Here a few of the recent opinions and analysis of the White House meeting between Pres. Obama and PM Netanyahu.
With Speech, Obama Moves Closer to Israel’s Position
May 20, 2011
By Steven L. Spiegel, IPF National Scholar
President Obama in his speech on May 19 has come closer to many Israeli positions than in the past, so it is a bit bizarre that the press has generally reported it as creating a crisis in American-Israeli relations.
In agreement with Israel, the President did not offer in detail a list of American positions on all key issues as many in the foreign policy community had urged him to do, he rejected the idea of an imposed peace—a favorite rallying cry of Israel’s opponents for years, he did not call for immediate Israeli concessions on settlements, he denounced the Palestinian plans for a UN General Assembly vote in favor of their independence in September, he spoke out against Palestinian efforts to delegitimize Israel, advocated a “non-militarized” Palestinian state, questioned the Palestinian unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas and put the burden of proof on the Palestinians. Obama pointedly asked, “How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?” He framed the conflict in a classic Zionist perspective, arguing that – “a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people, each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace”. The President spoke about the close US-Israeli relationship and its need for security. As some Palestinians are already complaining, he did not celebrate close relations between the U.S. and Palestine. No shared history and values; no “unshakeable” commitment to their security.
And perhaps most surprising of all, and ignored by the press, Obama proposed that negotiations should begin by addressing the issues of territory and security and that these should be settled during a transition period before the parties move on to Jerusalem and refugees. This format is precisely what many Israelis and their supporters have argued for years. The President said nothing about provisional borders, but that was the vision of the roadmap, whose second stage would constitute a “provisional” Palestinian state, and it has been vehemently opposed by the Palestinians. The controversial sentence in the speech came when the President said that “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both sides.” Several objections have been raised to this sentence by the Netanyahu government, but all of them involve putting words in the mouth of the President and making it appear that he said what he did not say.
Click here to read the entire column
When Peace Met Partisanship
May 20, 2011
By David A. Halperin and Peter A. Joseph
The criticism of President Obama’s speech this week, in particular the reaction to the statement that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” underscores the lamentable, polarized discourse in our nation – and in the Jewish community – when it comes to Israel and the pursuit of a lasting two-state solution.
A majority of Americans, Israelis and Palestinians have long supported the concept of a two-state solution. The contours of the agreement have more or less been known for years, outlined in the Clinton Parameters announced by President Clinton at IPF’s Gala in January 2001, in the Geneva Accords, the Ayalon/Nusseibeh plan, and even the progress indicated by the leaks of the Olmert-Abbas talks. Each concludes that a border agreement will be based on Israel’s incorporation of major settlement blocs close to – but beyond – the 1967 Green Line in return for a mutually agreed land swap. Every president since Lyndon Johnson – Republican and Democrat alike – has opposed Israeli settlement construction in the territories captured by Israel in 1967 exactly because it made a land-for-peace agreement all the more difficult to achieve. And every president for decades has enjoyed bi-partisan consensus for the United States’ unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, and support for its pursuit of lasting peace.
To be sure, semantics are critical in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. President Obama’s articulation of the date “1967” in his speech was significant. But the dishonest – and dangerous – politicization and demagoguery on display over the last 24 hours in response to this speech, and the dishonest suggestions that Obama has placed Israel’s security in jeopardy by imposing on Israel a full return to the ‘67 border, has been shameful.
In the moments during and just after the speech, many conservative pundits actually applauded President Obama for such comments as his strong opposition to the Palestinians’ attempt to gain recognition at the United Nations General Assembly, his statement that the “Palestinians have walked away from talks,” and his challenge to the Palestinians after the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement to provide a “credible answer” to the question, “How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?”
For example, on Twitter, Noah Pollak, the Executive Director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, and a fierce critic of the President, wrote “I don’t think there’s anything in this speech that Netanyahu will find surprising or even disagreeable,” and later that “If someone had said to me yesterday, “you’ll be defending Obama on Israel tomorrow” I would have laughed.” John Podhoretz of the conservative Commentary Magazine, joked on twitter that the speech sounded as if Obama was saying, “Let me be clear: I don’t want to go into 2012 in a broigus with Israel.” Danielle Pletka of the conservative think-tank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) wrote on her blog that the speech was “not bad” and another AEI blog post reported that “On balance, the speech was quite fair to Israel, especially when one compares it to the 2009 Cairo speech.”
