Obama to Israel – Time is Running Out. President Obama interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg View, March 2, 2014. Excerpts at The Atlantic.
Obama threatens Israel on the eve of Netanyahu visit. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, March 2, 2014.
For Netanyahu, a bombshell battering by Obama. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, February 3, 2014.
The President’s Prophetic Threats to Israel. By John Podhoretz. Commentary, March 2, 2014.
On Israel, Obama Has No Clue What He’s Talking About. By David Harsanyi. The Federalist, March 3, 2014.
Obama’s Scary Mideast Interview. By Elliott Abrams. The Weekly Standard, March 3, 2014.
Surprise: Obama Kills the Peace Process. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, March 3, 2014.
Obama puts Israel on notice. By Hussein Ibish. NOW Lebanon, March 4, 2014.
Obama’s Settlement Construction Lie. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, March 4, 2014.
Podhoretz:
In an
extraordinary—and I don’t use the word in a complimentary way—interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg, President Obama follows his secretary of state
in warning Israel and its leader that a failure to “make peace” now with the
Palestinians will have terrible consequences. Israel is “more isolated
internationally,” and will become more so; there will be more Palestinians and
Israeli Arabs as time goes on, not fewer, so Israel had better move now; and not
to move now is to create the conditions for a “permanent Israeli occupation of
the West Bank. . . . there comes a point when you cannot manage this anymore.”
The
wild logical contradictions in his remarks expose the degree to which the
American approach in the Kerry peace talks is to haunt Israel with the dire
nightmare it will face should the talks fail; Palestinian rejectionism plays
almost no role in the Obaman calculus here.
The
Palestinians, in Obama’s view, do not actually need to make changes; astonishingly,
he says, they’re ready for peace.
“The Palestinians,” the president says, overlooking every piece of polling data
we have about the opinions of the Palestinians, “would still prefer peace. They
would still prefer a country of their own that allows them to find a job, send
their kids to school, travel overseas, go back and forth to work without
feeling as if they are restricted or constrained as a people. And they
recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.”
Ah. So that 2011 poll that says 60 percent of the Palestinians reject a two-state solution is bunk—a poll whose findings have not been contradicted since. If Palestinians refuse to
accept a two-state solution, they do not “recognize that Israel is not going anywhere.”
Rather, they are still engaging in a pseudo-national fantasy about Israel’s
disappearance or destruction. And they are so eager for peace and coexistence
with Israel that they remain the only significant Muslim population that still has a favorable view of suicide bombings, according to a Pew survey.
“The
voices for peace within the Palestinian community will be stronger with a
framework agreement,” the president says. But why would the “voices for peace”
need to be “stronger” if they reflect the actual views of the Palestinian people?
They should be more than strong enough on their own now. Indeed, if they are so
strong, we would not be hearing repeated denunciations of the “framework” process from Palestinian negotiators.
The
president’s fantasies about the Palestinians also involve Mahmoud Abbas, president of the
Palestinian Authority. “I think,” he says, “nobody would dispute that whatever
disagreements you may have with him, he has proven himself to be somebody who
has been committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this
issue.” Nobody would dispute? In
2008, offered a peace deal by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that
involved Abbas actually drawing a new West Bank map giving the Palestinians
something between 92 and 95 percent of the territory, Abbas basically fled the table and didn’t return. Granted, he didn’t do what Yasser Arafat did after a
similar deal at Camp David in 2000 and begin the second intifada, but this
hardly demonstrates a commitment to a diplomatic effort—except for one that
fails.
So the
Palestinians, in the president’s view, are all in. It’s really quite wonderful,
in fact: “You’ve got a partner on the other side who is prepared to negotiate
seriously, who does not engage in some of the wild rhetoric that so often you
see in the Arab world when it comes to Israel, who has shown himself committed
to maintaining order within the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority and to
cooperate with Israelis around their security concerns — for us to not seize
this moment I think would be a great mistake.”
Yes,
the PA is such a partner for peace that even with negotiations going on, it
celebrates acts of violence against Israel on a constant basis, as this report details.
Not to
mention the little wrinkle that Abbas doesn’t speak in any way for half of the
Palestinian polity, the half living under the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
Ah, but that’s no problem, in the president’s view. “There would still be huge
questions about what happens in Gaza,” the president says, “but I actually
think Hamas would be greatly damaged by the prospect of real peace.” Really!
Unlike Abbas, who has not faced Palestinian voters since 2004, Hamas actually
won a free election in the past decade and its unquestioned commitment to
Israel’s destruction is clearly shared by the people who live under its aegis. They do not want peace.
All of
this is folderol, anyway, because the president clearly thinks peace is solely
Israel’s to make, and basically, Binyamin Netanyahu should listen to Obama’s
mother and rip off the band-aid: “One of the things my mom always used to tell
me and I didn’t always observe, but as I get older I agree with — is if there’s
something you know you have to do, even if it’s difficult or unpleasant, you
might as well just go ahead and do it, because waiting isn’t going to help.
When I have a conversation with Bibi, that’s the essence of my conversation: If
not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?”
Now
that’s some chutzpah right there, because of course the president is invoking
the words of Hillel, the ancient Jewish sage, as a rhetorical tool against the
Israeli prime minister. Of course, Obama leaves out the key words of Hillel’s
famed plaint, which are: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?”
Israel must be for itself, because there is almost no country left in the world
that will be for it; while the president says the American commitment to Israel
is “rock-solid,” clearly he does not believe it will necessarily be so in the
future . . . nor should it be.
