There’s something tasteless about headlining a “news analysis” Keeping score on Obama vs. Netanyahu (via memeorandum), but I suppose there will be a lot of this over the next three or four years as the media try to score points against Netanyahu. Bashing Bibi is a popular journalistic and diplomatic sport.
But Mr. Obama did not get his settlement freeze. In fact, Mr. Netanyahu told him it would be politically difficult for him to halt the construction of settlements. That is a hurdle to the administration’s broader peace objectives because Israel’s Arab neighbors have characterized a freeze as a precondition for them to establish normal relations.
Nor did Mr. Obama get much from Mr. Netanyahu on a peace plan beyond his promise to make good on a few commitments that Israel had already agreed to on the “road map,†an outline of peace steps that has not gotten either Palestinians or Israelis any closer to peace since President George W. Bush first announced it in 2003.
Mr. Netanyahu did agree to resume talks with Palestinians without preconditions. But he would not explicitly endorse the notion of an eventual Palestinian state, something his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, had already done.
“This is why I’m asking the question, did our president get suckered?†said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel and director of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. “We don’t know the answer yet, but unless he got something more from Bibi in that meeting than they’re telling us, that question can be asked.â€
Indyk, of course, as Ambassador to Israel was very much into scoring points against Netanyahu when he served in that post, and it got the Clinton administration Ehud Barak, Camp David and the Aqsa Intifada.
But if the President didn’t get his “settlement freeze, why is that possibly a loss for President Oama? Despite its being touted as a necessary precondition for the Arab world to drop their official antisemitism, there’s no guarantee it would work.
Still Secretary of State Clinton announced that a “settlement freeze” is an American demand to terror TV channel Al Jazeera.
Still no amount of pressure will create a Palestinian State if that isn’t the goal of the Palestinians (via memeorandum).
Over and over, the pattern has been repeated. Following its stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel offered to exchange the land it had won for permanent peace with its neighbors. From their summit in Khartoum came the Arabs’ notorious response: “No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”
At Camp David in 2000, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians virtually everything they claimed to be seeking – a sovereign state with its capital in East Jerusalem, 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, tens of billions of dollars in “compensation” for the plight of Palestinian refugees. Yasser Arafat refused the offer, and launched the bloodiest wave of terrorism in Israel’s history.
To this day, the charters of Hamas and Fatah, the two main Palestinian factions, call for Israel’s liquidation. “The whole world” may want peace and a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want something very different. Until that changes, there is no two-state solution.
And as long as the Palestinians remain uncommitted to peaceful coexistence no amount of pressure on Israel will bring peace to the Middle East.
So after President Obama meets with Abu Mazen will we see scorecards about who “won” the encounter? Or whether Abu Mazen will endorse the concept of a Jewish state enthusiastically?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
