Where Obama failed on forging peace in the Middle East
By Scott Wilson, Published: July 14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-searches-for-middle-east-peace/2012/07/14/gJQAQQiKlW_print.htmlIt was their first meeting with the new president, and the dozen or so Jewish leaders picked to attend had made an agreement among themselves: No arguing — either with each other or their host.
The pledge would be hard to keep.
Five weeks earlier, President Obama had traveled to Cairo to ask for a “new beginning” between his government and an Islamic world angry about the United States’ wars in two Muslim nations and its perceived favoritism toward Israel. Now, he was calling in these influential Jewish leaders to explain his thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As they gathered in the Roosevelt Room that afternoon, July 13, 2009, there was mounting concern about Obama.
In a very public way, the president had been asking Israel’s government to stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, hoping that political sacrifice by the Israeli leadership would bring the Palestinians to the peace table. In Cairo, he had even called Israel’s continuing construction on land that Palestinians view as their future state “illegitimate.”
More information: Israel’s pre-war 1967 boundaries
According to three people who were at the meeting, and to notes recounted by one of them, Obama sought to reassure the skeptical attendees, telling them, “Don’t think we don’t understand the nuances of the current issues. We do.”
But it was his response a few minutes later that came to define his administration’s relationship with Israel — and the reason many in the room that day, and even more outside of it, believe that his attempts to bring the two sides together failed in his first term.
“If you want Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them,” Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the president.
Obama politely but firmly disagreed.
“Look at the past eight years,” he said, referring to the George W. Bush administration’s relationship with Israel. “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.”
Obama’s Muslim middle name, former anti-Zionist pastor in Chicago and past friendships with prominent Palestinians had shadowed his presidential campaign. He wanted to restore the United States’ reputation as a credible mediator. To do so, he believed that he needed to regain Arab trust — and talk tough to Israel, publicly and privately.
This was the change that Obama had promised — a new approach to old problems. But the stunned silence of Jewish leaders around the table that day suggested the political peril he would face along the way.
“We believed from that point that we were in for problems,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who attended the meeting. “And we were right.”
The way Obama managed the Israeli-Palestinian issue exhibited many of the hallmarks that have defined his first term. It began with a bid for historic change. But it foundered ultimately on his political and tactical misjudgments, on a lack of trusted relationships and on an outdated view of a conflict that many of his closest advisers imparted to him. And those advisers — veterans of the Middle East peace issue — clashed among themselves over tactics and turf.
The enduring traits of the conflict, whose resolution Obama elevated to “a vital national security interest of the United States,” made it particularly resistant to his preferred methods of diplomacy. His appeals to the shared interests of countries at war and at peace have achieved some success, including in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — haunted by the Holocaust and the perceived injustice of a Palestinian land lost in war — resisted the natural give-and-take of negotiation that Obama counted on. It is a conflict more bound up in domestic politics than any other foreign policy issue, which he learned first in his 2008 campaign and later in the Oval Office.
Obama’s inability to bring Israelis and Palestinians together is especially problematic today, as the Arab Middle East remakes itself and Israel, more isolated than ever, weighs a military strike against Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to head to Israel this week. And Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney is planning to visit later this month, injecting Obama’s record on the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the heart of a fierce campaign.
“I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress,” Obama said last fall at the U.N. General Assembly. “Peace is hard work.”
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Battling Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Obama faced long odds contending for Jewish support. His middle name, Hussein, increased the already formidable challenge she posed for the Jewish vote, mostly by raising suspicions about his past and his religious character.
“The bar was higher for him,” said Ben Rhodes, who wrote Obama’s foreign policy speeches during the campaign and is now a deputy national security adviser. “He faced a level of scrutiny — and, frankly, a level of dishonesty in politics — that he had to answer to.”
In February 2008, as the crucial Ohio primary approached, Obama met in Cleveland with about 100 Jewish community leaders, hoping that a candid conversation would dispel some of the concerns rising on the campaign trail.
