Joseph Biden’s Myth

Obama’s vice president is surrounded by an aura of authority in international matters, built during his many years in the Senate, but the truth is there can be no more stale clichés. In his visit to Israel, his pattern has not changed.

For starters, he should have known that, in the Near East, even the simplest things are difficult to achieve. His dream of landing as a peacemaker clearly would be truncated. And not because of just one thing or another, but because of his inability to understand the problem. The Obama administration has endorsed the idea that if a Palestinian state is created, the rest of the unresolved issues in the region, from the poverty in Cairo to the Iranian nuclear weapons, will resolve themselves almost automatically. That was never the situation, nor is it probable that it will be in the future.

Even worse, Obama has translated that distorted vision to the Israeli settlements in the territories under dispute. As for his representatives — like Biden — without resolution of the settlement issue, he will be unable to achieve a satisfactory peace process. The settlements were never the problem in getting the Palestinians to negotiate. Nor were they the reason for Arafat refusing to sign a peace agreement or for impeding the Oslo accords, the “road map” or any of his other promises.

What Obama and Biden are doing, in reality, is providing the Palestinians with another excuse for not negotiating in good faith. Netanyahu has spent a year trying to sit down with Abu Mazen, and it is the Palestinian Authority that refuses — because it prefers to be a generously subsidized victim to taking responsibility for its own misery and corruption, or having to answer for its own problems. American politics have fluctuated this year from the extreme left to left of center. But Biden has yet to realize that Israel is not the problem, and that it is the others who prefer to continue as they are.