The Washington Post’s website is running not one, but two stories today about Arab anger over a shift in the Obama administration’s Middle East policy; the U.S. is no longer demanding a complete stop to Israeli settlement construction before Israeli-Palestinian peace talks begin. This is an effect of Obama tying his hands in the first place with his strategy for resolving the conflict. (My upcoming print article will focus on remedying this problem.)
Obama and his foreign policy team rushed into peacemaking mode from the get-go. Unfortunately, they didn’t lay enough groundwork early on. They didn’t consult any of the planned participants to see what they could offer as goodwill gestures. For instance, the president hoped that he could gain Israeli trust by getting Arab states to open flight paths to Israeli airliners. In exchange, he would demand a total stop to settlement construction.
The Arab states politely told the administration to go to hell. And yet the Palestinians, now having the president of the United States on their side, insisted on a total settlement halt as a precondition to negotiations — an unprecedented step. Netanyahu’s efforts to ease Palestinian freedom of movement and an actual temporary freeze in new construction were dismissed as “not good enough” for the Palestinians to even begin talking to Israel. Meanwhile, the Palestinian and Arab contribution the peace process in 2009 has been nil. Is this even-handed foreign policy?
So, yes, the U.S. is recalibrating its Middle East policy. Perhaps rather than a reverse-Bush approach of wishful thinking from the side of “pressure Israel on settlements at all costs,” a realistic view of the situation on the ground is called for.
