Obama is Fumbling a Chance for Middle East Peace

President Obama has divided foreign opinion. In the eyes of Western Europe, he is doing just great. Support for his handling of international affairs has quadrupled by comparison with the meager levels of President Bush, according to a survey conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and its partners. But that is only part of the story. In Eastern Europe, there is more skepticism about what he is doing regarding Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. And the disenchantment in Eastern Europe is nothing compared with the fearful majorities in the Middle East's most thriving democracy: Israel.

The numbers are startling. Obama's popularity in Israel has plunged to the point where now only 4 percent believe he is a friend. Obama should worry about this. So should we all, for the alienation has significant consequences for peace.

American support and American credibility are crucial for Israel. It is the confidence in America's friendship and support that will enable Israel to fulfill hopes for peace in the region. Alas, the American pressure campaign following Obama's ascent has had one clear outcome, and not one we had hoped for: It has made a peace deal much less likely. Obama has not exerted pressure equally. He ignores what Israel has done in recent years to advance the cause of peace and what the Arabs have failed to do. The onus has been on Israel and Israel alone. This has allowed the Arabs yet again to abdicate responsibility. It has reinforced the long-standing Arab belief that the United States can "deliver Israel" if only it has the will to do so, thereby reducing Arab incentives to make concessions in direct negotiations with Israel. The moderate Arab states, whose principal concern is not Israel but an expansionist Iran seeking domination in the Middle East, have been unwilling to raise a finger to advance the process—not Egypt, not Jordan, not Saudi Arabia.

While that may have been unsurprising, the public nature of their rejection was unusual.

As if on cue, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, announced that he would not negotiate on any issue with the new Israeli government until Obama's settlement prohibitions are met, both in the West Bank and in Jerusalem. Abbas had previously negotiated with both Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, and Tzipi Livni, the former foreign minister, without such qualifications, so Obama has dumped a solid blockade of concrete on the famous road map to peace. Abbas didn't leave it at that. He issued another set of unilateral, nonnegotiable demands as a condition for "negotiation": an independent Palestinian state, a pull back to the pre-June 1967 borders, minus the Palestinian land bridge between the West Bank and Gaza, and a Palestinian right of return to Israel. In short, come to a meeting to surrender. And this from a man who has no control over Hamas, which could veto any breakthrough from the Palestinian side. Abbas has now refused to make a deal with three different Israeli prime ministers.

Obama has misdirected his political capital by focusing on the idea that the Arab conflict is fundamentally about Israeli West Bank settlements or about Israel's denial of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations for a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. It is not. It is not about the territories that the Arabs lost to Israel in a war they provoked in 1967. The Arab cause against Israel and Zionism is not about "settlements," it is about the very existence of Israel. It is a centurylong war based on the conviction that all land governed by the Jews in Palestine, including Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries, is Arab land, and thus no Jewish state can achieve legitimacy in Arab eyes.

When Obama says that the Palestinians have suffered, surely he should understand that they have suffered because they have unsuccessfully pursued the destruction of the Jewish homeland. The Palestinians were not displaced by Israel's founding; they were displaced by a war that they originated in 1948 to destroy Israel in embryo.

Think of what Israel is facing even today. At a recent Fatah conference, the first in 20 years, the Palestinian organization's feuding old guard and young guard were united in their refusal to reach an accommodation with Israel. Both old and young endorsed terrorism. Both embraced the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorist group as a full-fledged Fatah organization. Both approved building a strategic alliance with Iran. Both called for establishing a sovereign state "on the entire Palestinian territory." In other words, Fatah retains the armed struggle not as a way of settling individual Palestinian grievances but as a strategy in order to destroy Israel and form a state in the whole of Palestine, or, as the conference put it, "the elimination of the state of the Zionist occupation economically, politically, militarily, and culturally."

The Fatah state on the West Bank is now competing in murderous extremism with the Hamas state in Gaza, so there is no unity on the horizon. Whatever President Abbas says does not seem to be binding on Hamas. How is a democratic state supposed to cope with such a divided entity and its ideology of murder and incitement?

