President shifts Mideast message

By: Josh Gerstein May 18, 2011 04:28 AM EDT

Two years ago, when President Barack Obama spoke to the Muslim world in Cairo, he devoted 12 paragraphs totaling more than 1,000 words to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Promoting democracy in Muslim countries mustered a mere three paragraphs totaling 375 words. When Obama delivers an address at the State Department on Thursday that many are billing as “Cairo II,” his text is expected to reflect how much the Mideast has changed. The urgent need for democratic change in the Arab world will stand front and center, while the foundering peace process recedes in prominence, White House officials signaled. The president and his aides are eager to capitalize on the burgeoning Arab Spring pro-democracy movement and the killing of Osama bin Laden as promising opportunities to wrest young Muslims from the path of radicalism. Throughout Obama’s campaign and well into his first year in office, one foreign policy premise became a mantra: Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was critical, if not essential, to achieving U.S. goals throughout the Middle East and around the world. That premise is now increasingly in doubt with the peace process at a standstill. The president’s peace envoy, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine), announced his resignation last week. And U.S. officials are profoundly concerned about recent moves by the Palestinian leadership. Still, Obama insisted Tuesday the time is ripe to resolve the Arab-Israeli standoff. “Despite the many changes, or perhaps because of the many changes that are taking place in the region, it’s more vital than ever that both Israelis and Palestinians find a way to get back to the table,” Obama said during an Oval Office visit with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. “The United States has an enormous stake in this.” Even some of the president’s closest foreign policy allies concede there is little, if anything, to show for the administration’s intense early efforts to broker peace. Democracy, though, is sprouting across the region, raising the hopes of average citizens while jarring U.S. allies and enemies alike. “It’s an awkward speech and an awkward time for a speech because there doesn’t seem to be a game plan in place,” Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation said of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama signaled even before he took office that he viewed the Arab-Israeli conflict as a national security imperative. He described it to The Atlantic in 2008 as a “constant sore” that “does infect all of our foreign policy.” It “provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions,” he said, “and so we have a national security interest in solving this.” Despite the looming danger of a nuclear Iran and tens of thousands of U.S. troops mired in a decade-long morass in Afghanistan, former National Security Adviser Jim Jones declared early on that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would help wind down an array of U.S. troubles abroad. “This is the epicenter,” Jones told the liberal Jewish group J Street in October 2009. Obama implicitly criticized prior presidents, such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, for waiting too long to strive for peace. “Even in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we started dealing with this issue on Day One,” he boasted in August 2009. He tried to jump-start peace talks by pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to impose an indefinite freeze on settlements in the West Bank. Now, even Obama’s supporters say that approach was a failure. “I was opposed to the prolonged effort on the settlements in a public way because I never thought it would work, and, in fact, we have wasted a year and a half on something that, for a number of reasons, was not achievable,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) said last month in little-noticed comments to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Washington.  Jones, who stepped down last October, acknowledged Monday that the peace process is stymied.  “The inability to make even the smallest progress is hurtful to both sides and perpetuates an issue that affects not only the region but a large part of the world,” Jones told reporters at the National Press Club.  Former Mideast peace negotiator Aaron David Miller said Obama “pushed louder, faster and harder on the Palestinian issue than any other American president,” but “the reality is that [the administration] has failed to find an effective strategy.”  Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the administration urged him to focus on Israeli settlements — then abandoned him.  “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze,” Abbas told Newsweek last month. “I said, ‘OK, I accept.’ We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder, and he removed the ladder, and said to me, ‘Jump.’ Three times he did it.”  Frustrated with the failed U.S. efforts, Abbas turned his attention elsewhere. Last month, he agreed to a power-sharing deal between his faction, Fatah, which controls the West Bank, and rivals in Hamas who hold power in Gaza. The deal seems like a snub to Israel and the U.S., both of which have refused to negotiate with Hamas because it uses terrorism to advance a stated goal of wiping out Israel.  The pact has caused much confusion about whether Hamas is easing its hostility toward the Jewish state or whether Fatah is moving toward greater militancy. Even some Palestinian-American activists say the time is not right for Obama to launch any major peace efforts.  “The interventionist impulse in the administration just has to wait,” said Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine. “How do you craft a policy when the character of the new Palestinian government isn’t clear at all?”  That sentiment put Ibish in rare agreement with pro-Israel hawks like Elliott Abrams, a former national security aide to Bush.  “Abbas is signaling his priority is internal politics,” Abrams said. The Palestinian leader “does not believe there’s any negotiating to be done right now and certainly the Israelis don’t believe it either. There is no peace process. … It would be really foolish for President Obama to spend a lot of time [Thursday] setting out a solution for Middle East peace.”  There is still talk in some quarters that Obama might step forward this summer with a peace initiative to try to head off a plan by Abbas to seek a United Nations vote in September on recognizing a Palestinian state. Kerry has called Abbas’s plan a “mistake” that could have “dangerous” consequences.  The political turmoil in the region and the NATO-led military intervention in Libya have relegated the Arab-Israeli peace process to something of a sideshow.  “The tsunami of change in the broader Middle East has overwhelmed the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Clemons said. Despite the earlier rhetoric about the centrality of the Middle East peace process, Jones said this week it’s the current upheaval that is earth-shattering.  “What we’re witnessing in the Middle East and in the North Africa … is perhaps the most significant historical event since the end of the Cold War,” he said.  Under Obama and prior presidents, the U.S. strategy for achieving Mideast peace has relied on cooperating with and publicly lauding some of the most undemocratic leaders in the region, including now-deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.  When Obama visited Cairo for his June 2009 speech, Mubarak was clearly delighted. Many viewed the selection of Egypt as an American honor of sorts for the Egyptian dictator.  Still, the democracy movement that swept Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria has not been driven by anger at the U.S., or even at Israel.  “The Palestine issue was not a primary motivating factor for the protesters in Tahrir Square,” Ibish said. “What they were talking about was their own government, their own rights. It wasn’t anti-American. It wasn’t anti-Israel.”  The upheaval in the region, though, introduces yet another element of uncertainty into the peace process. The first foreign policy foray by the new Egyptian government was the agreement between the two Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.  “None of that would have happened if Mubarak was in power,” Ibish said. “It produces now policies not as friendly to Israel as they had been. … The new [Egyptian] government is more responsive to public opinion.”  Over the weekend, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian protesters claiming inspiration from the Arab Spring clashed with Israeli troops along the border. Fifteen demonstrators were reported killed. Obama may feel compelled to publicly address these events when he meets with Netanyahu at the White House on Friday or in a speech Sunday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference.  Despite the regional transformation, the peace process remains essential, Abdullah insisted Monday during a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  “With all that’s going on in the Middle East, the core issue of the Middle East still is that … Palestinian and Israeli peace,” he said.