The new theme in the liberal press following the Israeli election is that Obama has trumped Netanyahu, so now is the time for Obama to push on the two-state solution. The New York Times implores him to go to Israel at last and explain why the two-state solution is in Israel’s security interest. Peter Beinart offers this exciting scenario, which he only halfway believes himself:
if Obama wants, he’ll be well-positioned to hasten Netanyahu’s demise, and push Israel toward elections that just might produce a Lapid-led government more open to a viable Palestinian state. It’s still a relative long-shot.
It’s not going to happen. Obama will not expend political capital on two states. He tried four years ago and got his head handed to him. His recent speeches have contained nothing about the Israel/Palestine issue, he is just hoping it will go away. And Tuesday’s results tell Obama that it will be too hard to achieve anything that even looks like a handshake on the White House lawn, let alone a fair deal, because Israeli society is now lost to the settler movement; Yair Lapid has no ability to counter it, or desire to.
But Obama is supposed to fly across the Atlantic to a country that if he were living there would regard him as a second-class citizen and lecture these people about their national interest? Mark Landler reports the grim truth in the Times today:
Nor, after the frustrations of his first term, does Mr. Obama appear any more likely to invest heavily in Middle East peacemaking. The president scarcely mentions the subject these days.
The New York Times editorial page has the crust to lecture Obama on how to kiss the lobby’s behind:
Unlike the bungled effort in his first term, though, he needs to carefully prepare the political ground, including making his first trip to Israel as president and explaining to the Israeli people how any peace plan will enhance their security.
“The political ground.” That means the lobby. But the Israel lobby is on Israel’s side; it will not abandon a broadly centrist Jewish government, and Obama has to defer to the lobby. Look how much work he had to do not to attack Iran. Look how many backflips he has had to do to get Chuck Hagel nominated to be secretary of Defense. And you think there will be a fair peace resulting from the forces coming to bear on Obama? Dream on. I am told that Dennis Ross and Mort Zuckerman were on Charlie Rose last night blaming the Palestinians for a lack of progress on peace. Obama will never get a deal even like Clinton’s deal of 2000, which was not fair to Palestinians.
If anyone has to prepare the political ground, it’s the New York Times. It needs to start explaining Israeli political culture to liberal Americans, it needs to lay out the fact that 20 percent of the Israeli population — Palestinians — will be written out of whatever governing coalition emerges in the next weeks, in the type of Jim Crow power-division that we had in the South under desegregation.
In fact, these desperate appeals to Obama are another sign of the dangers of Jewish sovereignty– in which American friends of Israel must turn to non-Jews to save the Jewish state from the patent danger of an all-Jewish governing coalition.
The only chance for change in months to come is from Europe and the BDS movement. They are the only means of changing the calculus of the future. The rest is just the bogosity of hope.
Three comments:
1) Beware the ILLUSION of change. Regardless to political party, they are all united on the core issue: take as much Palestinian land as you can, as quickly as you can. They differ on approach. That’s about it.
2) No colonial power in history has relinquished land without resistance. I certainly hope our next step resistance will be non-violent only. But for how long before the occupation is over?
3) The US Zionist Lobby (whose members are almost all Jewish!) must be exposed before peace has any remote chance to work. When will the American people realize the chokehold of the Zionist Lobby on their political system?? When will a whistelblower emerge from AIPAC’s grip???
Weiss: “In fact, these desperate appeals to Obama are another sign of the dangers of Jewish sovereignty– in which American friends of Israel must turn to non-Jews to save the Jewish state from the patent danger of an all-Jewish governing coalition.
The only chance for change in months to come is from Europe and the BDS movement. They are the only means of changing the calculus of the future. The rest is just the bogosity of hope.”
Maybe Obama and/or anyone (else) who actually wishes for a “just and lasting peace” per UNSC 242 must wait for things to get much worse — as the settler-culture and the explicitly-peace-refusing Israeli politicians rise to the fore — before acting. There may not be a right time to act for a long while, but it may well be that Obama’s political judgment is that, in any case, that time is not now.
Just as Obama has been waiting to speak up about climate change for 4 years, during which years the strangling noose of the out-year effects of ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions has been constantly tightening — waiting for the politically accessible time (apparently the time after Hurricane Sandy) — so too it may be that he is waiting for a sufficiently appropriate time to oppose The Lobby and work for an end of settlements, end of occupation, and peace.
While we work (at BDS) and otherwise wait, we should remember the lessons of geo-politics so clearly written in the history of the occupation — that nations sometimes wish to be seen as caring about human rights, or international law, or peace, or justice, but rarely wish to act, and in fact do not act, whether to save people from the misery of tyranny or war or starvation unless with a geo-political reason (usually hope for the availability of oil).
Richard North Patterson’s novel “Eclipse” which deals with an imaginary African oil country (perhaps modeled on Ken Saro-Wiwa and the devastation of Ogoniland in Nigeria) makes clear what pro-Palestine folks are up against when geo-politics is concerned, and it is neither pretty nor encouraging.
I had to look up ‘bogosity’.
Your usual optimism must be having a flatline day.
Not only is Obama powerless to make Israel do anything right but he shouldn’t even try. The lobby has gotten its way so they should just live with the consequences. In some respects the road ahead is simple as Phil points out. BDS in Europe along with non-violent resistance in Palestine is the only plan that makes sense. Serious economic pain is the nudge that Israel needs.
It is difficult to believe that writers of that editorial can even believe what they are suggesting. If they do, it is a sign of serious delusion — they would have to be completely oblivious to what Israel has become.
Yup, “Obama should go to Israel…” simply reeks of please “save us from ourselves (i.e. our own past and future inability to be sensibly critical and direct on this issue).” It’s positively passive-aggressive.
Why can’t the NYT, et. al., just say the obvious, directly? What stops them? Seriously.
But then, they’re pretty much incapable of being investigative and direct on any divisive issue, so it seems this is just a reflection of the general state of things.