As a candidate of change, he made clear that he was willing to say things that his predecessors were not.
“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel,” Obama said, referring to a hawkish Israeli political party that did not recognize a Palestinian right to a state. “That can’t be a measure of our friendship with Israel.”
A little over a year later, Obama was working with the Likud party chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was elected Israel’s prime minister for a second time not long after Obama took the oath of office.
The weeks-long war between Israel and armed Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip had been over officially for two days.
But Obama had promised during the campaign that he would begin a push for peace at once, regardless of the regional mood. On his second day in office, he named former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his special envoy for Middle East peace.
At 74, Mitchell was the embodiment of the Washington political establishment, noted for his mediation of the centuries-old sectarian strife in Northern Ireland.
But he had Middle East experience as well. In 2000, as the second, more brutal Palestinian intifada worsened, President Bill Clinton dispatched Mitchell to the region. He wanted recommendations on how to end the violence and begin negotiations.
In a report published in May 2001, Mitchell wrote that “a cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless [the government of Israel] freezes all settlement construction activity.”
It was the same recommendation he would make to Obama eight years later.
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Within a week of his appointment, Mitchell was on a plane to Europe and the Middle East for a “listening tour.”
To Obama and Mitchell, it was a propitious time, despite the recent Gaza war. Never before had the governments of the Sunni Muslim kingdoms, from Saudi Arabia to Jordan, shared more strategic interests with Israel. The reason was the common threat of Shiite Muslim Iran, which leaders in Riyadh and Jerusalem held in near-equal disdain.
In the words of one senior administration official, Mitchell’s plan was to “expand the chess board” — that is, to ask Israel and the Palestinians to return to direct talks and to ask the Arab states to make symbolic gestures to show Israel it was serious about a wider peace.
The approach captured the essence of Obama’s view of foreign policy: everyone gives a little, everyone gets a little. And several senior administration officials believed that Obama, after a historic election at home and rock-star popularity abroad, would be able to persuade traditionally recalcitrant Middle East leaders to agree.
But no Arab leader showed an interest in helping Obama with Israel. Mitchell did hear something else on his trip — that a freeze on Israeli settlement construction would send a strong signal that the new president wanted to make a difference.
An estimated 450,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. With each new house or apartment building, the land that Palestinians view as their future state shrinks. Israel annexed East Jerusalem soon after the 1967 victory — a move not recognized internationally — and no Israeli government had frozen construction there. Asking for a moratorium from the just-elected Netanyahu, a traditional hawk at the head of a narrow hawkish coalition, would be an enormous request.
At the time, Obama made clear to close advisers that he, in the words of one of them, wanted “to demonstrate that he could change Israeli behavior on the ground” to strengthen U.S. credibility.
Mitchell agreed with the approach, acknowledging that no U.S. president had ever asked an Israeli leader for such an extensive settlement freeze.
“We got what we wanted,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a rival advocacy group to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Many of its donors are Obama supporters. “We got a president who seemed to ‘get it.’ We got a commitment to deal with this on Day One. And we got George Mitchell.”
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I n mid-May 2009, Netanyahu made his way to Washington for his first meeting with Obama as president. The leaders did not know each other well — one senior administration official described Netanyahu as “essentially a Republican” — and their outlook on the future shape of Israel differed starkly.
Netanyahu had not declared his support for a two-state solution. Unsure what reception he would receive, he found out quickly when the leaders met May 18 at the White House.
“Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office, Netanyahu by his side.
Netanyahu was stunned by the encounter, according to Israelis, Americans and Palestinians who were later briefed on the meeting. The next day, he headed to Capitol Hill for a talk with Jewish members of Congress, a group that gathered a couple of times a year.
It was clear to some present, as they recounted the meeting, that Netanyahu was looking for support to take on Obama over his demand for a settlement freeze.
“What he received was a distinct surprise to him, which was unified support from many longtime friends of Israel for the president’s policy,” said former congressman Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), who attended the meeting after serving as a liaison between Obama and Jewish voters during the campaign. “He was clearly taken aback.”
