The errors of Obama’s Middle Eastern ways

One day, the chicken told the pig: “my friend, we must contribute to the welfare of mankind: I will produce more and better eggs, and you will produce more and better ham.” The pig replied: “Oh No ! for you it is an effort, but for me, it is a full life commitment!

By Isaac Yetiv, PhD

LA JOLLA, California — Political scientists like to say that “America does not have a foreign policy,” which is generally quite true. This judgment fits President Barack Obama’s “foreign policy,” with one important adjustment: By his words and deeds, he gives the impression that it is a good policy to appease, placate, and sometimes reward, our enemies, and scold and punish our friends and allies. While he has no clue on how to tackle , for example, the huge upheaval in the Arab Middle-East or the dangerous nuclearization of Iran, he seems sure of his ways when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: just demand more and more dangerous concessions from Israel, our only real friend and ally, without asking the Palestinians to reciprocate in any way.

In my last article, I showed that Obama’s call for Israel to return the ‘ 67 borders was “wrong legally, morally, practically, and tactically.” This begs the question: why did he do it ? Some observers and pundits wrote that he “does not understand the intricacies and complexities of the problem.” Charles Krauthammer, in his excellent column in the Washington Post, asks rhetorically if the president’s “perverse and self-defeating policy” is caused by ” a genuine antipathy to the Jewish state or by the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see” the reality and the historic antecedents.

I never accepted the ” exculpating” excuse of ignorance of any president. If Obama doesn’t understand, he has a host of very expensive advisers and “czars” to enlighten him. I believe he knew what he was doing. He intentionally provoked the incident by making his declaration in a venue traditionally hostile to Israel, the State Department, one day before the arrival of his invitee, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu ( in fact while the PM was in the air), and after his spokesman Jay Carney made assurances that the president will not say what he later said. Too much planning and counter-planning for it to be spontaneous.

It was not a “gaffe,” not even according to Michael Kinsley’s smart definition as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth,” because it was no accident. That is what he believes, his worldview, his upbringing, his political history, his role-models, his mentors. (See details in Dinesh D’Souza: The Roots of Obama’s Rage.) As I wrote before he was elected, Obama surrounded himself with advisers who, later, became government officials in his administration, and most of whom espoused  anti-Israel views like Valery Jarrett, Samantha Powers, Susan Rice (our ambassador at the UN) and the Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi,” a luminary on the Arab-Israeli conflict,” in whose house in Chicago Obama launched his political campaign. And let us not forget his “mentor” for 20 years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose often repeated anti-Israel and anti-American views have never been a secret.

So why did the president do it, in defiance of the will of the majority of the American people who are pro-Israel, especially among his own party and the American Jewish community ( 78% of which  voted for him) and its huge donors? He surely must have known that it would produce an adverse reaction. Indeed, his ideas were repudiated by Senator  Harry Reid and others from his own party, and most notably, by the royal reception of the Israeli PM at the US Congress with its 30 standing ovations.

I will attempt an answer in keeping with our Hebrew Sages injunction “to judge others lekaf z’khoot,” that is to assume it was a mistake, not malice. In my opinion, Obama fell prey to the fallacies and lies that the efficient Arab propaganda, regrettably unchallenged by a non-existing Israeli one, has succeeded in inculcating in the heads of otherwise honest people all over the world. As Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, cynically said, ” A lie that you repeat 1000 times becomes the truth.”  We know the lies and I won’t repeat them here. But here is a list of fallacies on how to achieve peace that have gained currency and have affected Obama’s thinking. I hasten to say that all these fallacies had been put to the test and proved totally false. Here are a few of them:
.- If only Israel stops building in the settlements…! Answer: There were no settlements before

the Six-Day war and the Arabs’ position was still “no recognition, no negotiations, no peace.”
.- If only Israel returns to the ’67 lines…! Answer: First, let us correct a mistake: There are no ’67 lines. These are the ’49 armistice lines that left Jordan occupying , then annexing, the West Bank for 19 years. (This is why the realistic arrangement I have always preferred was to be negotiated with King Hussein when it was still possible, until he himself “washed his hands” from the whole thing.)
Now to the point: Israel was within the ’49 lines, which did not prevent Arab aggression and two wars .
.- Land for Peace …! Answer: Israel gave land more than once, and got war, not peace.

.- The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of the problems in the Middle-East: Answer: What a silly idea! Is that why Kaddafi, Assad, Saleh, and other ruthless Arab dictators have killed thousands of their own peoples? Will this change if Israel magically disappeared? That’s a huge lie.

