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Instant view: Obama throws Israel under the bus in futile gesture of appeasement
Obama knows the Israelis can’t accept his “peace” plans. His speech was just another round of grovelling to extremism.
Jeremy Bowen was glowing. The BBC’s Middle East editor said President Obama’s speech yesterday, in which he effectively threw Israel under the proverbial bus by demanding the Jewish state accepts the completely indefensible 1967 lines as the basis for a peace deal with the Palestinians, represented a clear move by the United States to the “European position”.
In fact, Obama has a ways to go. His warning to the Palestinians that “efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure” and that the presence of Hamas in the new Palestinian unity government raised “profound and legitimate questions for Israel” would never be made quite so emphatically by a European leader.
More broadly, and in sharp contrast with Europe, the United States under Obama has also been resolute at the United Nations in seeking to block blatantly anti-Israeli ventures such as the Goldstone report into alleged Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza. Even after Judge Richard Goldstone himself retracted his key allegations the British foreign office was still sticking by it as if it were a piece of holy scripture from which any deviation would be a sign of heresy.
So Bowen and company can wipe that smug smile off their faces. Actually, they can do likewise for a whole set of other reasons, beginning with this one: Obama himself knows this is a non-starter. No Israeli government -- let me rephrase that, no government of any description, anywhere -- could accept a peace deal which leaves its people at the mercy of a declared enemy long committed to the state’s destruction.
And that is exactly what the 1967 lines would mean for Israel: Not so much gambling the lives of your children on the kindness of strangers as gambling them on the kindness of people very well known to you who (literally) teach their own children to hate yours.
No real surprise then that barely had Obama finished his speech and the New York Times was reporting that the president does not believe that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu can make a peace deal. On the basis of what is now being presented to him, of course he can’t.
But there’s more. Think about what Obama’s speech is supposed to mean in practice. Netanyahu has already rejected it. So, what’s Obama going to do? Impose sanctions on Israel to get Netanyahu to bend to his will?
Really? The United States is just getting into gear for next year’s presidential elections. Israel is a very popular cause among large sections of the American population. Congress too is overwhelmingly supportive of the Jewish state. It’s not going to happen.
So, what’s this all about? Frankly, it’s just another piece of classic Obama grovelling to the Arab and Muslim world.
How else can we interpret the fact that he made widespread references in his speech to the need for Middle Eastern countries to move towards freedom, democracy and the rule of law while only offering instructions on peace and national security arrangements to the one country in the region that actually fulfills those requirements?
In one respect at least, when Obama looks at the Middle East he sees what the rest of us see – a region possessed of a virulent and unremitting hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. In order to buy credibility with such people he feels it prudent to sell a little of America’s support for Israel. It’s the classic appeaser’s bargain.
And it fails for the same reason that appeasement in such circumstances always fails: concessions are not seen by the other side as a reason to reconfigure their own world view on the basis of reason and decency; they are seen as a sign of weakness and a reason to ask for more until their maximal aims are satisfied.
As comprehensive polling of Palestinian opinion by the Israel Project showed last November around two thirds of Palestinians only support a two-state solution in order to get a one state solution when the opportunity later presents itself.
By glossing over such realities and merely paying lip service to them in his speech in favour of platitudes about a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, all President Obama is doing is encouraging the Palestinians to believe they are right to think they are engaged in a waiting game: eventually, bit by bit, they’ll get what they want.
That is no recipe for peace, it is a recipe for perpetual war.
In the end then, you can pore over Barack Obama’s speech all you like. You can put this bit of his speech against that bit. You can draw comfort from one part and be concerned by another. You can agonise about what the 1967 borders with land swaps really means. You can pull and push until it sounds innocent enough on the one hand or nothing short of disastrous on the other.
But it’s all an exercise in futility.
This is a president cocooned in delusions about how to deal with tyrannical regimes and the political cultures which underpin them. Obama is an appeaser through and through. And when you read between the lines, that was the message we should draw from yesterday's speech.
Robin Shepherd is owner/publisher of the Commentator. His most recent book is A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel.
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"And when you read between the lines, that was the message we should draw from yesterday's speech".... yes we may well draw that message, but millions of Arabs will read it as carte blanche to destroy Israel; or try to... Obama is the most dangerous man alive; he is inflaming the Arab masses (who hardly need any pretext) & rewarding them for their aggression, whilst pinning Israel into a corner and throwing Western values off a cliff. I hope he doesn't really speak for America....
