They held a panel at Brookings two days ago on foreign policy, and at the very end of it, someone asked about the Pachyderm in the Pantry, the Israel/Palestine issue. Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, took the question and said in essence that Obama has been an abject failure, in part for political reasons. By the way, Indyk repeatedly tried to defeat Walt and Mearsheimer’s Israel lobby thesis in debates when the scholars reared their heads 5 years ago. Indyk:
“There I think that we suffer far more from, difficult as it is for me to say it, from a failed theory of the case. We went about trying to resume negotations and resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the wrong way. Now the degree of difficulty was great given the dysfunctionalism on the Israeli side, and on the Palestinian side. But nevertheless we didn’t help.
“And you can put that partly down to political constraints, but I think it has a lot more to do with the way that we went about it…
But I think that the failure to achieve just a limited goal of getting the resumption of negotiations going again– I mean even George Bush who didn’t care about solving the Palestinian problem had final status negotiations in his last year of office– but President Obama that swore that from day one that he was going to make it a priority, in 2-1/2 years was only able to get a fitful one month of direct negotiatons, just the direct negotiations, something which has been going on for the last 15 years. And that affects our credibility.
“If we can’t be seen to be effective in trying to resolve the Palestinian problem, which is the hotbutton issue in the Arab world, then we’re badly positioned to play an influential role in these dramatic developments that are going on now [reference to Arab spring, which was part of the question]. So our credibility has been tarnished.”
The one addendum I’d make to this is that Congress gave Netanyahu 29 standing ovations as he defied President Obama, and Democrats have sandbagged Obama repeatedly on settlements. Obama has no base for even a moderate position (end settlements). This is because the Democratic Party’s power structure is committed to the settlements, and the Republican Party is even further to the right. This is a political issue. It’s not about methodology.
