Josh Ruebner - Shattered Hopes: The Failure Of Obamas Middle East Peace Process

First published by Verso 2013
Josh Ruebner 2013

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The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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v3.1

To Mona, with love

O n January 22, 2009, the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama, in only the second full day of his term, made the short jaunt from the White House to the State Department to announce the appointment of former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his Special Envoy for Middle East Peace. Flanked by former electoral rivals Vice President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama boldly asserted to a roomful of State Department employees, It will be the policy of my administration to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel and its Arab neighbors.

However, none of the four thought that this would be an easy policy goal to attain. Obama acknowledged the difficulty of the road ahead. Biden termed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one of the most vexing international dilemmas that we face. Clinton admitted that the presidents ambitious agenda puts the pressure on everybody. And Mitchell, the veteran mediator whose marathon efforts helped broker the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, leading to the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland, was under no illusions that brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace would be any easier. I dont underestimate the difficulty of this assignment, Mitchell remarked. The situation in the Middle East is volatile, complex, and dangerous.

By wading into the mire of the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict so actively and aggressively at the outset of his term, Obama was making good on a campaign pledge to tackle this issue differently than his two immediate predecessors, Presidents This swipe at former presidents referred to the failed attempts of Clinton in 2000 at Camp David and Bush in 2007 at Annapolis to initiate negotiations under US auspices to resolve those final status issuesJerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders, and waterthat were deliberatively shelved during the interminable interim phases of the Oslo peace process, launched in 1993.

Obamas high-profile appointment of Mitchell as his Special Envoy for Middle East Peace not only signaled the presidents break from his antecedents record of making a big push for Israeli-Palestinian peace late in their terms; it also heralded the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict would hold a pride of place on the foreign policy agenda of an incoming US president in a way not witnessed since the Carter administration. Indeed, by twinning Mitchells appointment to that of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as the administrations Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama was making clear that he placed as much emphasis on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as he did in managing Americas longest-running war, and arguably even more so than on ending the US occupation of Iraq.

According to a leaked summary of an October 2009 White House meeting between General James Jones, Obamas National Security Advisor at the time, and lead Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the president prioritized Israeli-Palestinian peace above all other foreign policy issues. Jones told Erekat emphatically that if President Obama could solve only one thing in the world, Im sure he would choose the Middle Eastnot Afghanistan, not Iraqbut this. The two state solution will be the one thing he invests the most in to bring about justice and equality, not just for Palestinians, but this is in Israels strategic interests as well.

Obamas placing of Israeli-Palestinian peace at, or near, the top of his foreign policy agenda was a brave, if not audacious, high-stakes political gamble for a president whose only formal experience with US foreign policy derived from less than one full term in the Senate, where he served on the Foreign Relations Committee and chaired its

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Obamas intentions. However, after initially exerting pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem, as Israel had agreed to do first in the 2003 Roadmap and then again at the 2007 Annapolis Peace Conference, and failing to obtain a meaningful freeze, it became clear that when Obamas political instincts were at loggerheads with his political calculus, the former would lose out to the latter, even when pursuing such a course was to the decided detriment of his agenda. Thus began an inexorable slide from a plausibly coherent and proactive strategy for achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace to a series of reactive and defensive measures that resulted in the United States being even less of an honest broker at the end of Obamas term than it was at the beginning.

This book endeavors to dissect the anatomy of this painful policy failure by examining when, where, and why US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians went so abysmally wrong during the Obama administration. The first part of the book chronicles and analyzes US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians, preceded in background, the future president undoubtedly came into office with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than any of his predecessors. However, despite his exposure, by the time Obama ran for the US Senate, it became clear that he was willing to sublimate his likely true feelings on this issue in order to advance his political career by taking more mainstream positions, despite revelatory offhand comments to the contrary. This chapter also covers how Obama as a presidential candidate approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It concludes with an overview of how the Obama transition team dealt, or more accurately failed to deal, with Israels controversial Operation Cast Lead and how congressional support for Israels attack on the Gaza Strip significantly constrained his room to maneuver in response after his inauguration.

From his inauguration in January 2009 to his maiden speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2009, Obama and his foreign policy team displayed a more or less coherent and proactive strategic approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a period which is the focus of . During its first nine months, the Obama administration focused on three areas. First, Mitchell and his team met with regional leaders on listening tours and reviewed US policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, the administration wanted to consolidate the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead by strengthening international efforts to interdict weapons flows to the Gaza Strip, providing significant pledges of foreign assistance to rebuild the devastated area, and urging Israel to loosen its comprehensive and crippling blockade. Third, and most controversially, the administration pressed Israel to fulfill its prior obligations to freeze construction of its illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it persuasively argued would set the correct context for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.