President Barack Obama’s domestic audience isn’t much interested in foreign policy Tuesday night - and if they are, it’s more about Iran and now North Korea than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But his global audience is eager for him to dive back in to an issue that Europeans and many moderate Arab leaders see as a rallying cry for extremism and anti-American sentiment.
Their biggest worry: they see any hope for peace slipping away.
Yet Obama seems likely to offer little for Mideast peace advocates in his State of the Union address, even as his upcoming trip to Israel and elsewhere in the region has only raised expectations for a White House with nothing to show for the president’s first-term efforts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The president has acknowledged before that one of the major problems with his administration’s first big peace push was high-profile moves that led to outsized expectations of progress.
Now the White House knows it can’t let that happen again. Which is why the White House wouldn’t even say for sure whether Obama will draw attention to his Israel trip, news of which tumbled out in Israeli media last week.
Obama could use his high-profile speech to mention his upcoming trip and underscore his oft-stated view that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is critical to U.S. national security. Such a reference would likely come amidst discussion of the Arab Spring and the strife in Syria.
“He’ll have to make some reference to what’s happening in the region [but] the White House is very keen not to raise expectations about Obama’s trip,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who now is vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the the Brookings Institution.
“It’s a careful game of expectations management for sure,” said Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine.
Many factors are responsible for the gulf between the two sides. Israeli and Palestinian domestic politics have left the parties more hostile to compromise. The Arab Spring has led to chaos in Syria and turmoil in Egypt, undermining confidence that players in the region could join in or assure a peace deal. More Israeli settlement activity in Jerusalem and the West Bank creates new obstacles. A Palestinian gambit to seek recognition from the United Nations has angered Israel and the U.S. On-again-off-again talk of an alliance between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip has created uncertainty about who Israel would negotiate with — and whether it makes sense to negotiate at all.
“You pile all of that up together and it’s very bleak,” Ibish said.
“Obama now could well be the president who presides over two prospective calamities in the Middle East: Iran acquiring a nuclear capacity or nuclear weapon and…the end of any meaningful debate over the issue of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said former Mideast peace negotiator Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
“You can even make an argument it’s over already,” said Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. “A majority of Arabs and a majority of Israelis believe it will never happen.”
“It’s hard to see how the U.S. gets the parties back not only to the negotiating table, but where they think they’re talking about the same things,” said Ibish. “You have no process in place…..The parties really haven’t been this far apart in a long time.”
Despite the widespread pessimism, there are expectations of that the U.S. will try something in the coming months to try to get the process — if it can even be called that — moving in a positive direction. Draining one potential surprise from Obama’s speech, word leaked out last week about Obama’s first-ever presidential trip to Israel this spring, with stops also in the West Bank and Jordan. And the confirmation of John Kerry as the new secretary of state has also led some to expect movement on peace.
White House officials have said Iran and Syria will be the main topics on the agenda for the upcoming presidential trip, not Mideast peacemaking. The trip “is not focused on specific Middle East peace process proposals,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said last week.
Of the four annual addresses Obama delivered to Congress in his first term, only his first speech mentioned Mideast peace and then only glancingly.
“To seek progress toward a secure and lasting peace between Israel and her neighbors, we have appointed an envoy to sustain our effort,” Obama said in 2009, referring to the appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine.)
In his 2011 speech, Obama referenced the first wave of the Arab Spring democracy movement, vowing that the U.S. “supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”
That subject got a more extended discussion last year. There was also an election-year reference to Israel (“Our ironclad commitment — and I mean ironclad — to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history.”) But no mention of the dormant peace process.
If Obama really wanted to soft-pedal expectations for his trip and the peace process, he could simply omit it from his speech this year. But analysts say that would be interpreted in some quarters as a sign the president isn’t committed to peace and doesn’t recognize how critical it is to many in the region.
“The two state solution is too complicated to implement right now — and too important to abandon. Within that space, the administration is going to have to make something work,” Miller said.
Many analysts say they believe Obama is intellectually committed to solving the conflict, but has never committed the political capital needed for an all-out U.S. push on the issue.
“I actually think this president has a stronger belief [than many presidents] that this issue is important for the United States, but I don’t think he’s internalized what it means for him in terms of what it would take to make it happen,” Telhami said.
Kerry, by contrast, is seen as raring to jump into the issue.
“Kerry, I think, is the tip of the spear,” said Miller. “My sense is he really, really wants to go. What a lot of people are wondering is: why?”
In April 2011, then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Kerry publicly criticized Obama’s early strategy [3] on the Mideast, particularly the focus on an Israeli settlement halt. “I never thought [that approach] would work and, in fact, we have wasted a year and a half on something that for a number of reasons was not achievable,” Kerry said.
Kerry also said then he favored moving within months to talks on borders and security, leaving for later the more difficult issues of Jerusalem, refugees and Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Obama embraced that basic concept in a speech the next month, but no major U.S. push on the issue followed.
“He put forward the principles — and then walked away,” Indyk recalled. “It would be logical to start from that position.”
“Maybe they’ll try that, but it will not work,” said Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush. “The whole problem is the borders near the Jerusalem envelope…Also how do you do a security agreement when the guy you’re negotiating with is also negotiating Hamas’s entry into the government? The timing seems off.”
Abrams said the administration should be focused on preventing the situation from getting worse and on small steps to improve life for Palestinians in the West Bank. “There is not going to be a comprehensive settlement in this four-year period,” he said bluntly.
One urgent issue is shoring up the finances of the Palestinian Authority, which is struggling to pay its employees amid disputes with Israel over tax revenues.
“There is a danger in the next four years that things fall apart completely as the P.A. becomes weaker and weaker,” Abrams said.
“This is a very serious problem and something the U.S administration and the White House can do something about,” Ibish said.
While virtually no one sees a return to negotiations on a wide-ranging peace deal anytime soon, a few experts think a significant breakthrough is possible. Steven Rosen, a former foreign policy director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said the new government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to be less conservative than the previous one and may be open settlement limits that stop short of an across-the-board freeze. That, could lead to interim autonomy for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Rosen said.
“All around the prime minister people are ready to go this way….It’s morphed into a different government,” Rosen said. “I think he’s ready to do it the question is whether Obama is ready to do it…Obama made a leakproof settlement freeze with no exceptions his hallmark. If he walks back from it, the world will notice, the Arab league will say he’s betraying the ideal, but it has to be done.”
There’s also talk of trying to trade a settlement halt for Palestinians backing away from threats to take Israel to the International Criminal Court.
However, Telhami argues that the only way to overcome the pervasive pessimism will be with a bold effort, not baby steps.
“There is no in-between here,” he said. “To be able to create the kind of movement that people will trust and begin to transform their attitudes, you can’t do it cautiously…..I’m a little concerned about the way it’s being handled.”
Front Page Features