Category: Obama presidency

It’s been almost three months since, at that January 22 event at the State Department, Sec. Clinton announced the appointment of former Senate Majority leader George Mitchell as “special envoy for Middle East peace”– and Pres. Obama, who was also present, immediately put flesh on that announcement by saying,

Lasting peace requires more than a long cease-fire, and that’s why I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security.
Senator Mitchell will carry forward this commitment, as well as the effort to help Israel reach a broader peace with the Arab world that recognizes its rightful place in the community of nations.
I should add that the Arab peace initiative contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts…

At the time, I commented that the way Mitchell’s appointment was effected indicated that he would be reporting to both the president and the secretary of state. Yesterday I was able to have a good discussion with a couple of (regrettably anonymous) sources in the administration who were able to confirm conclusively that this was the case. “It is very important that there is no daylight between any of the three of them,” one of these people said.
Mitchell has, of course, been on the road again this week, with a heavy schedule of meetings in (thus far) Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt.
This is his third visit to the region since his appointment; and he has been more outspoken this time than hitherto in articulating the US’s vision of “two states living side by side in peace and security” both publicly and also, reportedly, in private meetings with leaders in both Israel and Palestine.
Israel new (or recycled) PM Netanyahu and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, are notably sticking to their position of refusing to engage at this time in any discussions about sovereignty issues– that is, about the possibility of a independent Palestinian state.
Haaretz reports today,

In meetings with Israeli leaders on Thursday, Mitchell stressed Obama’s commitment to the goal of a two-state solution to end the decades-old conflict.
“That is our objective. That is what we will pursue vigorously in the coming months,” Mitchell said.

It thus seems clear that serious confrontation between the two government is getting closer.
In associated news this week, it’s been revealed that Jordan’s King Abdullah II will be the first Middle Eastern head of state to meet Obama in the White House. That’ll happen next Tuesday. And US government sources have said that Obama likely won’t be in DC when Netanyahu comes across in early May for the annual AIPAC conference so won’t be able to receive him then.
This is, of course, an abrupt shift from the extreme lovey-dovey-ness that existed between the US president and successive Israeli PMs right through from January 2003 till January 2009. (In Pres. Clinton’s case he almost hero-worshipped Rabin, in particular.)
Mitchell’s earlier two visits to the region as “peace envoy” were low-key missions, focused on “listening”. During them, he didn’t make any forceful public statement. He didn’t do anything “radical” like visiting Gaza or Syria, or talking to anyone who could even remotely be described as “close to” Hamas. I got pretty worried and impatient, thinking that after the good, activist start Obama and Mitchell got off to in January, the momentum seemed to have fizzled out of their effort.
It also took Mitchell what I thought was an inordinately long time to staff up his peacemaking effort. Friends of mine also started to raise questions as to whether Mitchell, in his mid 70s and recovering from prostate cancer, really still had the physical vigor required to push this peacemaking effort through to conclusion.
Well, now it seems the staffing pieces are starting to fall into place. Mitchell will have, it turns out, four people who will report directly to him. Their exact job titles seem not to be clear– whether they will be “deputies”, or “chief of staff”, or something else…. But the important thing is these four will be expected to coordinate closely with each other and each will report directly to Mitchell.
They are:

Gen. Keith Dayton, the guy who’s been running the fairly controversial (in Palestinian circles) effort to train up a pro-Abbas Palestinian security force. He will apparently carry on doing what he is doing– and presumably will also be heavily involved in discussions on the security regime in the OPTs in the context of further Israeli withdrawals. But from now on, he’ll be part of the Mitchell operation, and reporting to Mitchell.
David Hale, until now a deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, and formerly I think Ambassador to Jordan. Hale has been traveling with Mitchell this week. I think the expectation will be that he’ll be the person who’ll go to Jerusalem to set up the office the Mitchell operation will be opening there. (Let’s hope it is of considerably more use all round than the ridiculously expensive and under-performing office that Tony Blair has been maintaining in the American Colony Hotel for the past couple of years…. Also, does this mean curtains for Tony? I certainly hope so.)
Fred Hof. Hof is a longtime Middle East expert, whose principal expertise is in the Syrian-Israeli-Lebanese nexus. But he was also chief of staff of the 2000-2001 Mitchell Commission, which reported on the causes of the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and drafted the commission’s April 2001 report. So Hof knows a lot about Palestinian affairs, too. He will be working primarily from Washington, backing up Mitchell’s efforts on both the Palestinian and Syrian tracks.
Mara Rudman, who worked in the Clinton-era National Security Council and has until now been the executive secretary of the Obama NSC. She has also been traveling with Mitchell this week. Her responsibility on the team will apparently include managing its efforts to coordinate with all the other arms of the federal government. She’s also pretty well connected to various parts of the US Jewish community.

