Obama Crosses His Fingers

In which we ever so carefully wade into the rhetoric surrounding Israel, Palestine, and the little American matter between the two.

U.S. President Barack Obama's two speeches on Middle East policy unequivocally laid out where he wants the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to begin: with Palestine recognizing Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and Israel returning to its pre-1967 borders. The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens figures the second speech “was a thin tissue of falsehoods, rhetorical legerdemain, telling omissions, and self-contradictions” that sought to paper over his demands of Israel issued in the first. Without expressly dropping the Palestinian right of return to property held before 1948 as a precondition, Stephens concludes, none too subtly, that Obama has provided “a formula for war, one that he will pursue in a second term.”

On the other hand, John Parisella, Quebec's chief representative in the U.S., writes in Maclean's that while “potential Republican challengers chastized the president for delivering what they called an anti-Israel speech,” Obama showed he understands the drastic changes afoot in the Middle East and that both the U.S. and Israel would be foolish to stand idly by. “The Arab Spring is not a temporary or passing fancy, nor is the growing numbers of youth in Palestine a temporary phenomenon,” says Parisella. Pressing for Israel and Palestine to reconcile soon, and in such clear terms, is certainly a risk that could hurt Obama's re-election chances, but should it bear fruit, “his gamble may turn out to have been an act of courage and leadership and, by consequence, an act of statesmanship.”

The Atlantic's James Fallows likens Benjamin Netanyahu to former vice-president Dick Cheney for refusing to compromise with any of the other actors at play in the Palestinian issue. Like Cheney, Netanyahu “mistook short-term intransigence for long-term strategic wisdom, seemed blind and tone-deaf to the 'moral' and 'soft power' components of influence, profited from a polarized and fearful political climate, and attempted to command rather than earn support from allies and potential adversaries.” Netanyahu's hardline tactics, while popular at home, will only further isolate Israel from the international community, says Fallows, a sad irony for someone who has staked his career on being a guardian of Israel's security and longevity.