Obama's in-tray - Israel / Palestine
Obama's in-tray - Israel / Palestine
With the general
election now over, the president has more leverage to pressure the Israeli
government
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| A Palestinian man stands on the Israeli barrier. Leaked documents expose Palestinians' weakness against the strength of Israeli negotiators in the Middle East peace process. Photograph: Mahfouz Abu Turk/Reuters |
If there's anyone more
sorry about Obama's victory than Mitt Romney then it's probably the Israeli
prime minister, Binyamin
Netanyahu.
After four years of an increasingly testy
relationship, which has seen unusual political friction between the White House
and an Israeli government, Obama is now less constrained by domestic politics
if he decides to return to the stand he took in the months after he took office
and press Netanyahu toward negotiating seriously with the Palestinians.
Obama sought to pressure the Israeli prime
minister to halt Jewish settlement expansion in the occupied territories,
including East Jerusalem, at their first meeting in the spring of 2009.
Netanyahu not only resisted but humiliated the president by publicly lecturing
him about Jewish history.
Since then, the Israeli leader has managed to
take Palestine off the agenda by shifting the focus to Iran's nuclear programme.
Obama has pursued a
twin approach of doing more than almost any other US president to bolster Israel's
security with military assistance while attempting to stave off an Israeli
attack on Iran. All the while the US administration has quietly brooded about
the president's treatment by Netanyahu.
Obama now has a freer hand to press the
Palestinian issue if he chooses. He is no longer as vulnerable to the drum beat
of charges from the right that by pressing Israel to end the occupation he is
endangering the Jewish state and therefore America.
The president has an incentive to shift more
of his attention to foreign policy because it will be hard to force any radical
domestic legislation past the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Bill Clinton was in a similar position when he decided to push the Middle East
peace process and came close to forging an agreement.
Obama is dealing with a more truculent Israeli
leader in Netanyahu, who is now aligned with political leaders who are opposed
to giving up land. But that does not mean the US president is without means,
including public pressure that any Israeli leadership - sensitive to its own
electorate which sees good relations with the US as crucial to the Jewish
state's security - will hesitate to resist too far.
If Obama's strategy of sanctions and diplomacy
defuses the crisis with Tehran, that will undercut Netanyahu's tactic of using
Iran to deflect attention from the occupation while Israel continues to expand
Jewish settlements in the West Bank and tighten its grip on East Jerusalem.
The question is whether Obama has the desire to return to the fight.
The question is whether Obama has the desire to return to the fight.
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