Below are two analyses of the George Mitchell resignation, a Daily Beast piece saying that Obama’s demand for an end to settlements has now devolved into a demand that Israel “halve the settlements.” Shocking. And then Daniel Levy’s analysis that Obama might have orchestrated the Mitchell resignation to send an angry signal to Netanyahu, because, face it, Obama is hogtied by “domestic political concerns” and the U.S.’s only policy for many years has been to provide “practical backing and diplomatic cover” to whatever Israel wants to do. In a word, the lobby rules.
The message to me of the George Mitchell resignation is that Obama has become the Mubarak of the Palestinian spring. He is in the way of any fair political reconciliation between parties, he supports the oppressor. I don’t care for this paradigm, as it suggests the only natural outcome is revolution, but it does reflect these realities: the U.S. does nothing to support nonviolent Palestinian protest (even as it supports demonstrators across the Arab world this side of Bahrain), the U.S. quashes international-legal responses to Israeli violence (compare to the Libyan intervention), the U.S. steadfastly supports Jim Crow conditions in Palestine (as it calls for democracy in the Arab world).
From the Daily Beast on the Mitchell resignation.
In a recent interview with Newsweek, one senior Israeli official said Mitchell often would say one thing about the direction the U.S. was taking with the two sides, only to be contradicted by Dennis Ross, Clinton’s special adviser to the region. The official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said it seemed as if Mitchell had abdicated his role completely in recent months. Indeed, Mitchell’s frequent visits to Israel and the West Bank slowed to a trickle; his last visit to the region was in December….
Mitchell’s resignation letter set off a small panic inside the West Wing earlier in the week. Senior advisers, as well as Obama himself, could sense the increasing difficulty of the job: Administration officials had been unable to convince Israel to halve new settlements in the West Bank, alienating Palestinians…
Daniel Levy at Foreign Policy:
In the over two years of this administration, there have been 30 days in which Israelis and Palestinians were in negotiation mode and 813 days in which they have not been.
The PLO has reached the conclusion, and yes it took a while, that conducting negotiations — absent terms of reference and against the backdrop of relentless settlement construction — was not working so well. Israel was far chirpier with the existing negotiating modality, rejecting the change in formula as an unwarranted attempt to impose preconditions…
The third, more unexpected explanation for this resignation has the administration utilizing Mitchell’s final act as envoy, namely his stepping down, as a way of sending a message mainly to the Israeli prime minister that if he was not willing to step up his game in a serious way then the U.S. too could step back…
Going forward, the administration essentially has four options for approaching the Israeli-Palestinian file:
1. Lead — A bold U.S. move to advance a solution or at least to agree a border on the ’67 lines allowing for equal land swaps, creating a two-state reality. That would probably require a U.S. plan, U.S. cajoling, and a recalibration of how the U.S. applies incentives and disincentives to the parties, requiring a degree of patience and commitment over time to allow internal debates to play out in both publics.
2. “Lead from behind” (as it is now known, courtesy of an unnamed official via Ryan Lizza) — The administration acknowledges its own limited wiggle space on this issue, given its reading of domestic politics, and allows for a more multilateral approach to achieving de-occupation and security for all. That might include an enhanced role for the Quartet and for the United Nations.
3. Follow Israel — The administration gives practical backing and diplomatic cover to whatever conflict management approach is pursued by Israel. This is the de-facto reality that has prevailed for very many years.
4. Strategic withdrawal — The U.S. downgrades its active involvement in the “peace process” in gradually calibrated ways. The parties are therefore less able to take cover behind the U.S., a loss that is more likely to be felt on the Israeli than the Palestinian side.
The “leading” and “leading from behind” options suffer from similar domestic political shortcomings while the price for “following Israel” continues to accumulate on the side of the ledger marked damaging America’s national security interests.
