David Bromwich at the New York Review of Books on Obama’s Thursday Middle East speech agrees with me that Obama has signalled a quietist shift because he has no power to effect events. And so in years to come Obama’s vision of two happy states side by side will come off as “kindly prophecy” to the Israelis– because of course it’s no longer attainable. This is a bleak time. Bromwich seems to be for a Palestinian state on 67 lines, I don’t know what I’m for except an end to Zionism in the Jewish mind, so as to liberate the world. But neither of us has traction yet. And we are descending into god only knows what you call the next intifada. Excerpts:
The May 19 speech did not attempt to hide his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Netanyahu government. Yet at the moment, Obama can find no way of exerting leverage against Netanyahu that will not hurt him more than Netanyahu, and hurt him in America—-especially with the reliable Jewish donors whom Republicans have been seeking to detach from the Democratic party with increasing urgency for the past three presidential elections. Pilgrimages to Israel by prominent Republicans such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and the invitation to address Congress issued to Netanyahu by the majority leader Eric Cantor, suggest that this attempt has become a secret in plain view.
In the past decade, the word “occupation” had occasionally been spoken by American administrations when criticizing Israeli expansion in the West Bank. By contrast, “1967,” though understood as the basis for all negotiations, had come to be spoken less often. This perceptible shift of usage, Netanyahu and his allies in the settler movement were evidently hoping, would be consecrated by time and turn into a change of substance. Yet until the press reports after Obama’s speech revealed the attempted pre-speech intervention by Netanyahu, no one could have guessed the degree to which the Israeli prime minister had fixed his sights on excluding the mention of 1967 as a taboo. Ethan Bronner, in a New York Times story, made it clear that while none of the parties ever expected the exact lines to be followed (hence the importance of swaps), Netanyahu actually now objects to the idea that (as Bronner paraphrases his position) “any retained land would be compensated with other land.” Does this mean that he will accept only negotiations that lead to a post-1967 net gain of territory for Israel? Netanyahu reiterated his objection in his remarks on May 20 after meeting with President Obama at the White House. Israel, he said, “cannot go back to the 1967 lines,” both because those earlier borders leave it exposed to attacks, and because of “certain changes that have taken place on the ground.”
Next week, he has booked himself two opportunities to work up from other American bodies the sympathy for “certain changes” that he failed to elicit from the American president: an address to the annual AIPAC convention on May 23, and an address to Congress on May 24.
The extreme hostility of Netanyahu’s reaction on a single point may have obscured how much he got substantively from Obama. For an unmistakable message was sent by omission in Obama’s speech at the state department—namely, that the administration has no present plan to broker talks between Israel and the Palestinian unity government. There was not a word about Gaza and only a spectator’s advice about the West Bank. Practically speaking, therefore, one more American president has been turned away from active engagement with the challenge of the occupation. No further pressure for an independent Palestine is likely to be initiated by the US before the 2012 presidential election. From the evidence of a growing mass movement on both sides of Israel’s borders, Obama, for his part, seems to have calculated that Israelis in the next few years will come to treat his words of May 19 as a kindly prophecy.
