Eight months into President Barack Obama's administration, his Middle East peace "road map" is crystal clear.First, he dialed down the pressure on Iran, whose nuclear weapons program presents an existential threat to Israel.Second, he shifted the blame for Islamic extremism to Israel and solely blamed it for the Palestinian's plight. Thenhe unilaterally ratcheted up the pressure on Israel to cease building settlements and to ease its self-defense blockadeof Gaza. Now, Obama has upped the ante even further, framing lasting peace in the Middle East as requiring Israelto retreat to its 1967 borders. Although he blandly claims that there are "no preconditions" to relaunchingnegotiations, in truth he has doomed the peace talks before they even start. Obama has set up Israel as the fall guyfor negotiations that will ultimately fail and is the architect of that failure.
When Obama was elected -- with 78 percent of the Jewish vote -- there was concern about what hisadministration would mean for the 60 years of unwavering support America had provided Israel. Unlike hisRepublican opponent, John McCain, or his predecessor, George W. Bush, both longstanding supporters of Israel,Obama had no such track record and was championing a different course, one of détente with such hard-lineregimes as Iran and Syria. Jews took heart when then-President-elect Obama selected a Jew, Rahm Emanuel, as hischief of staff, and Hillary Clinton, previously a staunch supporter of Israel from her days as senator from New York,as his secretary of state.
An examination of the first 250 days of President Obama's administration convincingly demonstrates that theearlier concerns were well founded and the mitigating cabinet appointments mere window dressing. From his firsttelephone call as president to a head of state -- Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority-- and his first one-on-one television interview with any news organization -- Al Arabiya TV -- to his bowing toPrince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, then embracing the Muslim world at Cairo University and, most recently,rebuking Israel in an address to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama has shown far more concern forstrengthening ties with authoritarian regimes on the Arabian Peninsula than to maintaining the historically closealliance with the region's only true democracy.
His Cairo speech scaled back his support of Israel in favor of establishing new diplomatic channels in the Arabworld. He also equated the suffering of the Palestinians with the loss of 6 million Jewish lives in the Holocaust.Worse yet, Obama's affirmation of the Arab propagandist idea that Israel was created as a response to theHolocaust greatly undermined its legitimacy as a state and ignored Jews' forced diaspora and Judaism's historicalties to the Middle East that predate all other religions.
Instead of seeing Israel as the oasis and model for democracy that it is in the Middle East, Obama views the countryand its conflict with its neighbors as "this constant wound ... this constant sore, [that] does infect all of our foreignpolicy." It is as if the president has blinders on: in effect repeating the red herring that blames the atrocities of 9/11on America's support of Israel, in July 2008, Obama stated:
The lack of a resolution to this problem [theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict] provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusableactions, so we have a national security interest in solving this.
Sound familiar? Former President Jimmy Carter,author of the canard, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," asserts, "lack of progress in the Middle East is one of the main causes for animosity, hatred and even violent acts against America." Both presidents conveniently neglect thefact that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, perpetrators of multiple attacks on America, never cared or linked any oftheir actions to the Palestinian cause until after 9/11. Islamic extremists are at war with the spread of Westernculture, and the United States is the chief exporter of Western beliefs, so it is a pipe dream to assume that Americacan achieve détente with "anti-American militant jihadists" by, in effect, offering up Israel as a sacrificial lamb.
In his United Nations address, Obama called for Israel to establish "a viable, independent Palestinian state withcontiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967." Like Bush before him, Obama referred to theterritories Israel won in the Six-Day War -- a preemptive defensive strike against armies from nine Arab countriesmassing on its borders -- as "occupied territory" but, unlike Bush, Obama's proposal has Israel retreating from itsown land, returning to indefensible 1967 borders and trusting in the peaceful intentions of its neighbors. Bushdidn't go nearly that far, citing in his 2004 "road map" that "in light of new realities on the ground, includingalready existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final statusnegotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."
Obama went even further, linkingAmerica's continuing support for the Jewish state's very security with his demand that it surrender the territory,stating, "The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its securitywith an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians." Of all the countries inhistory that have won wars, only Israel is being denied the fruits of its victory in 1967.
Obama appears to have adopted as policy the controversial agreement Carter reached with Hamas last year toestablish a Palestinian state in the territories won by Israel 42 years ago. Additionally, and again in sharp contrastto the Bush Administration, which opposed a Palestinian national unity government, Obama has communicated hissupport, through Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, for the formation of a Hamas-Fatah coalitiongovernment. Obama has even gone so far as to request Congress amend the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009to enable the United States to continue to provide financial aid to any Palestinian government if the Presidentdetermines that it is in the interests of national security.
