US President Barack Obama waves upon his arrival at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on March 20, 2013. JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]
Barack Obama lands in Israel today for his first official visit to the Jewish state as US president. According to conventional wisdom, he will not bring any new policy initiative to resurrect the currently defunct Palestinian–Israeli negotiations.
He is, say aides, coming to “listen” to both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas, whom he will meet later in Ramallah. Obama also intends to speak directly to the Israeli people; he plans to do so in a speech billed as a focal point of his visit.
This pre-trip spin from the White House, purportedly aimed at lowering media expectations for concrete results from the visit, has befuddled many observers and analysts. Why go now, they wonder, if there is nothing of substance to discuss?
“That’s a good question,” said Geoffrey Aronson, editor of the Report on Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Territories, published by the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace. “I’m not sure what the policy purpose is. There may be other considerations that may be as, or more, important, but there certainly doesn’t seem to be a policy point here.”
A long-time observer of US policies towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Aronson noted that “presidential power is a precious asset and presidential time is a precious asset.” How they are spent, he added, can increase or detract a leader’s influence and stature. The implication is that if Obama’s brief sojourn in the Holy Land is ultimately seen as pointless, he may end up with even less prestige than he now has in the Middle East.
Other observers are a bit more optimistic. “President Obama will place a great deal of emphasis on reaching out to the Israeli and Palestinian publics, repairing Washington’s relations with the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and exploring what it would take to bring each side back to the negotiating table,” Hussein Ibish, senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine in Washington, wrote in an email. “How successful these efforts will be is very difficult to anticipate, but as long as expectations are realistically modest, the trip could and should prove quite successful.”
Ibish’s assessment focuses on intangibles, that is, all the things that are so hard to measure but that are vital to bring forth something special. This is clear from his language: he writes about the president “reaching out to” the two sides, “repairing ... relations with” them, and “exploring what it would take” to bring them together. In other words, Obama must be Listener-in-Chief.
Certainly, there are many good reasons for low expectations. Neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli side has the domestic ability to enter into negotiations at this time. The former is in disarray and badly split between Abbas’ Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza. On the Israeli side, Netanyahu’s maneuvering ability has been seriously compromised, since his coalition government is now more than ever beholden to the settler movement that has colonized the West Bank with half a million people and is firmly against a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, “What Obama has done is that he has made the Israeli–Palestinian [conflict] boring,” said Aronson. His administration failed to energize the peace process “and they are rationalizing their failure ... by becoming disinterested in the process, such as it is, and in prospects for making progress.”
For someone as ambitious as Obama, it is curious that he has apparently given up on trying to find the holy grail when it comes to this intractable conflict. But Obama is also cautious—and we cannot forget his domestic to-do list that poses enormous challenges, including nothing less than the future fiscal health of the United States.
Although criticism of Israeli policies in the media has clearly increased in recent years, there is still a strong bias towards Israel in the US public that constrains US policy-makers. As Ibish wrote, “Opinion polls continue to show a high degree of support for Israel from the American public and there is no political debate about the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries ... The basic relationship between Israel and the United States is unchanged, and ... it’s rooted in public opinion and deep-seated cultural, religious and political narratives that remain largely unchallenged.”
On the other hand, there is no dearth of dire warnings about the consequences of inaction. Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism, wrote at The Daily Beast this week that “charm isn’t enough. Obama also needs to scare Israelis. He needs to tell them that by subsidizing settlement growth, and thus pounding nails into the coffin of the two-state solution, their leaders are imperiling Israel’s future as a democratic Jewish state ... He should say, very clearly, that if Israel tries to permanently control millions of Palestinians who lack citizenship and the right to vote, the Zionist dream will die, regardless of what happens in Washington.”
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote, “Obama wants to lower expectations of his visit. Well, they can’t get any lower. During his first term they said we’d have to wait until his second. So now it’s here, and he says he’s only coming ‘to listen.’ But his job isn’t to listen; everybody has listened far more than enough. Now it’s time for action ... The years are passing, the settlements are growing and the occupation is becoming entrenched. Soon, Mr. President, it will be too late—maybe it already is.” We can only hope it is not.
