Shattered Hopes

Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Josh Ruebner

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781684948
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

President Barack Obama's first trip abroad in his second term took him to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he despondently admitted to those waiting for words of encouragement, "It is a hard slog to work through all of these issues." Contrast this gloomy assessment with Obama's optimism on the second day of his first term, when he appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace, boldly asserting that his administration would "actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians." How is it that Obama's active and aggressive search for progress has become mired in the status quo?Writer and political analyst Josh Ruebner charts Obama's journey from optimism to frustration in the first hard-hitting investigation into why the president failed to make any progress on this critical issue, and how his unwillingness to challenge the Israel lobby has shattered hopes for peace.Written in a clear and accessible style by the advocacy director of a national peace organization and former Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, Shattered Hopes offers an informed history of the Obama administration's policies and maps out a true path forward for the United States to help achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

PART I: US POLICY,
2009–2011

CHAPTER ONE

An Unbelievably Informed President

During a November 2009 congressional delegation to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed to Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) how pleased he was that President Barack Obama was “unbelievably informed” about Israeli-Palestinian issues.¹ In fact, given Obama’s intimate engagement with a large and politically active Palestinian-American constituency, which he represented as an Illinois state senator, and given his ties to a coterie of liberal Jewish-American political activists in Chicago who were critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, it is likely the he entered the White House with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than any previous president.

A PRESIDENT EMERGES

As a state senator, Obama developed strong working relations with a politically empowered Palestinian-American constituency in his Hyde Park–based district. He frequently attended community events and relied upon this community to help raise funds for his campaigns. It was through these contacts that Obama likely developed some of his first impressions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Chicago-based activist and author Ali Abunimah wrote in 2007 that when he first met Obama nearly a decade before, “He impressed me as progressive, intelligent and charismatic. I distinctly remember thinking ‘if only a man of this calibre could become president one day.’ ” Abunimah heard him speak on several occasions to Palestinian- and Arab-American audiences, during which times “Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an evenhanded approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” The last time he met with the future president was during Obama’s 2004 Democratic primary run for the US Senate. Abunimah recounted: “As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.’ He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, [by saying] ‘Keep up the good work!’ ”²

As Obama’s relations with the Palestinian-American community in Chicago become a heated electoral issue during his 2008 presidential campaign, campaign strategist David Axelrod denied that Obama had made those comments to Abunimah, stating, “In no way did he take a position privately that he hasn’t taken publicly and consistently.” According to Axelrod, Obama “always had expressed solicitude for the Palestinian people, who have been ill-served and have suffered greatly from the refusal of their leaders to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”³ Thus began a pattern of Obama shying away from initial remarks he had made that were sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, and then instead placing the blame squarely on Palestinian shoulders for their own travails. This type of double-talk raised hopes among those who thought that as president Obama would bring a new US approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while also stoking suspicion among defenders of the political status quo that his repeatedly expressed pro-Israel sentiments were insincere and that Obama would undermine the foundations of the US-Israel relationship.

During those early days of his political career, Obama also developed a friendship with his former colleague at the University of Chicago, Professor Rashid Khalidi, an eminent Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and US foreign policy. At a 2003 farewell tribute to Khalidi, who was leaving for a position at Columbia University, Obama relished the fact that his discussions with Khalidi and his wife Mona had served as “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases … It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation—a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but throughout “this entire world” as well. In turn, Khalidi told the gathering, “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances.”⁴

Not only did Obama’s connections to Palestinian-Americans early in his political career suggest that he would bring an atypical viewpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the White House; his ties to liberal Jewish-American political activists in Chicago did so as well. According to Peter Beinart, “Woven into the life stories of many of the Jews who most influenced the young Barack Obama was a bitter estrangement from the see-no-evil Zionism of the American Jewish establishment. In Chicago, those Jews constituted a geographic and moral community, a community that bred in Obama a specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state.” Obama’s “inner circle of Jewish advisers,” which included Axelrod, “whose views of Israel leaned left,” according to Beinart, “meant that he was repeatedly reminded, in a way most American politicians are not, that when it comes to Israel, many American Jews disagree with their communal leaders.”⁵

Yet despite these relationships and the role they may have played in shaping Obama’s early views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it became evident early in his political career that Obama was more than willing to dismiss the knowledge and advice he received from his Palestinian-American and liberal Jewish-American friends if it stood in the way of advancing his career. As early as 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully for the US House of Representatives, Obama crafted policy positions to endear himself to pro-Israel political action committees. In response to a questionnaire by CityPAC, which describes itself as a Chicago-based organization designed “to maintain strong and steadfast Congressional support for Israel,” Obama reportedly expressed support for maintaining Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital,⁶ a controversial position repeated during his 2008 presidential run.

