#Obama's Mideast Speech Sampler 05/20/2011

From an email from DG

1) The speech

Challahu Akbar had a pretty impressive roundup of reactions to the President's Arab spring speech. I'd recommend Elder of Ziyon's review, which, despite different emphases seems rather similar to Jackson Diehl's. Regarding the Israel-Palestinian part of the speech, there's a debate between those saying that there was little new in the speech and those saying that there was a major change.


Walter Russell Mead emphasizes how much the President's speech resembles the views of President Bush. Charles Krauthammer annotates aspects of the speech. (Yid with Lid turned in a similar exercise.)

I have a hard time buying that the President's specification of the 1967 borders wasn't much of a change from President Bush's position, as even a supporter of his, former Representative Robert Wexler defended it as a major change. Or as J. E. Dyer tweeted: one is an Israeli negotiating position,vs. the US saying it will tolerate only that specific negotiating position. Alternatively Omri Ceren tweeted: Bush is a statement of where negotiations should end up, Obama is a statement of where they should start. Either way, in the context of how the President presented his idea; it limited Israel's diplomatic maneuverability.

William Daroff had a funny re-tweet:

RT @latimestot Leno: Obama wants Israel to go back to pre-1967 borders. Now Native Americans are demanding Obama go back to pre-1492 borders

Does that remind anyone of a classic Dry Bones cartoon?

2) The gaffe

Jackson Diehl outlines what he calls the gaffe in the speech.

That doesn’t mean that Netanyahu doesn’t have reason to be fuming as he heads for his meeting with Obama today. For months, Washington has been privately pressing the Israeli leader to endorse the 1967-lines-principle as a way of jump-starting moribund talks with Abbas. Netanyahu has resisted, though he inched toward the position in a speech last Monday. Now Obama has publicly sprung the principle on him — even though there is next to no prospect that negotiations can be started anytime soon.

Reporting in the New York Times seems to back this up.

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu has complained that Mr. Obama has pushed Israel too far — a point driven home during a furious phone call with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday morning, just hours before Mr. Obama’s speech, during which the prime minister reacted angrily to the president’s plan to endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders for a future Palestinian state. Mr. Obama did not back down. But the last-minute furor highlights the discord as they head into what one Israeli official described as a “train wreck” coming their way: a United Nations General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September. 

...

But the easing of tensions ended this spring when, Israeli and American officials said, Mr. Netanyahu got wind of Mr. Obama’s plans to make a major address on the Middle East, and alerted Republican leaders that he would like to address a joint meeting of Congress. That move was widely interpreted as an attempt to get out in front of Mr. Obama, by presenting an Israeli peace proposal that, while short of what the Palestinians want, would box in the president. House Speaker John A. Boehner issued the invitation, for late May. So White House officials timed Mr. Obama’s speech on Thursday to make sure he went first. 

Here's my problem. This is what Robert Satloff wrote:

Perhaps more than anything else, the most surprising aspect of the president's peace process statement was that it moved substantially toward the Palestinian position just days after the Palestinian Authority decided to seek unity and reconciliation with Hamas. 

The Fatah-Hamas agreement was a slap in the face of peace processors. President Obama found a way to upstage Prime Minister Netanyahu and did it in a way that rewarded Mahmoud Abbas's demonstrated contempt for peace.

In March of last year, Thomas Friedman wrote a column, Driving drunk in Jerusalem. The subject of the column was the announcement that Israel would be building more apartments in Ramat Shlomo. This how Friedman began the column:

I am a big Joe Biden fan. The vice president is an indefatigable defender of U.S. interests abroad. So it pains me to say that on his recent trip to Israel, when Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s government rubbed his nose in some new housing plans for contested East Jerusalem, the vice president missed a chance to send a powerful public signal: He should have snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious. We need to focus on building our country.” 

The incident of course was not intended to embarrass Biden. It certainly didn't come from Netanyahu. Yet the administration (and its cheerleaders in the media) chose to make it into a diplomatic incident.

The contrast to President Obama's reaction to Abbas is stark. Even as the President laments at how long the Israeli-Arab conflict has gone on, he fails to acknowledge a player who has made it so. Abbas rejected an offer from then Prime Minister Olmert in 2008; he refused to negotiate with Netanyahu, even when Netanyhau acquiesced to a building freeze, until the freeze was nearly over and then walked away; he came to an agreement with Hamas and this week he wrote in an op-ed that he intends to use international recognition to further attack Israel's legitimacy.

While the President has warned Abbas that his shenanigans in the UN won't help (though the Times article suggests that the President may have no way of preventing it) the President rewarded Abbas's intransigence by moving towards his position and doing it in a fashion designed to embarrass Netanyahu.