My sources told me they expect Mitchell to run parallel efforts to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace and to secure peace in the Israel-Syria-Lebanon nexus, but with the latter effort most likely somewhat subordinated to the former. There seems to be a fairly clear understanding that Netanyahu might try to push for a big peacemaking breakthrough on the Syrian track as a way of staving off US pressure to engage seriously on the Palestinian track– and that this needs to be resisted. But, as one of my sources said, “We are firmly convinced a person can walk and chew gum at the same time. Activity on the Syrian track should not preclude activity on the Palestinian track.” Indeed, this person indicated that the “comprehensive” (Palestinian track, plus Syrian track, plus Lebanese track) peacemaking approach, as advocated in the Arab peace initiative, has some non-trivial advantages including from the perspective of Israel’s citizens.
Though Mitchell will reportedly be working on both the principal tracks at once, he has no immediate plans to visit Damascus (or Beirut.) Someone remarked that this seemed unlikely before the holding of elections in Lebanon in early June.
Well, anyway, I am happy that Mitchell’s operation is finally getting up and running. I’ve been reading the slightly theoretical study of his previous peacemaking efforts in both Northern Ireland and Palestine/Israel that Shelley Deane has in the latest (March 2009) issue of something called the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. Shelley was also looking at the more recent “Helsinki process” undertaken with reps of many political trends in Iraq, which tried explicitly to use the peace-mediation approach summed up in the “Mitchell principles.”
Mitchell’s 2000-2001 effort in Palestine resulted in a report and a set of recommendation that went absolutely nowhere. In part that was because of the limited mandate of the Mitchell Commission, which was not itself given the task of mediating a final peace agreement, but only of making recommendations as to how the existing peace “process” could be gotten back on track. In part it was because of the lack of commitment and support the Commission received from both Pres. Bush and also– to some extent– from secretary of state Colin Powell.
The Mitchell Commission report was commissioned, remember, by Clinton, in early October 2000, in response to a resolution from the UN Security Council calling for a “speedy and objective inquiry” into the causes of the escalation of violence in Palestine. Clinton “captured” that process from the UNSC; but since he, his veep, and his wife were all heavily focused on the imminent elections, he didn’t too much to activate the Commission with any great speed…. And then, after Bush because president, it was to Bush that the Commission submitted its final report… That, after all kinds of shenanigans involving disruptive Israeli leaks, the Israelis attempting end-runs around Mitchell by getting Scooter Libby to go bat for them, etc.
Anyway, Bush was deeply uninterested in doing anything on the Israel-Palestine front. Thus, the report sank like a stone into a very deep ocean.
This time, we have a different president. And we have a Sen. Mitchell– along with some of his staff members– who have long experience of the kinds of tricks balky Israeli governments can get up to.
I was just now having lunch with an English friend who’s also deeply interested in these issues. He asked whether I thought Obama and Mitchell were wise to the kinds of tricks Netanyahu might get up to. I said yes.
An attempt to activate the pro-Israeli lobby in this country in defense of the Netanyahu government’s positions is completely predictable.
(That is another reason why the Delahunt resolution,a House of Representatives resolution that congratulates Sen. Mitchell on his appointment as peace envoy and applauds the effort to establish a Palestinian state, is so important. This resolution now has 101 sponsors, including five or six republicans. If you go to this web-page, you can find out if your representative has signed on as a sponsor. If so, express your appreciation. If not, lobby her or him to urge her to do so.)