When he reached the US Senate in 2005, after a meteoric rise to the national political stage following his electrifying speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama developed a fairly routine and undistinguished record on Arab-Israeli issues that synched with the Senate’s reflexive and uncritical support for Israel. According to the Congressional Report Cards of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, during his four years in the Senate Obama did not sponsor any significant resolutions relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.⁷ He did, however, cosponsor the notorious “Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act” (S.2370), a bill passed in the Senate by unanimous consent in June 2006. President George W. Bush later signed a different version of this bill into law. The bill imposed comprehensive and draconian sanctions against Palestinians for freely and fairly voting in 2006 to elect Hamas candidates to a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. In July 2006, Obama also cosponsored a blatantly one-sided resolution, S.Res.534, which expressed unabashed support for Israel in the midst of its brutal and punishing wars against Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 1,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and deliberately destroyed billions of dollars of Lebanese and Palestinian civilian infrastructure.

Even though he entered the Senate with little foreign policy experience, Obama received a coveted appointment to the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he served on its Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs Subcommittee. To bolster his firsthand knowledge of the region, Obama made a high-profile, ten-day visit in January 2006 to Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territory. While in Israel, Obama chided the Bush administration and Congress for not being attentive enough to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Because of the distraction of Iraq, and the work we’ve been having to do there,” Obama offered, “we probably haven’t been paying as much attention to what is happening here in Israel as we should. We need to be much more actively focused here, and that is one thing I will be focused on when I get back to Washington.”⁸ After meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Obama declared, “Violence is not the answer to the long-standing problems that exist in this area and my hope is that US policy will continue to encourage the nonviolent mediation of these issues.”⁹ These statements presaged his policies as president, when Obama would prioritize Israeli-Palestinian peace and urge nonviolence, although always exclusively to Palestinians and never to Israel.

In March 2007, one month after announcing his candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for president, Obama addressed a Chicago policy forum of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful and influential of the many groups that comprise the Israel lobby. Obama’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had not been fully articulated up to this point, and a briefing paper by his campaign on his pro-Israel credentials, according to Chicago Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet, “was not widely circulated and clearly not enough. If he was to make a major speech on Israel, there was an interest among Obama’s Chicago backers for him to deliver it in the city.”¹⁰ The speech did not disappoint its audience. Obama’s address contained perfunctory, if not anodyne, references to promoting peace, such as: “We can and we should help Israelis and Palestinians both fulfill their national goals: two states living side by side in peace and security. Both the Israeli and Palestinian people have suffered from the failure to achieve this goal. The United States should leave no stone unturned in working to make that goal a reality.” Obama also took the opportunity again to take repeated jabs at the Bush administration for the timing and substance of its Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts. “Our job is to do more than lay out another road map,” he said, referencing Bush’s stillborn 2003 initiative to restart the “peace process.” Obama argued, “For six years, the administration has missed opportunities to increase the United States’ influence in the region and help Israel achieve the peace she wants and the security she needs.” Instead of seizing these opportunities, Obama belittled Bush’s efforts as “trips consisting of little more than photo-ops with little movement in between.”

