Foxman: Obama Putting Too Much Weight On Solving Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abraham Foxman, Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), gives an account of his meeting this week with President Barack Obama and other Jewish group leaders, which was aimed at addressing concerns that the new administration's approach towards Israel has been too harsh while its approach to Arab states is seen as too soft.
According to Foxman, in a blog post on the Jerusalem Post's website, Obama on Monday stressed his administration's undying support of Israel insofar as, despite stricter demands against things like settlements, the US will never allow Israeli security to erode.

However Foxman then goes into his qualms with the Obama approach towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the criticism that the strategy, as it stands now, is based on too simplistic a reading of the effects of the Bush years. Or in other words, Foxman fears that Obama is bending over backwards to appease Arabs to make up for the ardently pro-Israel approach the Bush administration employed. As Foxman puts it, though, treatment of Israelis versus Arabs is not a zero-sum game--both can be pushed to make changes simultaneously.

The other most salient concern Foxman has in the piece is that Obama is rushing the process, perhaps unrealistically or even detrimentally, writing:

A second assumption that is troubling is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains the key to US interests in the region. To his credit, President Obama rejected the concept of linkage between the Palestinian and Iran issues. I welcome that.

Still, I continue to sense that the administration is putting too much weight on solving the conflict. We all want to see progress and I have no problem with the administration view that the US must be much more engaged to achieve progress. But I am concerned when expectations rise dramatically, as when the president says that he expects the problem to be resolved in two years.

Foxman ends by saying that he is pleased with Obama's overture, but he gives a caveat that there is much more to be done to win over the Jewish community's full trust.

Get HuffPost World On Facebook and Twitter!

Comments

[Freenation]

another example of how US is not getting it's return on investment for promoting peace:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8158062.stm

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected a reported US request that a building project in Jerusalem be halted.

The project involves building 20 apartments in the mainly Arab East Jerusalem area, which was captured by Israel in 1967. "

[MemoryAlpha]

Hypothesis:
The ethnic cleansing will continue until we take a hard line with the war criminals. Both there and in our own administration.

[FebM]

If Israeli settlers want to live in West Bank, let them but they must accept to live under Palestinian rule, just like the Arabs within Palestinian territory borders. Gaza and West Bank cannot be spliced any further.

[MemoryAlpha]

Reference:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/profile/StCuthbert?action=comments

Logical Faults noticed in pro-Israel argument:
Palestinians have a right of return; but all Palestinian rights are subservient to Israeli demands for "peace."

Jews from Israel have the right to move unrestricted to Palestine and settle, in spite of established pattern of violence. Muslims and Christians from Palestine are not only denied right to move unrestricted to Israel, They are denied right to move unrestricted /in Palestine/.

Insistence that 750,000 Palestinians "just left" in spite of Israeli military plans, Zionist rhetoric and personal testimonies all establishing the occurrence of the Nakba.

[Darwin256]

You may not know just how right you are.

The intelligence branch of the IDF issued a report right after the 1948 war entitled 'The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine in the Period 1/12/1947 - 1/6/1948'.

The report concludes that, "at least 55 percent of the total of the exodus was caused by our operations and their influence". In addition, the Irgun and Stern groups "directly caused some 15 percent . . . of the emigration".

So the IDF itself has said that at least 70% of this emigration was not voluntary.

Dr. Benny Morris published this in the January 1986 edition of 'Middle Eastern Studies'.

This is the same Benny Morris referred to earlier.

[george389]

First of all calling the right wing Israeli argument the same as the pro-Israel argument is the same as calling the American conservative movement the pro-America movement. it's bullshit. it's the right wing argument not the pro-Israel argument. Israeli leftists are pro-Israel as well even though they have a different vision for peace than the conservatives

[MemoryAlpha]

Observation:
And where on the Israeli political spectrum is the massacre of Palestinian children considered a crime? It is difficult to tell.

[yankees]

I couldn't agree more. Obama should stop all his International ventures and concentrate on the USA and the economy!!!! Stop trying to misdirect the real issues facing all Americans. If he put his time and energy into our problems maybe we could solve some!!!!!!

[Freenation]

does this mean obama should take back the $3 billion check we handed 2-3 weeks back to is.rael..maybe this will stop some settlement activities and some innocent getting thrown out of his home...

[Michael Valentine]

With two wars going on in the Middle East it is most certainly our business.

[alexa07]

Foxman hasn't adjusted to the new visibilty that the international networks are giving to the Palestinians & their plight. While CNN, ABC & other corporate culprits have sang the song of Israel for many yrs., providing cover, burying many stories, the images from Al Jazeera English are in circulation & being broadcast everywhere. Whoever thought the internet would be able to counter such strongholds of vested interest?

[JackWhistle]

The Net-Neutrality war and Obama 2008. But you are very much correct in how these corporations are losing power. Not too long ago I saw a poll about how Americans feel about Israel. From a peak (I think) of 70 percent it is now down to around 44 percent approval. It is only a matter of nets and time before even Obama has to recognize the plight of the Palestinians.