He’s been doing so well, and it’s churlish of me not to have mentioned it before. (I’ve been busy.)
But oh man, it really feels great no longer to have a president who makes you cringe every time he opens his mouth!
There are still several areas of Obama’s policy that cause me great concern:

1. He is being ways too slow in doing anything concrete to lay out clear and principled markers for Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. (Repeating the mantra about the strength of the US’s support for a two-state solution is completely not enough! Let’s have some consequences out there!)
2. He’s terrifyingly– and actually, quite unrealistically– warlike in his policies in Afghanistan.
3. On the whole economic crisis he has surrounded himself far too much with the bankerist types who got us into this whole darn mess in the first place. Larry Summers??? Send him and the rest of the bankerists packing!
4. Why is he so supportive of the provocative “missile defense shield” in Central Europe?

… But despite those caveats, which are not trivial, I think that over all he’s doing an excellent job.
I just read the speeches he gave in Prague yesterday, and in Ankara today.
In Prague he spelled out his unequivocal support for the goal of a nuclear-weapons free world, set out some generally good first steps toward that goal, and promised to take them. So now, we can hold him to those steps.
In Ankara, first of all it is good he went there, to the giant, majority-Muslim nation at the eastern end of NATO. Second, it’s excellent that the Turkish government had invited him, even after knowing the comments he’d made earlier about the Armenian genocide.
I thought he dealt with the Armenian question and just about all the other issues he spoke about in his speech very deftly, honestly, and compassionately.
On Arab-Israeli issues he said this:

In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. Let me be clear: The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis and people of goodwill around the world. That is a goal that the parties agreed to in the road map and at Annapolis. That is a goal that I will actively pursue as president of the United States.
We know the road ahead will be difficult. Both Israelis and Palestinians must take steps that are necessary to build confidence and trust. Both Israelis and Palestinians, both must live up to the commitments they have made. Both must overcome long-standing passions and the politics of the moment to make progress towards a secure and lasting peace.
The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security. And like the United States, you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the Palestinians. So now, working together, we must not give into pessimism and mistrust. We must pursue every opportunity for progress, as you’ve done by supporting negotiations between Syria and Israel. We must extend a hand to those Palestinians who are in need, while helping them strengthen their own institutions. We must reject the use of terror, and recognize that Israel’s security concerns are legitimate.

So okay, now let’s have some actual accountability for the Israeli government– as well as, as usual, for the Palestinians– regarding their actions in the occupied territories.
We need to flood the White House and the offices of our congressional representatives with urgent requests that the US do these things:

1. Require Israel to open the crossings into Gaza for the passage of construction materials, humanitarian goods, and all goods needed to rebuild a normally functioning economy. This is Israel’s responsibility as occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which requires a lot more than “just” humanitarian aid for Gaza, as for the West Bank. It requires a normally functioning economy. The US should push for no less than that.
2. Cease all construction work in the settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, forthwith, and all work on infrastructure projects that support the settlement: “Not one brick.”
3. Push for the immediate release of from Israeli jails of all the elected Palestinian legislators.
4. Fully support all international efforts to investigate alleged grave rights abuses committed during the recent war in Gaza.

