Obama and the Middle East Trap

I read at the bottom of an article in the Estadão today that the negotiations for peace in the Middle East will once again be halted. For a simple reason: the Obama administration is convinced that it is useless to negotiate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The central idea behind this reasoning stems from the biggest crisis between the U.S. and Israel in 35 years. It all started with the planned coincidence of the announcement of the illegal settlements in Arab Jerusalem and the visit from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. This was the first step of a government strategy turned public humiliation for one of the biggest Middle East specialists within the sphere of American politics. Biden has always been linked to the Foreign Relations Committee in the senate and was present and participated in many episodes linked to this topic in the past. The trip to Tel Aviv was a symbolic gesture of importance and pressure, making it clear to Netanyahu that the discussion would be “for real.”

Biden, nonetheless, either committed a mistake or was counseled into to it. He believed, or was led to believe, that the Israeli government had some intention of negotiating an accord that would make viable the creation of an independent Palestine in the Arab occupied territories. It is part of any government doctrine, no matter the form of the cabinet in power, to permanently prevent this objective from being reached.

In an article published in the JB, Professor Gilson Caroni Filho approached the topic in a clear and objective manner starting from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s correct, in my point of view, refusal to make an unexpected, and not earlier agreed to by the Brazilian delegation, visit to the gravesite of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Herzl’s ideas percolate on all different levels in public administration and rest in the thoughts of a great majority of Israeli society. They are based as much on the exclusion of Palestinians in their own territory, re-vindicated on basis of religion, as a systematic behavior independent of the pressures of the international community. For the Zionist, the hatred in the world for Jewish people, especially Diaspora and the Shoah (Holocaust), give the Israelites a right to consider themselves apart from the world.

Lula did not want to visit the tomb of the founder of Zionism and escaped a trap. By presenting himself as a viable mediator to the conflict, no one was able to read into his decision. The Brazilian president maintained a distance from a political endorsement of constant expansion in an illegally occupied territory. Obama cannot have the same attitude, being that the U.S. is the only unconditional ally that Israel has. The announcement of the expansion of illegal settlements in Jerusalem was not “an error in timing,” like Netanyahu affirmed in apologizing in reaction to the virulent reaction by the White House. Never before had a secretary of state classified any action taken by Israel as an “insult to the United States” like Hilary Clinton did. Netanyahu’s maneuver that was both astute and well executed. In doing this, he knew that he would be facing a serious crisis in American relations, but had guarantees that his powerful ally would restrict itself merely to rhetoric. Proving this rationalization is the fact that two weeks after the announcement, no concrete action has been taken against the expansion of Jerusalem. The works were not and will not be halted and the effect of the rhetoric is slowly losing power. The speech given yesterday by Hilary Clinton at the AIPAC (the leading Pro-Israel lobby in the U.S.) made this very clear.

Another political gain obtained by Netanyahu with the announcement of the expansion, besides completely neutralizing Biden, came from the expected reaction of the Palestinians. The radical leaders took the bait and declared “a day of rage” in which the only objective achieved was a revitalization of the economic stability of the occupied West Bank with the consolidation of the Palestinian Authority. The journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek, in commenting about the crisis, pointed out that Netanyahu always was and always will be an enemy of any agreement that concedes to the Palestinians what is rightfully theirs, even if it is disproportionately less. Given the proven growth of Palestine’s GNP, the betterment of the community — brought on by the growth in commerce and other businesses — despite the Israeli blockage and the decreasing crime rates, it was necessary to create some justification based on security to renew the state of persecution as leverage for the indefinite expulsion of all Palestinians. For days now we have been seeing the returning images of teenagers throwing rocks at soldiers and soldiers retaliating by firing their arms. Deaths have once again returned.

It’s no wonder that Obama is waiting for a change in Israeli government power to restart talks. If that is in fact the case, he is playing right into the hand of the radicals on the Israeli right. They can now be even more brazen with the actions they take because the U.S. will not do anything about it until there is a change of government. They also gain precious time in the slow moving and apparently inexorable clock of Zionism, whose hands move only to eliminate Palestine from the West Bank with new illegal settlements and other morally and politically questionable decisions. For the second generation of Intifada that will soon arrive in the streets also to fight with stones, the resistance will return to being the only objective in life, an inheritance carefully passed on from father to son. There is an emblematic dialogue about this in the movie “Munich” by Steven Spielberg. It’s a pity because the economic gains that ensued from fragile peace were a promising path to stability, even if radicals end up using it as a leitmotiv to justify a path of violence as the only effective path against the expansionism of Zionists.