The Warped Mirror: Is Obama anti-Israel?

A recent Jerusalem Post-sponsored poll showed that only 6 percent of Jewish Israelis consider the Obama administration as "pro-Israel," while 50 percent believe that Obama's policies reflect a "pro-Palestinian" stance and 36 percent see the policies as "neutral."

There is of course a noisy chorus of merry voices that cheer Obama's "tough love" for Israel and the shouts for "more" and "tougher, much tougher" are all over the media - and no doubt there is a dimension to it that has very little to do with sober political analysis. Indeed, it's hard to avoid the impression that at a time when there is no shortage of serious foreign policy challenges for the Obama administration, their determined fight against even one more brick in any Israeli building anywhere beyond the line that separated Israel and the Jordanian-occupied West Bank before 1967 attracts a rather disproportionate amount of media coverage.

It is precisely for this reason that it makes sense to question how much of the "tough love"-cheer and the perception of a "pro-Palestinian" bias is actually based on facts and how much is just media hype. Perhaps the most important point to keep in mind in this context is the very basic fact that Obama is the American president, and the question if his administration is "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian" is hardly sensible by itself. That was highlighted with all the necessary bluntness by the former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, who pointed out in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post:

Israel is heavily dependent on the US, militarily, politically and economically. With that dependence come certain obligations. If you're going to depend on the US, you're going to have to take American interests into account. And America now defines resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict as a national interest. This, by the way, started with ... George W. Bush, who saw it in America's national interest to resolve the Palestinian problem. The point is that when America has a national interest, Israel has to take it into account."

It is important to note that Indyk is right when he emphasizes that it was already the Bush administration that defined the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an American national interest. The Bush administration also complained a lot about Israeli settlement construction and pushed hard for the removal of check points and road blocks on the West Bank - it's just that the media wasn't particularly interested back then because Bush was considered as "pro-Israel" and when he or his officials said the same things Obama administration officials are saying now, it simply wasn't considered newsworthy.

Another important point the media like to ignore is the fact that since the Oslo process of the 1990s, more and more Israelis believe that it is in Israel's national interest to find a way to disentangle ourselves from the occupation. Over the past few years, polls have also shown pretty consistently that a majority of Israelis support the establishment of a Palestinian state under the terms outlined by Netanyahu in his recent speech at Bar-Ilan University.

That means of course that there isn't all that much to the fundamental "clash" that the media now construct between the US and Israel: both the US and Israel believe that a resolution of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is in their interest, and commentators who follow the news as professionals should also know that for some time now, both the US and Israel have believed that it would be best to pursue such a resolution within a broader regional framework that would require the Arab states to give up their convenient posture of waiting for a final bi-lateral Israeli-Palestinian agreement before they are willing to make even the slightest move that could be - heaven forbid!!! - seen as accepting Israel as a legitimate regional state.

By contrast, it is increasingly acknowledged that the Palestinians are at best ambivalent about getting a state of their own. Somewhat belatedly, the media are now beginning to notice that during last year's Annapolis talks, the Palestinians turned down Israeli proposals that left little room for any additional Israeli concessions.

Indeed, even two widely respected experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who are known for their sympathy with the Palestinian plight recently noted:

After months of talks, Abbas declined a far more concessive Israeli proposal - on the size of the territory for Palestinians, for example - than the one Yasser Arafat turned down eight years ago and for which the then Palestinian leader was excoriated as an implacable enemy of peace. There is little reason to believe that more tweaking of the accord would have made a difference."

Interestingly enough, they also point out:

Palestinians do not judge the idea of a state on its merits. They judge it by the company it keeps. ... The new millennium began with the near-universal acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state, which is precisely when its support among Palestinians began to slip. ... Today, the idea of Palestinian statehood is alive, but mainly outside of Palestine. Establishing a state has become a matter of utmost priority for Europeans, who see it as crucial to stabilizing the region and curbing the growth of extremism; for Americans, who hail it as a centerpiece in efforts to contain Iran as well as radical Islamists and to forge a coalition between so-called moderate Arab states and Israel; and even for a large number of Israelis who have come to believe it is the sole effective answer to the threat to Israel's existence posed by Arab demographics. Those might all be good reasons, though none is of particular relevance to Palestinians; and each only further alienates them from the vision of statehood, the purported object of their struggle."

Yet, it seems that the Palestinians were now taken in by all the pundits who couldn't quite stop themselves praising the Obama administration for getting "tough" with Israel and speculating ecstatically about how much tougher they could still get. To be sure, Obama's people were more than happy to feed the media's pre-occupation with the idea that a few more buildings in Israel's settlements would doom the chances for Middle East peace once and for all - who knows (and who cares!!!) that after some forty years of supposedly relentless "land-grabbing" settlement expansion, the built-up areas beyond the "Green Line" take up less than 2 percent of West Bank territory?

As the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl concluded after interviewing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Washington in May, the focus on the Obama administration's demands for a complete stop of any Israeli construction work beyond the pre-1967 dividing line "revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud."

How much the Palestinians misjudged the situation was illustrated rather dramatically by their reaction to Netanyahu's speech at Bar-Ilan: Several Palestinian representatives could barely wait for Netanyahu to finish his speech before they began to lash out at him, and the office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas confidently issued a statement declaring that the positions outlined by Netanyahu constituted "a clear challenge to the Palestinian, Arab and American positions."

The reaction of the Obama White House was therefore certainly a disappointment for the Palestinians: a short statement by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs contained everything Netanyahu could have possibly asked for.

Netanyahu's endorsement of a Palestinian state was praised as "an important step forward" and the statement reaffirmed the American commitment to Israel's security and "to two states, a Jewish state of Israel and an independent Palestine, in the historic homeland of both peoples."

So far, there is plainly no evidence that would justify Israeli doubts about America's commitment to Israel's security and to a genuine two-state solution that reflects the idea of two states for two people. While it is debatable how wise it is that Obama is willing to indulge the Palestinian insistence on a total freeze in settlement construction, the fact of the matter is that both the US and Israel share an interest in pushing for a genuine two-state solution.
 
By contrast, reports that indicate that the Obama administration is finding it difficult to get the Arab states to agree to any positive steps in response to the supposedly all important "settlement freeze" illustrate once again that it is Arab intransigence that is the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East - and a new AJC film that highlights some of the crucial Arab "Nos" that have prevented a two-state solution thus comes at a time when there is yet another "No" being added to the list.

It therefore seems questionable if Obama's apparent ambition to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be seen as a sign of a "pro-Palestinian" bias. After all, the Palestinians may see little reason to wish for the day when they would have to sign up to an agreement that would give them a state of their own within parameters that they have repeatedly rejected, not least because such a state would leave little room for the glorification of "resistance" and would put an end to fantasies about a "right of return" that would turn Israel into just another Arab state.