.- If only the “refugees” could return to their homes IN ISRAEL ! This is the worst, because they know it is a non-starter  for Israel and tantamount to a call for the extinction of the Jewish state.

This is why it was very disconcerting to hear Obama say, with equanimity, that the question of the “refugees” will be negotiated later (after Israel has retreated, on his advice, to indefensible borders.)

Even the consideration of this contingency shows a total absence of political maturity and leadership.

Maybe at this stage we can’t ask the president to show empathy to Israel’s plight and its precarious situation in its inimical neighborhood, but we can, and must, ask him for a thorough study of all the aspects of this thorny issue of US foreign policy, after freeing himself from the grip of the anti-Israel advisers, and seeing clearly where the national interests lie.

As I see it, Israel is at the center of concentric circles of enemies, more or less virulent: the first circle is made of the Palestinians, themselves divided between those who proclaim their goal of Israel’s destruction now and brook no recognition of, or negotiation with, “the Zionist entity,” and those who, hypocritically, say that they are ready to negotiate if Israel surrenders to their demands before the negotiations, including the return of the refugees and Jerusalem as their capital, and they expect Obama to “deliver” Israel to them (in their words) on a silver platter, knowing full well that this will happen , as they say in the Middle-East, bukra felmishmish, i.e. never.

The second circle is made of Arab countries, only two of which had signed with Israel a peace treaty which is now, with the turmoil of bloody revolutions, in danger of being abrogated. The other Arabs are still at war with Israel and never abandoned their idea of its destruction, proclaimed day and night , by their leaders and by the terrorist organizations in their midst, Hamas and Hizballah.
The third circle is made of the non-Arab Muslim world, led by the fanatical regime of the mullahs in Iran whose leaders never hid their ardent desire to “wipe Israel off the map,” and are working frantically to produce the atomic weapon that will serve their murderous purposes.
The fourth circle is populated by the Europeans who have not yet shaken the chains of their atavistic antisemitism which, supplemented by commercial interests, makes them more dangerous.

Add to this the great number of do-gooders and self-appointed counselors who shine by their naive and arrogant ignorance, who are found in the US and even in Israel, and you get the picture of the great dangers the Jewish state is facing in today’s geopolitical conjuncture.
And the vicious anti-Israel indoctrination of the new generations continues unabated in the schools, the mosques, the camps, and the media.

The detractors of Israel and the naive do-gooders often invoke, as did Obama lately, the Arab Saudi initiative for peace without reading the fine print that calls for “the right of return of the refugees.”

Now, they cling to another fantasy, “the Arab Spring” and the uprisings all over the Arab Middle-East

against their dictatorial bloody regimes, in which they see an opening to the possibility of Israeli-Arab peace, “if only Israel makes the appropriate concessions.”

Who can be sure where these revolutions end?  The recent developments are not encouraging at all. In Egypt, for example,  after the toppling of Mubarak , we witnessed a new wave of Tahrir Square demonstrations against the transitory military regime. The Muslim Brotherhood is now a part of the government; the Salafis, even more extremist, have burned Coptic churches and killed many Christians with impunity; the New Regime has lifted the blockade to terrorist Gaza and brokered the “Unity” agreement between Fatah and Hamas, making any negotiations with Israel impossible (Even Obama has denounced it).

Israel is off the maps in official Egypt; a dangerous rapprochement with Iran is the order of the day; virulent anti-Israel demonstrations have been allowed in Cairo on the annual Nakba day to commemorate their defeat in 1948 and the establishment of the Jewish state; anti-Israel declarations are issued every day, and not only by the extremist elements in the coalition ; polls show that a majority of Egyptians advocate the adoption of Islamic Shari’ah as the law of the state, and the abrogation of the peace treaty with Israel. And that’s Egypt, mind you. One can imagine how it might end in Libya, Syria, and Lebanon where yesterday the new government comprised a majority of Hizballah ministers (16 out of 30), a fact I sorrowfully and repeatedly predicted months ago.

Against the backdrop of this lugubrious state of facts, any advice to Israel to “make gestures for peace …,” from whatever quarters, is amateurish , even childish. Coming from the president of the United States, it is bad and dangerous foreign policy.  In view of these fateful developments, the time has come to re-think and re-assess the whole situation of war and peace in the Middle-East.

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Yetiv is a freelance writer based in La Jolla.  He may be contacted at Isaac.yetiv@sdjewishworld.com