As the United States, the European Union and other countries have classified Hamas as a terrorist organization,America under Obama would appear to have strange new bedfellows. Perhaps the president has forgotten thatHamas' charter (Article 7) advocates the killing of all Jews by Muslims, its leaders are Holocaust deniers, that hisown FBI director, Robert Mueller, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, cited "the FBI's assessment that there is a...threat of a coordinated terrorist attack in the U.S. from Palestinian terrorist organizations, such as Hamas," thatHamas has never accepted Israel's right to exist and is committed to "obliterating" it (preamble to Hamas charter),and that, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates last January, Hamas and another terrorist organization,Hezbollah, have joined with Iran in fomenting "subversive activity" in Latin America. Or perhaps he believesAmerica's stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists -- established by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 andreaffirmed by Obama as a presidential candidate in April 2008 -- should be scrapped.
The United States is proving to be a fair-weather ally, abandoning Israel in the face of an impending existentialthreat from a nuclear Iran. Obama's self-declared "evenhanded" approach to solving the Middle East "problem"would appear to consist of continually pressuring Israel to give up its secure borders while simultaneously enablinggrave threats to Israel's very existence, refusing to engage the United States in taking action to halt Iran's nuclearweapons program. Last May, the president connected the dots thusly:
To the extent that we can make peace...between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I think it actually strengthens our hand in the internationalcommunity in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.
This idealistic view misses the point -- Iran isn't interestedin a two-state solution. In the words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "Israel must be wiped off themap," is a "stinking corpse," "is on its way to annihilation" and "has reached the end like a dead rat." Not a lot ofroom to negotiate there.
Nor is there room to negotiate Iran's nuclear weapons program. As Obama belatedly acknowledged on Sept. 26regarding the country's newly disclosed nuclear power facility, "the size and configuration of this facility isinconsistent with a peaceful program." Iran desires global power and to spread the religious and political ideologyof the Islamic Revolution, so what's left to negotiate? Access to nuclear energy for peaceful uses isn't on Iran'sshopping list.
Iran and Syria rank as the leading state sponsors of terrorism, yet the president has removed a longstanding exportban on American technology to Syria, allowing the transfer of spare aircraft parts, information technology andtelecommunications equipment, all material that could also benefit the air force of Syria's close ally, Iran. At thesame time, Obama actually suspended the sale of military equipment to Israel -- holding up the shipment ofApache helicopters after Israel moved to defend its citizenry against daily Hamas-enabled rocket barrages earlierthis year -- equipment necessary to safeguard Israel's security against overwhelming odds. Syria, an unrepentantstate supporter of terrorism, was exempted by Obama from the longtime ban on the sale of sensitive, dual-usetechnologies. Yet, it is only Israel that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States as America's mostimportant and dependable ally in combating terrorism. Can the president see the difference?
Obama spoke eloquently to the United Nations about having compassion for "the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has... no country to call his own." Where's his concern for the 3,000-year-old Jewish communities in Arab lands thatwere ethnically cleansed between 1948 and the early 1970s? Commencing with Arab League retaliation for thedeclaration of the State of Israel, 1 million Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and personal property,forfeiting 62,000 square miles of land (nearly five times Israel's 12,600 square miles) and assets worth approximately $300 billion. What of their "right of return?"
By tying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to improving Muslim-U.S. relations, Obama has forced Israel into theposition of answering for U.S. failures in the Muslim world and making the sacrifices necessary to mend thatrelationship. Obama has placed immense pressure on Israel to halt settlement building. Where is the equal pressureon the Palestinian Authority to ensure Israel's security? Obama's far greater pressure on the Israelis hasemboldened Arab intransigence and moved the Middle East farther away from the prospect of peace.
Case in point:Last weekend, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian chairman of the United Nations' International Atomic EnergyAgency, asserted that Israel's nuclear weapons program, not Iran's, is "the number one threat" to Middle Eastpeace. In the words of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, "Israel seeks Iran's recognition; Iran seeks Israel'sdestruction. So of course it is Israel that poses a threat." Obama's strong-arm policies toward Israel have createdthe opening Arab countries have long sought to solve "the Jewish problem" once and for all.
President Obama's new, "evenhanded" policy in the Middle East is anything but fair and balanced. His policiesincreasingly endanger and isolate Israel. At the United Nations, Obama forcefully stated that "the United States ofAmerica will never waiver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their owndestiny," that is, of course, unless the people are Israelis. Without the Jewish state of Israel as a standard bearer forWestern ideals of democracy in the Middle East, the world will be a far more dangerous place. Then it will beAmerica's turn to stand alone as "Public Enemy No. 1" for Islamic fundamentalists.