. Over the last months since moving the D.C., I’ve been to innumerable events featuring Arabs and non Jews, as well as read news reports from the well sourced, talking about Middle East “peace”. Most in the Arab world are ready, many already talking continually about how Middle East equilibrium has a very short window of time to manifest, otherwise we’re likely to see a new round of bloodshed.
“Incrementalism and the step-by-step approach have not, and we believe will not, achieve peace,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said after meeting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Temporary security, confidence-building measures, will also not bring peace.”
Prince Saud al-Faisal has been saying this since the Saudi-US forum I attended back at the end of April:
9:41:38 AM: Al-Faisal: We don’t need more plans from Obama. “We need implementation.” (via live reporting Twitter feed)
Zbigniew Brzezinski has been even more forceful, as have others.
“One of the public misimpressions is that it’s all been about settlements,” Mr. Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, said in a rare interview Friday after six months on the job. “It is completely inaccurate to portray this as, ‘We’re only asking the Israelis to do things.’ We are asking everybody to do things.”
In the quote above from the Times, Mitchell makes a point of saying that everyone is being asked to do things, while trying to downplay that “it’s all been about settlements.” The reality is that we shouldn’t even be having this discussion, because as Hillary Clinton said a while back, that issue is closed. A settlement freeze has been something Israel agreed on since back when Mr. Indyk was involved during the Clinton administration. From his most recent book, Innocent Abroad, which ironically gets its title from something Ronald Reagan said.
On the second level, both sides were supposed to implement their Road Map commitments under the watchful eye of an American general.*
*Among other obligations, Israel was supposed to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle illegal settlement outposts while the Palestinian Authority was supposed to end incitement and violence as well as begin dismantling the infrastructure of terror.
The first sentence leads to the footnoted section, which is noted at the bottom of page 386 in Indyk’s book.
Now, we can all pretend that settlements are not an issue, but that won’t get us any closer to equilibrium than when George W. Bush hurriedly whipped up instant peace negotiations hoping something would stick before he road back to Texas on the same ass he road in backwards on when first coming to Washington.
Of course it’s not just about settlements. But that we’re even talking about them at this point isn’t because of Obama.
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