However, the partisan anti-speech chorus grew when presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Newt Gingrich all disparaged Obama for his remarks, with Romney stating “President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus.” Representative Allen West (R-FL) even wrote that the speech “could be the beginning of the end as we know it of the Jewish state.” So much for bi-partisanship…
Click here to read the entire column
The Case for Borders First
May 18, 2011
By David Avital, IPF Executive Committee Member
Published in Politico on May 18, 2011
President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday about the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s impending visit and Special Envoy George Mitchell’s recent resignation, makes this a unique moment for Washington to set a new Mideast policy direction focused on one goal: a borders agreement.
Rather than view the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September as a threat to derail Middle East peace, Obama could use the opportunity to move both sides forward and promote a return to negotiations on the border before the U.N. vote.
Even as more than 140 nations at the U.N. stand ready to recognize a Palestinian state, Palestinian leaders still indicate the Palestine Liberation Organization’s preference of talking with Israel. But after a prolonged stalemate, each side is reluctant to break away from its deeply entrenched, public position.
While the momentum toward recognition is strong, Washington can capitalize on the historic opportunity offered by the Israelis and Palestinians current vulnerabilities by developing a plan for Israel to applaud Palestine’s recognition rather than be threatened by it.
The road to peace begins with clearly defined borders.
For the Jewish state, this agreement could stem the increasing isolation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. It would enable systematic negotiations to begin with settlers living in areas due to become part of Palestine, while construction in areas expected to remain part of Israel could continue. This also allows the Israelis to sustain the status quo on key issues like security.
The approach could also establish a context for greater Israeli-Palestinian economic cooperation, consistent with Netanyahu’s vision of an “economic peace first.”
However, the alternative – a U.N. vote in favor of a Palestinian state which the U.S. and Israel oppose – could unleash what Defense Minister Ehud Barak described as a “diplomatic tsunami,” engulfing Israel in de-legitimizing campaigns and international legal battles against Israel’s “occupation” of a newly sovereign nation.
Read the entire op-ed at Politico
Andrew C. McCarthy
Borderline Treachery
Obama proposes leaving Israel indefensible.
Would that the president of the United States were as worried about Arizona’s border as he is about “Palestine’s.”
There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous.
As for the delusional, “Arab Spring” devotees are thrilled that the president has morphed into his predecessor on the Democracy Project — the enterprise in which future generations of American taxpayers go deeper into hock as our tapped-out government borrows more Chinese billions in order to stimulate the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the few shovel-ready projects President Obama has managed to find (and as a union, the Brothers make the SEIU look like the Jaycees). There is cruel irony in the Arab Spring hallucination, though, evidenced by this bit of rhetorical flourish: “Through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in six years.”
As the president utters his paeans to nonviolence, Egyptians and Iraqis continue slaughtering their religious minorities, and Bashar Assad, the “reformer,” murders his Syrian subjects in the street with the help of his friends at Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization whose day job is running the Lebanese government. The democracy fetish that gave Hezbollah and Hamas thugs the patina of political legitimacy is about to place Egypt under the thumb of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is itching to deep-six the treaty that has kept peace with Israel for 30 years. Speaking of Israel, it is recovering from a weekend in which thousands of “peaceful protesters” stormed four of its borders. Meanwhile, Iraq, which is touted by Arab Spring enthusiasts — and now even the Obama Left — as a Democracy Project success story, just announced that it will show its gratitude to American soldiers and taxpayers by expanding military ties with Iran, the world’s leading facilitator of Islamist terror. Pakistan, when not holding memorial services for Osama bin Laden, is exploding in bloodshed. The Obama administration is pleading with the Taliban to come to the negotiating table; you may recall that the Taliban is the reason our troops are still in Afghanistan preventing the collapse of its fragile “democracy” and the reopening of a safe haven for al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda’s current safe haven, Yemen, is the site of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So much for nonviolence.
The president stumbled into a bracing truth when he compared the change achieved by the people in the region, on the one hand, and by terrorists on the other. The change both are seeking is the same: the creation of sharia societies. Obama and Democracy Project promoters like to frame the Arab Spring as the ultimate rejection of al-Qaeda. But it is, at most, a discovery that there are better tactical routes to the promised land than al-Qaeda’s crude brutality. That promised land is not Western liberalism; it is Islam in all its repression of free speech, religious liberty, and equality — American principles the president spoke of his boundless determination to promote, while avoiding a single mention of Islam or sharia, which make achieving those principles a pipedream in this region.
Speaking of the promised land, the real one, Israel, is apparently getting smaller. This was Obama’s news-making treachery, and its ramifications are impossible to predict, other than that they bode ill.