If I was the US president, my policy for Israel would be to absolutely arm it to the teeth like you wouldn't believe. I would then tell the muslim countries, "if you threaten to attack Israel, you threaten to attack the USA. And we will respond with every weapon in our arsenal if you lay one finger on them". Islamic culture respects strength, especially in its enemies. It has to be believeable like Bush's "bomb Pakistan back to the stone-age" if Pakistan didn't co-operate. Mushareff believed him, and Bush would have done it too. Diplomacy for muslims is displaying weakness. Just threaten to take them back to the 7th century - via sorties of B52s - which they seem so desirous of. That's how you deal with these people.
if it was not obvious before, it is now. obama has no idea about the middle east.
An instant view, but no less accurate for it. Obama's dream of leading through non-alignment has led to compromises of principle and the erosion of moral leadership. He has prostrated the USA's authority and sacrificed its credibility. Now it's time for aggression's victims to pay for re-gilding the Emperor Nero's laurel wreath, and it's up to Congress and the American electorate to decide whether he's had their standing in the world at heart. Principles are universal, one imagines. But, thinking of the Quartet, the Baroness and that chap with even less hair than me, what should one be doing in practice here in the UK?
I understand the moral outrage over Obama pontificating about the 1967 lines without asking the Palestinians for any reciprocal move. The idiot definitely missed a trick by failing to include the refugee question as the trade-off for generous Israeli territorial concessions. However I almost think we have to ignore Obama and just ask simply what, if any, is the best solution for Israel that could be accepted by the Palestinians on a long-term de facto basis. The Palestinians will never be happy with the existence of the state of Israel, but if they’ve signed a treaty of peace and mutual recognition, then any aggression from their territory can be met with a ferocious response and the rest of the world won’t be in a position to criticise.
Excellent article.
To quote Sophie: "We have a choice coming - more dhimmified appeasement and Jizya for militant Islam leading eventually to our own destruction or to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel and fight back. Israel is the outpost of western civilisation against 7th century tyranny."
Good article. Obama's anxiety to get closer to the Arab world is only matched by that of Cameron and Haig in the UK.
Arabs respect strength. The current US and UK governments simply do not understand this and are perfectly happy throwing Israel under the bus, to satisfy their own, misplaced and short term ambitions.
In the US, fortunately Israel has a lot of friends, from across the spectrum. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the UK, which is why Mel Philip's Londonistan is just the tip of an iceberg that will grow to sink the UK as a nominally Christian, democratic and free country.
Obama is dangerous and ineffectual or tries to pretend that he is, but who knows what machinations are afoot?
The idiot missed many tricks, but Netanyahu, although I rarely agree with his policies or what he says, was masterly.
Israel should, I believe, define her borders now. Then, when the Palestinian project tries to come it or attack her, she can go back at them with ten times the strength, much as any sovereign nation might at anyone who threatened its existence.
Obama holds grudges. I doubt that he will forgive having been made so public a fool of.
So what does the author suggest instead of a demilitarised independent Palestine? Continue to raise walls and add more barbed wire around the refugee camps? Annihilating the Palestinian people altogether? Deleting the parts in our moral and legal codes that gives people the right to live as equal citizens in their own country?
I hope not, because such policies only strengthen fanatics on both sides. It is high time that Americans and Europeans put paid to the notion that Israeli security can be served by denying the basic rights of the Palestinians.
Rasmus, no need to be pysched out about Israel's denial of Palestinians' human rights as you see it. The Palestinians are more than capable of denying themselves those rights in the first place. To wit: witness Hamas's sharia-style rule in Gaza, which has done far more to harm Palestinians' "human rights" (a concept Islamists don't buy into in any case) than Israel's so-called "occupation," which is a misnomer when it comes to Gaza, seeing as Israel uprooted all its settlements there and evacuated its security presence years ago. (And much good that did.)
Cont.: As every country in the world, Israel has the right to defend its citizens and if it takes walls and barbed wire to keep out a steady stream of suicide bombers, I fail to say why you would want to take issue with that.
You may go daydreaming about a "demilitarised independent Palestine" as a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but no sooner did Obama utter words to that effect than Hamas rejected the idea out of hand. So what do you suggest Israel do to counter the constant threat of terror attacks? Dismantle its security fence and trust Palestinians' better judgement not to take Israeli lives in vain?
President Obama is looking increasingly out of his depth.
His neo socialist ideology is not a broad & sound basis for understanding what is at stake for democracy & the West should Israel fall to Islam.
We have a choice coming - more dhimmified appeasement and Jizya for militant Islam leading eventually to our own destruction or to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel and fight back.
Israel is the outpost of western civilisation against 7th century tyranny.