Thomas Friedman no doubt approves.

Could you imagine the President saying:

You've told me that you want peace and you want a state. Yet your actions have shown that you have little interest in either. You have refused to negotiate in good faith. You incite violence against Israel. Recently you joined with a terrorist organization that refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist.

Like Yasser Arafat you have refused an offer that would have given you your state. How long do you expect you can continue rejecting Israel and maintain international support? How long do you think you fail to accept peace offers and expect to get the same or better deal you previously rejected?

Neither can I and that's a big problem with the speech.


3) Tom, Tom the President's muse?

Daled Amos caught onto one of those things that really bothers me. He notes the way the President referred to Hamas.

Somehow, I get the impression that Hamas does more than just not recognize Israel's right to exist -- they are acting upon it.

The president uses understatement in describing Hamas.

It's not really all that different from how Thomas Friedman referred to Hamas in his latest:

And it is equally silly for the Palestinians to be going to the United Nations for a state when they need to be persuading Israelis why a Hamas-Fatah rapprochement is in their security interest. 

Got that? Implicit in Friedman's words is that it is possible to show that including Hamas in the PA's government is in Israel's "security interest!"

It's not just understatement in both cases, but a denial of what Hamas is.

Let's take two other sentences from the President's speech. First we have:

The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.

This echoes Thomas Friedman's formulation in Bibi and Barack:

With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state. 

And when the President said:

But precisely because of our friendship, it’s important that we tell the truth:  The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace.

If we go back a few years, we find Thomas Friedman quoting this idea in Rooting for the Good Guys. (He's done it more than once.)

"There is something quite stunning when you think about it," the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi remarked. "Three Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Sharon -- all of them army generals, two from Labor one from Likud -- all came to the same conclusion: that the occupation was unsustainable from the point of view of Israel's national defense." As a result, they all shifted from focusing on "wars of necessity to focusing on a peace of necessity," Ezrahi added. Sharon doesn't want to explain this about-face publicly, in part, I assume, because it suggests weakness -- that Israel can't keep doing what it has been doing, and knows it.

My intent is not to critique Friedman's or the President's assertions, which has been done. As has been noted before President Obama seeks out advice from Thomas Friedman. In these three instances we see the agreement or influence. (I suspect there are more agreements in the speech with Friedman's ideas, but I don't have time to seek them all out.)


4) The disconnect

In the speech, President Obama said:

In a region that was the birthplace of three world religions, intolerance can lead only to suffering and stagnation.  And for this season of change to succeed, Coptic Christians must have the right to worship freely in Cairo, just as Shia must never have their mosques destroyed in Bahrain.

And yet as the Egyptian revolution has progressed, there's been more violence against the Copts and the Muslim Brotherhood, which would almost certainly restrict the Copts further, is increasing its political power. And yet President Obama said:

Second, we do not want a democratic Egypt to be saddled by the debts of its past.  So we will relieve a democratic Egypt of up to $1 billion in debt, and work with our Egyptian partners to invest these resources to foster growth and entrepreneurship.  We will help Egypt regain access to markets by guaranteeing $1 billion in borrowing that is needed to finance infrastructure and job creation.  And we will help newly democratic governments recover assets that were stolen.

Shouldn't the President have established benchmarks for Egypt to prove that it is becoming democratic and tolerant of religious minorities before committing to helping it out?


5) Obama and the Jews

In the New York Times article cited before the reporter, Helene Cooper observed:

Mr. Netanyahu, as the leader of Israel’s conservative Likud Party, was far more comfortable with the Republican Party in the United States than with Mr. Obama, the son of a Muslim man from Kenya whose introduction to the Arab-Israeli conflict was initially framed by discussions with pro-Palestinian academics. 

This reminds me of one of the most condescending articles written in the 2008 election, As Obama Heads to Florida, Many of Its Jews Have Doubts 

Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern's friends told him in Aventura. (He's not.) 

He is a part of Chicago's large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.) 

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama's children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he's not.) 

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.) 

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.) 

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.) 

South Florida is "the most concentrated area in the country in terms of misinformation" about Mr. Obama, said Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida, the co-chairman of the Obama campaign in the state. His surrogates can put these fears to rest, Mr. Wexler said, by simply repeating the facts about Mr. Obama -- his correct biography, his support for Israel, his positions on other important issues. 

Note how every single doubt Obama is dismissed. But now, nearly three years later, with Obama in office the Times relates that fears of his influences were valid.

Tevi Troy doesn't think that the speech will help the President with Jewish support.

Technorati Tag: Obaba and Middle East and Hamas and Israel.