The engine of the conflict is the continuing Arab refusal to accept Jewish history, people, or sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel. Fouad Ajami, a great scholar of the region, has written, "There is no change in Arab attitudes towards Israel. The great refusal persists." But despite this, there is a desire to end the conflict among some of them, even though they don't accept Israel's moral legitimacy.

So thanks to Obama's hard line, the peace process is coming apart, and with it all the intimacy and dialogue that used to take place between Israel and the United States. How different from President Gerald Ford, who made a commitment to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the United States would never put a peace proposal on the table without first consulting Israel. Since then, that has been the policy of every U.S. government—until the Obama administration.

The issue that has raised the most concern in Israel is the rejection of the verbal understanding on settlements reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2003. It essentially allowed Israel to maintain the larger settlements and permitted some construction within those existing boundaries. It was Israel's condition for accepting the road map peace plan, which supported the creation of a Palestinian state, and, ultimately, for withdrawing from Gaza.

That there was such an agreement was publicly asserted by Olmert and by Dov Weissglas, the principal representative of the preceding prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Weissglas wrote, "An essential part of the agreement related to the Gaza disengagement. Not only were those agreements made, they were documented in records at the time, at the prime minister's office, as an exception to the general construction freeze in the road map." Sharon himself referred to it when he presented the Gaza disengagement plan and asserted, "Israel will deliver on all its obligations, including on the matter of settlement construction. There will be no construction beyond the existing construction lines. There will be no land confiscations meant for construction, no special economic incentives."

Olmert made it clear that without these understandings, Israel would not have agreed to the Annapolis conference and the plan launched there. Olmert recently wrote, "I adopted these understandings and followed them in close coordination with the Bush administration."

Of course, there was logic to what was agreed, for the demographic reality requires keeping the large settlement blocks in Israel's hands, just as corresponding democracy in other areas favors their return to the Palestinians. What is more, in every serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiation, the Palestinians had accepted that the main settlement blocks right next to the 1967 border would be retained by Israel in any final settlement. These settlement blocks were deliberately located on strategic high ground or in other militarily significant locations and are undoubtedly part of the "defensible borders" promised Israel in the 2004 Bush letter.

How can the Obama administration disregard understandings with the Bush administration that spelled out the scope of Jewish building that Israel would maintain for the duration of the peace process? How can the current administration, on top of that, seek to prevent Israel's new construction across the green line in Jerusalem? Banning building in such areas as the Jewish Quarter in the Old City was simply impossible for any Israeli government.

This reneging on a verbal commitment has undermined Israeli confidence in America's word. As one senior Israeli official put it, "The most sensitive matters are often only verbal; that is how it is between friends and couples. It is only in divorce agreements that the sides insist on putting everything in writing."

The attitude of the Obama administration threatens any possible permanent status arrangements. Why? Because these will have to be backed up with a larger number of American guarantees, promises, and commitments, particularly as they pertain to long-term security arrangements. If the Israeli decision makers fear that American commitments are valid only for the duration of the term of the president who makes them, they won't accept any new ones. Oral agreements are agreements that have to be kept as well.

The United States will have to provide reassurance that security and economic needs will be met, particularly in terms of guarantees against potential threats and political support within the international community. Letters and other commitments have often been provided in the past to get the parties to take steps or cross historic thresholds, such as the one provided to Prime Minister Sharon by the Bush administration in April 2004 before he finalized his decision on the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Lacking confidence in the durability of American commitment would be devastating for the prospects for peace. This also applies to the willingness of the Middle East to rely on an American security guarantee as a protection against Iran's acquisition of deliverable nuclear weapons. There is an erosion of confidence that the Obama administration knows how to "play the game" in the region.

As Bernard Lewis, a noted historian of the Middle East, put it, "A nation can make few mistakes worse than this: to be harmless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend." The Obama administration will sacrifice much if this is the perception of it in the Middle East.

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