[Ergon]

III: "Theodor Herzl supported the transfer idea. Land in Palestine was to be gently expropriated from the Palestinian Arabs and they were to be worked across the border "unbemerkt" (surreptitiously), e.g. by refusing them employment.[103] Herzl's draft of a charter for a Jewish-Ottoman Land Company (JOLC) gave the JOLC the right to obtain land in Palestine by giving its owners comparable land elsewhere in the Ottoman empire. According to Walid Khalidi this indicates Herzl's "bland assumption of the transfer of the Palestinian to make way for the immigrant colonist."[104]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_and_Palestinian_Arab_attitudes_before_1948
http://www.al-awda.org/zionists01.html

[Ergon]

III: "Theodor Herzl supported the transfer idea. Land in Palestine was to be gently expropriated from the Palestinian Arabs and they were to be worked across the border "unbemerkt" (surreptitiously), e.g. by refusing them employment.[103] Herzl's draft of a charter for a Jewish-Ottoman Land Company (JOLC) gave the JOLC the right to obtain land in Palestine by giving its owners comparable land elsewhere in the Ottoman empire. According to Walid Khalidi this indicates Herzl's "bland assumption of the transfer of the Palestinian to make way for the immigrant colonist."[104]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_and_Palestinian_Arab_attitudes_before_1948
http://www.al-awda.org/zionists01.html

[Ergon]

II: "The Peel Commission's plan and the Yishuv's reaction
The idea of population transfer was briefly placed on the Mandate's political agenda in 1937 by the Peel Commission. The commission recommended that Britain should withdraw from Palestine and that the land be partitioned between Jews and Arabs. It called for a "transfer of land and an exchange of population", including the removal of 250,000 Palestinian Arabs from what would become the Jewish state[77], along the lines of the mutual population exchange between the Turkish and Greek populations after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. According to the plan 'in the last resort' the transfer of Arabs from the Jewish part would be compulsory.[78] The transfer would be voluntary in as far as Arab leaders were required to agree with it, but after that it would be almost inevitable that it would have to be forced upon the population.[79]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus

[Ergon]

I: "Origins of the ‘Transfer Idea’
Morris concludes that the idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, a new one. He writes:
Many if not most of Zionism's mainstream leaders expressed at least passing support for the idea of transfer during the movement's first decades. True, as the subject was sensitive they did not often or usually state this in public[74].
Morris also concludes that Zionisms aim was "to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population". According to Morris only after Arab resistance emerged did this become a rationale for transfer.[75]
Other authors, including Palestinian writers and Israeli New Historians, have also described this attitude as a prevalent notion in Zionist thinking and as a major factor in the exodus.
Israeli historian and former diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote:
The debate about whether or not the mass exodus of Palestinians was the result of a Zionist design or the inevitable concomitant of war should not ignore the ideological constructs that motivated the Zionist enterprise. The philosophy of transfer was not a marginal, esoteric article in the mindset and thinking of the main leaders of the Yishuv. These ideological constructs provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field actively to encourage the eviction of the local population even when no precise orders to that effect were issued by the political leaders.[76]"

[Paulo1]

"is putting too much weight on solving the conflict"

Sure, way too much weight on solving a problem that has been a cornerstone of death and destruction for almost half a century now !! How dare Obama actually put real pressure on anyone to DO anything!

One should remember that the ADL is basically a subsidiary of the Israeli government and as such its comments are basically propaganda. Israel does not want progress, progress and a real peace are not in the interest of settlements, continued political opportunism in their country or in keeping the money flowing which supports their country. Israel is a state built on the concept of endless siege and culture clash with a good dose of religiously based racism thrown in. Progress is NOT what it wants only what it will give lip service to.

[Ergon]

Yet somehow the ADL doesn't have to register as a foreign lobbyist.

[CigarGod]

“Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours…Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”
Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.

[DustinTime]

Stunning.

[mikesw]

Why can't the Israel-Palestinian conflict have a realistic solution on the table in two years????

What's wrong with trying??

I don't understand Mr. Foxman at all.

[CigarGod]

He is just following the national text: "Delay, Delay".

[mamacat]

What he really means is: "why can't the U.S. just let us do what we want with the Palestinians, and keep helping us pay for it, like the last administration did? What's so important about peace in the Middle East, as long as Israel keeps getting to expand its borders?"

[phute]

Once again deliberately muddying the waters - Judaism and Israel. The two are not mutually exclusive.

And is Foxman an elected mouthpiece or just another dishonest usurper?

[mcantwell]

He is 'rushing' the Peace process? How many more decades would be sufficient for you Mr. Foxman?

[zaz33]

So the goal shouldn't be PEACE, it should be PROGRESS in the next three years.

Thank you for your honesty Mr. Foxman