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Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu was complicated by more than their politics. As with many aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it involved a history that Obama had little to do with.
Netanyahu believed that some of Obama’s Middle East advisers carried what one Israeli diplomat described as a “Clinton-era grudge,” a bias against Netanyahu that would transfer to Obama.
Bill Clinton and Netanyahu clashed repeatedly over the general faltering of the 1993 Oslo Accords that had brought a measure of Palestinian self-government in the territories.
But they found ways to compromise, and Netanyahu, fearing a politically costly falling-out with a U.S. president, agreed to some Palestinian concessions. His decision probably cost him the 1999 election.
Hillary Clinton, Mitchell, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Dennis B. Ross — a Middle East adviser to Obama during the 2008 campaign who joined his administration as a State Department adviser on Iran — were veterans of the Clinton years.
According to former administration officials and outside advisers briefed on some White House meetings, Emanuel, in particular, thought Netanyahu could be pressured to make concessions, just as he had in the 1990s.
Emanuel’s father was born in Jerusalem and, before the state of Israel was created in 1948, belonged to the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary movement classified as a terrorist group by the British forces it fought. Emanuel served as a civilian volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
He often told others that he believed his view was consistent with that of the Israeli political center, which had traditionally disliked the settlement project because of its cost and security risks and the moral questions it raised about the occupation of Palestinian land. He also had an outsize say in the Obama administration about Israel policy.
“I have some very smart people advising me on this,” Obama told the Jewish leaders in that first meeting at the White House in July 2009, turning to Emanuel.
“We understand there is a profound political edge to Israeli politics. Rahm understands the politics there and he explains them to me.”
To many in the administration, Emanuel’s instinct was one of “tough love” toward Israel.
“But his depth may not have been as grounded in the realities of the current conflict as it should have been,” said a senior administration official, who worked on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Netanyahu had changed since the 1990s, and so had the Israeli public. From his experience with Clinton, Netanyahu learned that he could not afford to lose his base. For him, a fight with a U.S. president pressuring Israel was a safer political bet than it once had been.
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How to manage the region’s key leaders would become an occupation of Obama and his team, and Netanyahu was not the only Middle East veteran generating concern. The other was Mahmoud Abbas, the 77-year-old Palestinian leader who had spent a lifetime promoting an independent Palestine.
Abbas had once broken with the Palestinian leadership on principle over the violence of the second intifada. Now he ran a Palestinian national movement divided between his secular Fatah party and the Islamists of Hamas.
On the eve of Abbas’s arrival in Washington in late May 2009 for his first meeting with Obama, Hillary Clinton provided an unscripted push to the Palestinian leader’s position.
At a State Department appearance with the Egyptian foreign minister, Clinton, speaking for Obama, said, “He wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.’
“That is our position,” she said, outlining a demand publicly stronger than any to date. “That is what we have communicated very clearly.”
White House officials acknowledged recently that her comments were a mistake. But the president declined to soften that position when he had a chance.
Obama’s twin meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas that May were steps along the path to Cairo, where he intended in early June 2009 to deliver the signature foreign policy address of his first term. From inside the domed main hall of al-Azhar University, a centuries-old seat of Islamic learning, Obama, the son of a lapsed Muslim father, spoke candidly.
He warned Palestinians to end hateful anti-Israel incitement, rejected the official strains of Holocaust denial, and condemned suicide terrorism, saying that “Palestinians must abandon violence.”
“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland," Obama said. “They endure the daily humiliations, large and small, that come with occupation.”
Using the term “occupation” for the Israeli military authority over the West Bank and other areas seized in the 1967 war sent a powerful message.
“America will align our policies with those who pursue peace,” Obama said, in what to Israelis sounded like a warning. “And we will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs.”
The speech and spectacle surrounding it electrified much of the Muslim world — and alarmed many Jews.