Lexington
A thankless task, but at least Barack Obama seems to be trying
WHY, you have to wonder, do they bother with it? The “peace process”, that is. The present conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine has been going on for about a century. And yet every American president is implored upon entering office to bring the quarrel swiftly to an end. Most have a go—or at least go through the motions. Some actually make progress. Jimmy Carter owes his Nobel peace prize in large part to the peace deal he brokered between Israel and Egypt in 1978 (and has never let the world forget it). Bill Clinton got Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat to shake hands on the White House lawn, but no peace, and no prize, followed the unhappy Camp David summit of 2000.
Since the Nobel committee saw fit to reward Barack Obama virtually the instant he was elected, it cannot be the lure of that prize that explains why he is investing in this thankless conflict so early. Doing so is not, after all, compulsory—nor always wise, since the reaction to peacemaking that fails can be violent. Soon after Mr Clinton’s failure at Camp David, for example, the Palestinians mounted their second intifada, a wave of suicide-bombings that blew away the modest store of goodwill that Rabin and Arafat had built during the 1990s. After his own election in 2000, George Bush took one look at the blood and muddle and decided that America had better things to do. Plenty of rueful diplomats in Washington, with long experience of upset tummies and smoke-filled rooms in Cairo, Jerusalem and Ramallah, are willing to argue, sotto voce, that it is more realistic for America to “manage” the conflict in Palestine than to seek actually to solve it.
Whether Mr Obama is trying to solve the conflict or simply to manage it is hard to say, since the secret of “managing” is to maintain the pretence that the peace process will indeed one day produce. Either way, it cannot be a bad thing to get old enemies to talk, and this Mr Obama has now done. After the dinner he intends to host at the White House on September 1st for Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the two sides are supposed to start talking directly again, relieving George Mitchell, Mr Obama’s envoy, of the need to shuttle between them. That is progress of a sort, albeit not the sort that poses the slightest danger of raising high expectations. It merely restores matters to where they stood after Mr Bush inaugurated a previous set of direct talks in Annapolis at the end of 2007. These were expected to fail, and lived up to expectations.
This next lot of talks is expected to fail, too, not least because with Mr Netanyahu as prime minister Israel is under harder-line management than it was at the time of Annapolis. Even if he wanted to, Mr Netanyahu would find it hard to cut a deal with Mr Abbas and keep his coalition together. And if Mr Abbas compromises with Mr Netanyahu, he will be accused of betrayal by Hamas, the extremist half of the Palestinian movement which he does not control and which already denounces him as an American dupe. So the moment of truth will come only after the talks reach their inevitable impasse and Mr Obama tables a bridging proposal. The seriousness with which he pushes that proposal will be the first real clue as to how genuine his intentions are.
Having given the talks a year, the president may not yet have made up his own mind. He could use some time to reflect. For if Middle Eastern peacemaking requires the stamina of a boxer, it also demands a chess master’s patience to play the game in at least three dimensions. The first of these, fixing a border between Israel and the putative Palestine, is hard enough. But that task is often subsumed within a second dimension that extends beyond the confines of Palestine and engages American interests more directly. For Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Mr Carter it was the cold war. For Mr Obama it is fear of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Whereas achieving a solution in Palestine would be a feather in Mr Obama’s cap, keeping Iran bombless while talking Israel out of a pre-emptive attack is one of the most vital foreign-policy aims of his administration. To the extent that Israel wants American help against Iran, this gives Mr Obama extra leverage. But the Iranian threat helps Mr Netanyahu too, since it gives a middle-ranking player a dominant position on the board. Thanks to Iran, Israel’s prime minister has both the means and the motive to touch off a war that could have perilous consequences for America’s own forces and interests all over the Middle East. For the moment, there are signs that Mr Obama and Mr Netanyahu have their Iran policy in alignment. Keeping them that way without sacrificing Mr Abbas could be a challenge.
The third dimension of this game is played at home, in American politics. Here, you might think, Mr Obama has an advantage. Most Jews are Democrats. His White House is stuffed with advisers, such as David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, who know the community inside out. And yet his first move—demanding a total settlement freeze—prompted a bruising collision not only with Mr Netanyahu but also with Israel’s powerful supporters on Capitol Hill. At one point Israel’s ambassador was reported (wrongly, he later claimed) to have spoken of a “tectonic” change in American policy. In March of this year Mr Netanyahu was humiliated during a White House meeting devoid of the customary pomp. Israel’s friends in Congress bombarded the president with letters complaining that this was no way to treat a friend.
Relations are now restored, just in time for next week’s dinner (and November’s mid-term elections). But the clash with the Hill suggests that however noble its intentions were, the Obama team failed to prepare its opening gambit with sufficient care. That is an ominous sign in the unforgiving Middle East. It may be just as well that this president got his peace prize up front.
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