For the first time in history, an American president explicitly called for a settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict premised on the 1967 borders — i.e., the 1949 armistice line, the tenuous state of play before Israel captured the West Bank (actually, Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in the Arab war of aggression to destroy the Jewish state. To be sure, Obama said that there would also have to be territorial “swaps” to satisfy security concerns. This caveat, though, is cold comfort for Israel, America’s only true ally in the region.
To begin with, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to point out, the 1967 borders are “indefensible.” That is why they have never been the starting point of U.S. policy, even though they always hover over negotiations. In its implacable hostility to Israel, the “international community” chooses to forget how and why the Arab side first grabbed, then lost, the territory in question. For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, the Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff explains, American administrations of both parties have called for eventual Israeli withdrawal to “secure and recognized” borders, a phrase interpreted as “not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.”
By his new articulation, President Obama would deny Israel crucial negotiating leverage. If there is to be a peace settlement (which there cannot be until there are two parties that want peace), Israel must have the latitude to make territorial concessions in exchange for reliable concessions on security and other matters. It cannot be coerced into accepting an Obama-imposed fait accompli that leaves it fatally vulnerable to enemies whose ferocity is only encouraged by this bullying.
Bear in mind that what are called the “1967 borders” were never agreed-upon national boundaries. The Jewish claim on Judea and Samaria has roots in antiquity. This fact was intentionally obfuscated by Obama’s earlier suggestion in Cairo that Israel’s creation was an ill-conceived payback for the Holocaust, as it is by the convention of referring to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank,” the name Jordan gave them when it seized and occupied them at the conclusion of Israel’s war of independence. The Arabs, of course, never created a Palestinian state when it was within their power to do so. Thus, the final disposition of this territory has never been resolved. It is a subject for negotiations, not predetermined Palestinian sovereignty.
Clear here for the entire column
And finally the last comments from Barry Rubin
Obama Middle East Speech: A Big and Revealing Mistake That Nobody Has Noticed
There is a small detail at the end of Obama’s big Middle East speech that everyone has overlooked up until now but which shows how inept this administration is at understanding the IsraelI-Palestinian issue and why it continually makes Israel mistrustful.
In doing his balancing act on Israeli and Palestinian fears and hostility, he says this:
“I’m convinced that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rather look to the future than be trapped in the past….We see it in the actions of a Palestinian who lost three daughters to Israeli shells in Gaza. `I have the right to feel angry,’ he said. `So many people were expecting me to hate. My answer to them is I shall not hate. Let us hope,’ he said, `for tomorrow.’”
That’s genuinely touching. But in the specific case Obama cites — that of Izzedin Abuelaish on January 16, 2009 — there is strong reason to believe that the three girls were killed because of Hamas, that is Palestinian, actions.
According to an official Israeli inquiry, Hamas snipers on the roof of their five-story building were shooting at Israeli soldiers. The tank returned fire. In addition, though, the investigation could not rule out the possibility that the girls were killed by an explosion of explosives and ammunition being stored in the building by Hamas or even by fire from Hamas forces.
In other words, the president took an incident where the cause was unclear and blamed Israel for it. And of course the tragic deaths of these girls took place because the United States did nothing to help prevent Hamas from taking over the Gaza Strip and then Hamas broke a ceasefire and attacked Israel.
Since then, the Obama Administration has pressured Israel to reduce sanctions on Hamas to an absolute minimum and provided $400 million to pay salaries in the Gaza Strip, which benefits Hamas’s rule.
In addition, since the Palestinian Authority has just announced it will pay money to those who are prisoners of Israel, U.S. taxpayer money will now go to reward those who have committed terrorist attacks.
And that tells us what we need to know: President Obama and his colleagues don’t get the facts straight and tend to blame Israel. In other words, Obama counterposed the reaction of an Israeli father whose son was murdered by Palestinian terrorists to that of a Palestinian father whose daughters were murdered by or because of the actions of…Palestinian terrorists.
And that’s the trouble with an “even-handed” approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
But, as with the Abu al-Aish case, it is the radicals who lead the Palestinian movement, several states, and the revolutionary Islamist oppositions — not Israel — are killing the peace process.
Terrorists attack Israel; Israel defends itself.
The revolutionary Islamists — not Israel or Husni Mubarak or the Saudi regime, or past U.S. policy — are destroying the Middle East. And since Obama Administration policy fails to realize these things then it, too, is destroying the Middle East.
