It’s pretty undeniable now that President Obama screwed up. Badly. He and his administration were so eager to re-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that they got ahead of themselves. U.S. policymakers had the right idea by trying to get the two sides to offer confidence-building measures before the talks began. But they handled this poorly, on a number of fronts.
First, they set the respective demands of the parties without consulting them to ascertain what they were capable of delivering at that point. As a result, American officials were sharply disappointed when Saudi Arabia announced they weren’t going along with Obama’s intiative. Then, even after the Arabs failed to produce any signs of goodwill, the administration continued to press Israel for a complete stop to settlement construction — even growth in existing settlements, and even in Jerusalem’s municipal borders. This had the effect of artificially raising expectations on the Palestinian side. Why artificially? Because, once again, the American demand was made without any sense of what could actually be accomplished.
Artificially raising expectations is extremely dangerous in the Middle East. Take an example from today, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced he won’t run for re-election:
It was nonetheless clear that Israeli-Palestinian talks would not resume any time soon despite intensive American diplomacy. A top aide to Mr. Abbas said a large part of the “despondency and frustration” felt by Mr. Abbas and the entire Palestinian leadership was due to President Obama’s unrealized promises to the region. He said he feared that without a stop to settlements, Islamist rivals in Hamas could triumph and violence could break out.
“There was high expectation when he arrived on the scene,” the aide, Nabil Shaath, who heads the Fatah party’s foreign affairs department, said of Mr. Obama at a briefing. “He said he would work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it would play a major role in improving the American and Western relationship with the Muslim world. Now there is a total retreat, which has destroyed trust instead of building trust.”