The Palestine Question now appears to have fallen off Pres. Obama’s agenda. In his early days in office he took some impressive steps toward principles-based and constructive engagement in the diplomacy on this issue, which is one of stronger impact worldwide now than it possibly ever has been in the past.
On Obama’s second day in office he (and Secretary of State Clinton) announced the appointment of Sen. George Mitchell as special representative on Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. In the speech in which he described Mitchell’s mandate, in the interview he gave Al-Arabiya television, and in other events during his first week in office Obama made some forceful statements about the need for strong US engagement in the search for a durable two-state solution between the Palestinians and Israel.
That was two months ago. Since then, nothing.
This matters, because the Palestine Question is one of burning– and increasing– relevance to publics throughout the Middle East, and in the Muslim world far beyond that region. It acts as one much-watched litmus-test of how much moral (and thereby also political) authority this new US president will be able to retain for his, and my, country over the years ahead.
Strong outside engagement in the diplomacy on the Palestine Question is needed now because the long-pursued tactic of “having the two parties sort it out between themselves” clearly hasn’t worked. Instead, over the 18 years of “bilateral direct negotiations” since Madrid, the pro-negotiation camp in each of the two societies has shrunk to near-zero; much harder-line and intransigent political forces now predominate.
As of now, if we say “outside engagement”, the key role in providing that would have to come from Washington, in good part because the actions of successive US presidents over the past 35 years have emasculated the capabilities of the UN, which should more naturally and appropriately have retained the lead peace-brokering role that it previously had. (If Washington truly cannot perform on the peacemaking, the lead role may yet devolve back to the UN; other permanent members of the Security Council might insist on this if Washington’s policy throws the Middle East and the world into too much further chaos.)
Washington’s engagement needs to be at the presidential level precisely because Israel’s well-organized networks of support inside the US have succeeded in turning the Palestine issue into a dangerous hot potato for all lesser oficials. All the power of the presidential “bully pulpit”– that is, the president’s power to lead through the clear articulation of a principled position married to the taking of clear and compelling steps to secure that vision in timely fashion– needs to be harnessed to the issue.
Instead of which– ?
If you go to the main “Foreign Policy” page on the White House website you have to scroll down quite a way in the priority-ranked listing of topics there before you come to any relevant item. This is the item headed “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, which comes in third under the subhead “Renewing American Diplomacy.”
What it says there is really disappointing, and a clear sign of presidential inattention to the issue. It is just an outdated and clearly quite inappropriate cut-and-paste from some pre-inaugural document:

Obama and Biden will make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a key diplomatic priority from day one. They will make a sustained push — working with Israelis and Palestinians — to achieve the goal of two states, a Jewish state in Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security.

No mention of Israels assault on Gaza and subsequent escalation of its campaign to punish the Strip’s people through harmful blockade. No mention of Mitchell’s mission or any other post-inaugural developments at all.
Then, right after the other items in “Renewing American Diplomacy” comes an entire sub-section headed “Israel”, which contains this in full:

Israel
* Ensure a Strong U.S.-Israel Partnership: Barack Obama and Joe Biden strongly support the U.S.-Israel relationship, and believe that our first and incontrovertible commitment in the Middle East must be to the security of Israel, America’s strongest ally in the region. They support this closeness, and have stated that the United States will never distance itself from Israel.
* Support Israel’s Right to Self Defense: During the July 2006 Lebanon war, Barack Obama stood up strongly for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hezbollah raids and rocket attacks, cosponsoring a Senate resolution against Iran and Syria’s involvement in the war, and insisting that Israel should not be pressured into a ceasefire that did not deal with the threat of Hezbollah missiles. He and Joe Biden believe strongly in Israel’s right to protect its citizens.
* Support Foreign Assistance to Israel: Barack Obama and Joe Biden have consistently supported foreign assistance to Israel. They defend and support the annual foreign aid package that involves both military and economic assistance to Israel and have advocated increased foreign aid budgets to ensure that these funding priorities are met. They have called for continuing U.S. cooperation with Israel in the development of missile defense systems.

Once again, meaningless electoral boiler-plate. Okay, probably not meaningless, because these are clear policies that are evidently being pursued by the administration with no even cosmetic attempt to provide “balance.”
Look, I guess I can understand why the Palestine Question has fallen off Obama’s agenda. He has a lot of other things to deal with right now– primarily, the economy.
But Palestine can’t wait. He came out of the starting gate well on the issue, back in his first week in office. Since then, nothing. No actions– or even words, from him– to force the full implementation of humanitarian law for Gaza’s long-punished people.
(And only a couple of half-hearted bleats on this issue from Mitchell and Clinton. They said a few words about some of the more outrageous aspects of Isarel’s collective-punishment siege of Gaza, and then did nothing, frittering away thereby any moral or political authority they might have had on the principles involved.)
No actions– or even words– from anyone in the administration on Israel’s continued detention of more than three dozen duly elected Palestinian legislators.
No actions from Obama– and just a few words from Clinton– about Israel’s stepped-up demolitions of Palestinians homes in occupied Jerusalem. (And once again, the fact that she said something and then no consequences followed makes here and her boss both look impotent.)
No word from Obama to save the appointment of Chas Freeman.
As Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That is what seems to be happening on the Palestine Question these days.