However, expressing his hope for a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and taking potshots at the Bush administration for failing to achieving it were not the purposes of this speech. Rather, Obama’s intent was to demonstrate his political commitment and personal, emotional attachment to Israel before a skeptical, if not potentially hostile, Israel lobby crowd. In this regard, he succeeded. During his 2006 trip to Israel, he took part in the almost obligatory political ritual for visiting US politicians: taking a helicopter tour arranged by the Israeli military. These aerial briefings were designed to demonstrate Israel’s supposed security justifications for why it could not fully withdraw from the Palestinian West Bank. “The helicopter took us over the most troubled and dangerous areas and that narrow strip between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea,” Obama recounted. “At that height, I could see the hills and the terrain that generations have walked across. I could truly see how close everything is and why peace through security is the only way for Israel.” While the term “peace through security” seems banal, to this audience it was a well-understood code to communicate that Obama would not insist on Israel foregoing all of its territorial conquests from the 1967 war.

But even more than proffering veiled policy prescriptions, Obama’s speech was designed to tug at the heartstrings of his audience. As Obama told it, the helicopter then deposited him in Kiryat Shmona, a town on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon that was hard-hit by Hezbollah rocket fire during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon. “What struck me first about the village was how familiar it looked,” Obama marveled. “The houses and streets looked like ones you might find in a suburb in America. I could imagine young children riding their bikes down the streets. I could imagine the sounds of their joyful play just like my own daughters. There were cars in the driveway. The shrubs were trimmed. The families were living their lives.” Obama then ventured to a home struck by a Katyusha rocket. “The family who lived in the house was lucky to be alive. They had been asleep in another part when the rocket hit. They described the explosion. They talked about the fire and the shrapnel. They spoke about what might have been if the rocket had come screaming into their home at another time when they weren’t asleep but sitting peacefully in the now destroyed part of the house. It is an experience,” Obama offered, which “I keep close to my heart.”¹¹ While conjuring great empathy for this Israeli civilian family that suffered during the war, Obama failed to muster one word of sympathy for Lebanese and Palestinians civilians who experienced far greater death and devastation at Israel’s hands.

To bolster further his pro-Israel credentials, Obama praised the signing in August 2007 of a US-Israeli agreement for the United States to provide Israel with $30 billion of taxpayer-funded weapons between 2009 and 2018. On that occasion, Obama rather tendentiously hammered the Bush administration’s “failed policies in Iraq” for having “emboldened Hamas and Hezbollah.” In Obama’s view, “That makes it more important than ever that the United States live up to its commitment to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge in a dangerous region. For that reason, I support the agreement on military assistance reached today.”¹² As president, Obama would be responsible for requesting from Congress the record-breaking levels of military aid to Israel envisioned in this agreement.

As Obama segued into full-time presidential campaigning mode, it became clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would take on a central role in his foreign policy platform. And, as the campaign progressed, it also became apparent that Obama’s scripted and formal positions on the issue would stay well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse for a presidential candidate, breaking no new ground and offering only hidebound platitudes about the importance he would attach to achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace if elected.

Although the Obama campaign made a pretense of recognizing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict mattered to various constituencies, the overwhelming preponderance of Obama’s campaign material on this issue was consciously and narrowly targeted to Jewish-Americans. Whereas his Arab-American “people” web page contained a fleeting reference to Obama’s commitment to “a just peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict,” his Jewish-American page contained fulsome praise for Obama’s stance on Israel. “Barack, whose name comes from the same root as the Hebrew word Baruch, or ‘blessed,’ has traveled to Israel and witnessed Israelis’ determination in the fight against terrorism and their yearning for peace with their neighbors,” the campaign gushed. “His commitment to Israel’s security, to the US-Israel relationship, and to Israel’s right to self-defense has always been unshakable. Demonstrating his personal connection to Zionism and understanding of Israel as the homeland Jews longed for, Senator Barack Obama has stated that it must be preserved as a Jewish state. He will work tirelessly to help Israel in its quest for a lasting peace with its neighbors, while standing with Israel against those who seek its destruction.”¹³ The campaign tellingly did not realize, or deliberately obfuscated, the fact that the candidate’s first name is actually more closely related to and derived from the Arabic word for “blessing,” baraka.

The Obama campaign also released a position paper, entitled “Barack Obama and Joe Biden: A Strong Record of Supporting the Security, Peace, and Prosperity of Israel.” In the policy paper, Obama and his vice presidential running mate Joe Biden were declared to be “true friends of Israel, stalwart defenders of Israel’s security, and effective advocates of str...