by Dore Gold
President Barak Obama's
re-election raises the question of what will happen to U.S.-Israel
relations during his second term. What marred his relationship with
Israel during his first term were the broad conceptual gaps between
Washington and Jerusalem over key issues in the Middle East. Obama began
his term advancing a policy of "engagement" with Iran, while Israel had
witnessed all the failed attempts at diplomacy with Iran that were
tried in the past and believed that Tehran was simply playing for time.
In the peace process, Obama appeared to believe that achieving an
Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement was a pivotal factor in stabilizing
the Middle East and in removing the main obstacle that prevented America
from forging a close relationship with the Arab world.
According to The
Washington Post, during a famous meeting with American Jewish leaders in
July 2009 that was widely quoted during the presidential campaign,
President Obama was critical of how his predecessor, President George W.
Bush handled U.S.-Israel relations: "During those eight years, there
was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When
there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes
our credibility with the Arab states."
The underlying
assumption in Obama's analysis was that showing Israel a cold shoulder
would get it to make new concessions in the peace process while at the
same time elevating America's standing in the Arab world. According to
this strategy, however, the administration was still willing to maintain
close military ties between Israel and the U.S. security establishments
and even enhance aspects of strategic cooperation.
What will happen now?
Obama's foreign policy has been a mixture of his own personal
convictions and the conventional wisdom that came out of the American
foreign policy establishment back in 2009 through its think tanks and
newspaper pundits inside the capital beltway. Regarding the 2003 Iraq
War, as a senator he proved to be an independent thinker who expressed
his opposition to the war well before it became a popular position. But
on Iran, the call for diplomatic engagement with Tehran was already a
popular position when he was elected president that was backed by former
secretaries of state like James Baker and even Henry Kissinger.
President Obama still
wants to try negotiations with Iran one more time. It has been rumored
that the administration has opened a channel with Tehran by using
Obama's close adviser, Vallerie Jarrett, who spent many years in Iran
earlier in her life. The administration will have to face Iranian
recalcitrance if these talks become serious. What Obama has demonstrated
in the past is that he is capable of shifting course and adopting
policies he previously opposed as his own, if he becomes convinced. It
is useful to recall that the administration originally rejected
Congressional proposals for new severe sanctions on Iran in late 2011,
fearing that they would lead to a rise in the price of gasoline. But
Obama changed course and featured his Iran sanctions in the election
campaign as one of the pillars of his foreign policy.
Like in the Iranian
case, Obama's positions on the peace process can also be traced to
intellectual currents that had been promoted in Washington during the
previous eight years before his election in 2008. After the failure of
the 2000 Camp David Summit and the 2001 Taba talks, a whole cottage
industry of former officials from the Clinton administration popularized
the idea that "we all know what the shape of the peace settlement is
and all we have to do is create a political bridge to get there."
There were also Israeli
ex-officials coming to Washington in that period perpetuating the myth
that Israel and the Palestinians had been extremely close to reaching an
agreement and that just a little work was left to bridge the gaps. The
popularity of this belief created a rising degree of impatience in
Washington with Israel. For these impressions had a strong impact on
several of the key individuals who surrounded Obama at the beginning of
his first term and helped cloud the U.S.-Israeli relationship
In the meantime, while
this American consensus about the peace process grew, the people of
Israel had gone through the Second Intifada, marked by a wave of suicide
bombings in most of Israel's major cities, an escalation of rocket
attacks on southern Israel after the Gaza Disengagement and most
recently rising strategic uncertainties surrounding the Arab Spring.
True, there were some
experienced officials, like Dennis Ross, who did not buy into the
popular mythology about past negotiations. Nonetheless, a gap began to
grow between how many U.S. experts of the Middle East perceived the
requirements of Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy and what the vast majority
of Israelis thought. In summary, the problems that Israel faced with
the Obama administration during its first term were based on much
broader trends, about how the American establishment came to perceive
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that were not necessarily specific to
Obama himself.
The White House learned
that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was far more complicated
than what many experts in Washington described back in 2009. At the
beginning of President Obama's first term, the Palestinians felt they
were perceived by the White House as a close partner for peace and hence
all U.S. diplomatic pressure would be placed on Israel. But Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did not prove to be a reliable
partner. In fact, it soon became clear that his expectations were so
high at the time that he believed Washington would deliver Israel on a
silver platter. In May 2009, he told Jackson Diehl of the Washington
Post that his only role was to wait for the Obama administration to
force Prime Minister Netanyahu to accept a settlement freeze.
And two years later, he
criticized Obama in a Newsweek interview and rebuffed repeated U.S.
requests to not get the U.N. involved in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, which would force the U.S. to use its veto in the Security
Council. Obama was told that if he just used the phrase "1967 lines" in a
public address, then Abbas would come back to negotiations with Israel
without prior conditions. More than a year after Obama went out on a
limb and made reference to the "1967 lines," Abbas has still refused to
negotiate with Israel.
It is probable that
President Obama will look at the Middle East peace process far more
realistically in his second term. It is now obvious that the centrality
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Middle Eastern stability is much
harder to argue, since it has become clear as day that the series of
revolts known as the Arab Spring had nothing to do with the Palestinian
issue. U.S. diplomatic traffic from its posts in the Arab world that are
now public due to WIKILEAKS indicate that the Iranian threat is a far
more urgent issue than what happens with the Israeli settlements for
many Arab leaders.
It is now clear that
the key to U.S. relations with the Arab leaders of the oil-rich Persian
Gulf would be an effective policy to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program
as well as its regional adventurism. Equally, given the daily violence
in Syria between the pro-Iranian Assad regime and the Syrian rebels
backed by the Sunni Arab states, it will be vital for the administration
to provide a more effective approach to bringing that bloodshed to a
halt.
Obama still believes
that U.S. diplomatic involvement is important, though it would be
surprising if he expected that a full Israeli-Palestinian final status
agreement were possible at this stage, in contrast with the conventional
wisdom when his first term began. Of course if Israeli spokespeople
were now to raise this possibility, they could set the administration
down this path again. But right now with Abbas continuing down the
unilateral path by seeking to upgrade the status of the Palestinian
observer mission at the U.N. to a non-voting member, the prospects for
serious negotiations do not look promising.
Historically, when
U.S.-Israeli relations have undergone tense periods, realities on the
ground in the Middle East brought the U.S. and Israel closer together.
In the far more severe cases of U.S.-Israeli disagreements, President
Eisenhower and Prime Minister Ben Gurion had their troubles over the
Sinai Campaign in 1956. At the time, the U.S. was seeking to build a
bloc of Arab states against the USSR known as the Baghdad Pact. But when
the Hashemite regime in Iraq fell and Nasserist forces threatened
Lebanon, the U.S. and Israel were drawn into new levels of cooperation.
Similarly, though President H.W. Bush had tense relations with Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir over the issue of settlements, after Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait, the U.S. and Israel drew together as allies very
quickly.
Presently, there are a host of
Israeli commentators who foresee a difficult period for Israel because,
as they argue, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bet on the
wrong horse. Never mind, as David Makovsky writes in Foreign Policy, the
Israeli leader never came out and endorsed President Obama's opponent,
Governor Romney, they still are trying to paint baseless scenarios of
doom and gloom. Over the last four years, there is no escaping the fact
that the U.S. and Israel had real differences over policy. But at the
end of the day, the U.S.-Israeli relationship is based on common
interests and shared values and those will continue to form the fabric
of the ties between the two countries in the years ahead.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2846
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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