Obama's Mid-East Policy Boils Down To 3 Assumptions--All Of Them Wrong

Tablet Magazine has a symposium of foreign policy experts on Obama’s Middle East policy. One of them, Elliott Abrams, writes in part:

The Obama Administration appears to have three basic premises about the Middle East. The first is that the key issue in the entire Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is that it is a territorial conflict that can be resolved in essence by Israeli concessions. The third is that the central function of the United States is to serve as the PLO’s lawyer to broker those concessions so that an agreement can be signed. I think these premises are all wrong.

I think we can agree that there is nothing in Obama's conduct of his Mideast policy that would contradict any of the 3 premises that Abrams ascribes to him.

Now of course, there is nothing novel in assuming that the conflict is at the center of everything that goes on in the Middle East. The problem is that considering the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular to be the key to peace in the Middle East means conveniently forgetting that the long history of Arabs killing Arabs predates the reestablishment of the State of Israel.


At the end of his book The Arabs In History, Bernard Lewis provides a time line (p. 179) of the early history of Islam:

632. Death of Muhammad
656. Murder of 'Uthman--beginning of first civil war in Islam.
657-59. Battle of Siffin
661. Murder of 'Ali--beginning of Umayyad dynasty.
680. Massacre of Husain and 'Alids at Karbala.
683-90. Second civil war
685-87. Revolt of Mukhtar in Iraq--beginning of extremist Shi'a.

The fact is that historically, Arabs have not needed Israel as a pretext for killing each other--and that fact has not changed over the centuries.. Raphael Patai, in an updated chapter in his book The Arab Mind has a list of Arab conflicts--none of which involve Israel--just during the 13 years from 1970 to 1983:

1. Intermittent disputes involving border warfare and assassinations between South Yemen on the one hand, and North Yemen and Saudi Arabia, on the other since the early 1970's. A brief but fierce border war between the two Yemens took place as recently as March, 1979.

2. A major and bloody, albeit brief, conflict between Jordan and Palestinian guerrillas in 1970, complicated by Syrian intervention.

3. Fighting between the Kurds and the Iraqis, which lasted several years.

4. A bloody conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan, 1956-1972.

5. Clashes between South Yemen and Oman, linked to the Dhofar rebellion, 1972-1976.

6. A tripartite conflict between Algeria on the one hand and Morocco and Mauritania, on the other, over the control of the former Spanish Sahara, beginning in 1976 and subsequently transformed into guerrilla warfare against Morocco by the Polisario, the freedom fighters of the Western Sahara, supported by Algeria and Libya, which was still in progress in 1982.

7. Intermittent hostility, and actual border fighting, including air attacks, between Egypt and Libya in 1977.

8. The Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, involving two outside parties, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization, still unresolved in early 1982.

9. The invasion of Chad by Libya in 1980.

10. The war between Iraq and Iran, which began in the fall of 1980, in which Iraq is supported by Jordan and Iran by Syria, making it in effect, an inter-Arab conflict. It was still in progress in early 1982.

11. In February, 1982, a conflict flared up between the Syrian government and Muslim fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama, in which several thousands were killed and major parts of Hama were destroyed. [p.357-358]

For an even more up-to-date list of Islamist violence, there is TheReligionOfPeace.com, which has a list (as of the writing of this post) of 15,569 Islamist attacks around the world since 9/11. Among the places where these terrorist attacks have taken place include:

India and the Sudan and Algeria and Afghanistan and New York and Pakistan and Israel and Russia and Chechnya and the Philippines and Indonesia and Nigeria and England and Thailand and Spain and Egypt and Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia and Ingushetia and Dagestan and Turkey and Morocco and Yemen and Lebanon and France and Uzbekistan and Gaza and Tunisia and Kosovo and Bosnia and Mauritania and Kenya and Eritrea and Syria and Somalia and California and Kuwait and Virginia and Ethiopia and Iran and Jordan and United Arab Emirates and Louisiana and Texas and Tanzania and Germany and Australia and Pennsylvania and Belgium and Denmark and East Timor and Qatar and Maryland and Tajikistan and the Netherlands and Scotland and Chad and Canada and China and Nepal and the Maldives and Argentina and Mali and Angola and the Ukraine...

Would all this really come to an end by creating a second Palestinian state?

And is that all that it will take--creating a state? On the one side is the goal of Hamas, as described in Article 7 of their Charter:

the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!

That is more than just a matter of territorial ambition--and the fact is that the Fatah Constitution is no different. In fact, in October 2007 Representative Roy Blount introduced Resolution 758:

Urging Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is also Chairman of his Fatah party, to officially abrogate the 10 articles in the Fatah Constitution that call for Israel's destruction and terrorism against Israel, oppose any political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and label Zionism as racism.

...Whereas the 10 articles in the Fatah Constitution opposing Israel and Zionism are the following:

(1) `Article (4): The Palestinian struggle is part and parcel of the world-wide struggle against Zionism, colonialism and international imperialism.';

(2) `Article (7): The Zionist Movement is racial, colonial and aggressive in ideology, goals, organization and method.';

(3) `Article (8): The Israeli existence in Palestine is a Zionist invasion with a colonial expansive base, and it is a natural ally to colonialism and international imperialism.';

(4) `Article (12): Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.';

(5) `Article (17): Armed public revolution is the inevitable method to liberating Palestine.';

(6) `Article (19): Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People's armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.';

(7) `Article (22): Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine, as well as any project intended to liquidate the Palestinian case or impose any international mandate on its people.';

(8) `Article (23): Maintaining relations with Arab countries . . . with the provision that the armed struggle is not negatively affected.';

(9) `Article (24): Maintaining relations with all liberal forces supporting our just struggle in order to resist together Zionism and imperialism.'; and

(10) `Article (25): Convincing concerned countries in the world to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine as a method of solving the problem.'

Resolution 758 went nowhere, and the Fatah has not been revised. The Fatah claim that Zionism is an international phenomenon and that it must be eradicated culturally go beyond a mere territorial conflict involving the creation of a Palestinian state. It explains the persistent persecutions of Jews by Muslims when that very same area was under Islamic rule. For that matter, you can skim through Andrew Bostom's The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and get an idea of the pervasive anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews--and all non-Muslims--throughout the history of Islam. To claim that the conflict is merely a dispute over land requires ignoring a lot of history that directly contradicts that view.

Now of course, no one is going to stop Obama from setting up the US as Abbas's personal representative to force unilateral Israeli concessions and manufacture a Palestinian state--something that has never existed in the history of the region. But considering how wrong Obama is on his first 2 premises, the result of pursuing the 3rd premise can only end in disastrous consequences for the region.

Ironically, it is Obama's single-minded attempt to force the creation of a second Palestinian state--to the exclusion of dealing with other threats in the region--that has been responsible for destabilizing the region. The Arab world has seen Obama's failure to deal with Iran and Syria and has begun to take steps to deal with the threat of Iran--steps that do not include the US or its interests.

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