Says
the president of Netanyahu, “if he does not believe that a peace deal with the
Palestinians is the right thing to do for Israel, then he needs to articulate
an alternative approach. And as I said before, it’s hard to come up with one
that’s plausible.” That’s ridiculous. A peace deal with the Palestinians is of
course the right thing to do for Israel. But if there can be no peace deal, or
can be no peace deal that does not pose a severe danger to Israel’s survival,
then it is not the right thing to do.
The
only “plausible” thing to do is to challenge the Palestinians to cure
themselves of their psychotic political culture and become a rational actor
with whom a true peace can be made. Is that a tragedy? It sure is. Sometimes
there are tragedies, and they must be faced realistically, not wished away.
One
thing that cannot be wished away is the president’s insistence on placing the
burdens on Israel. This is something else his apologists can no longer wish
away.
Putin Smashes Washington’s Cocoon. By Walter Russell Mead and Staff. The American Interest, March 1, 2014.
Red Lines in Crimea. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, February 28, 2014.
Mead and Staff:
A Politico report calls it “a crisis that
no one anticipated.” The Daily Beast,
reporting on Friday’s US intelligence assessment that “Vladimir Putin’s
military would not invade Ukraine,” quotes a Senate aide claiming that “no one
really saw this kind of thing coming.”
Op-eds
from all over the legacy press this week helped explained why. Through the rose
tinted lenses of a media community deeply convinced that President Obama and
his dovish team are the masters of foreign relations, nothing poor Putin did
could possibly derail the stately progress of our genius president. There were,
we were told, lots of reasons not to worry about Ukraine. War is too costly for
Russia’s weak economy. Trade would suffer, the ruble would take a hit. The 2008
war with Georgia is a bad historical comparison, as Ukraine’s territory,
population and military are much larger. Invasion would harm Russia’s
international standing. Putin doesn’t want to spoil his upcoming G8 summit, or
his good press from Sochi. Putin would rather let the new government in Kiev
humiliate itself with incompetence than give it an enemy to rally against.
Crimea’s Tartars and other anti-Russian ethnic minorities wouldn’t stand for
it. Headlines like “Why Russia Won’t Invade Ukraine,” “No, Russia Will Not Intervene in Ukraine,” and “5 Reasons for Everyone to Calm Down About Crimea”
weren’t hard to find in our most eminent publications.
Nobody,
including us, is infallible about the future. Giving the public your best
thoughts about where things are headed is all a poor pundit (or government
analyst) can do. But this massive intellectual breakdown has a lot to do with a
common American mindset that is especially built into our intellectual and
chattering classes. Well educated, successful and reasonably liberal minded
Americans find it very hard to believe that other people actually see the world
in different ways. They can see that Vladimir Putin is not a stupid man and
that many of his Russian officials are sophisticated and seasoned observers of
the world scene. American experts and academics assume that smart people
everywhere must want the same things and reach the same conclusions about the
way the world works.
How
many times did foolishly confident American experts and officials come out with
some variant of the phrase “We all share a common interest in a stable and
prosperous Ukraine.” We may think that’s true, but Putin doesn’t.
We
blame this in part on the absence of true intellectual and ideological
diversity in so much of the academy, the policy world and the mainstream media.
Most college kids at good schools today know many more people from different
races and cultural groups than their grandparents did, but they are much less
exposed to people who think outside the left-liberal box. How many faithful New York Times readers have no idea what
American conservatives think, much less how Russian oligarchs do? Well bred and
well read Americans live in an ideological and cultural cocoon and this makes
them fatally slow to understand the very different motivations that animate
actors ranging from the Tea Party to the Kremlin to, dare we say it, the
Supreme Leader and Guide of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As far
as we can tell, the default assumption guiding our political leadership these
days is that the people on the other side of the bargaining table (unless they
are mindless Tea Party Republicans) are fundamentally reasonable people who see
the world as we do, and are motivated by the same things that motivate us. Many
people are, of course, guided by an outlook not all that dissimilar from the
standard upper middle class gentry American set of progressive ideas. But some
aren’t, and when worlds collide, trouble comes.
Too
much of the Washington policy establishment looks around the world and sees
only reflections of its own enlightened self. That’s natural and perhaps
inevitable to some degree. The people who rise through the competitive
bureaucracies of American academic, media and think tank life tend to be those
who’ve most thoroughly absorbed and internalized the set of beliefs and
behavioral norms that those institutions embody and respect. On the whole,
those beliefs and norms have a lot going for them. It would not be an
improvement if America’s elite institutions started to look more like their
counterparts in Russia or Zimbabwe.
But
while those ideas and beliefs help people rise through the machinery of the
American power system, they can get in the way when it comes to understanding
the motives and calculations of people like President Putin. The best of the
journalists, think tankers and officials will profit from the Crimean policy
fiasco and will never again be as smug or as blind as so much of Washington was
last week. The mediocre majority will go on as before.
The big
question of course, is what President Obama will take away from this
experience. Has he lost confidence in the self-described (and self-deceived)
“realists” who led him down the primrose path with their empty happy talk and
their beguiling but treacherous illusions? Has he rethought his conviction that
geopolitics and strategy are relics of a barbarous past with no further
relevance in our own happy day? Is he tired of being humiliated on the international
stage? Is it dawning on him that he has actual enemies rather than difficult
partners out there, and that they wish him ill and seek to harm him? (Again, we
are not talking about the GOP in Congress.)
Let’s
hope so. There are almost three years left in this presidential term, and they
could be very long ones if President Obama chooses to stick with the ideas and
approaches he’s been using so far.
