Why Do American Presidents’ Peace Efforts Succeed or Fail?

Whatever the results of the current negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, will it be the responsibility of the American president?

Now we are witnessing something repeated at each cycle of negotiations: the exercise of Jewish-American power. It is the most influential force on the American president, where Israel depends on its arsenal of tools for applying pressure, rather than the capabilities of their negotiators.

So what has happened in the historical record of these pressures?

Many American politicians, as well as writers and experts, seriously discuss this situation, among them Professor Fred Greenstein, who teaches political science at Princeton University. In his 2000 book, “Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton,” he wrote that in society, interest groups and forces of pressure play a decisive role in a candidate’s success in elections, and so the candidate will find himself standing at a point, trying to balance the satisfaction of these groups with considerations of his country’s interests. Only three of the 11 presidents he discusses in his book successfully liberated their will — and considerations of the greater good — from the control of personal interest in confrontations with Jewish pressure. These three are Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and George Bush Sr. They did not back down in the face of pressure, and forced the Israeli government to yield to them.

Greenstein doesn’t mention John F. Kennedy, who, according to official American and Israeli documents, protested Israel’s research on producing a nuclear bomb and was determined to subject Israel to inspection, perhaps because Kennedy’s role was cut short by assassination.

A large number of senior politicians, experts and officials working with American presidents involved in the Israel-Palestine negotiations, clinging to their experience with books, explained why presidents’ past mistakes made the peace negotiations go nowhere. Among these men are three who finished their books shortly before Obama took office, and presented them to the new president as though they were messages addressed to him. The books agreed with each other on the reasons for failure: It was attributable to the congruence of the American and Israeli positions during the negotiations, the non-crystallization of a decisive American position regarding the success of the negotiations and a failure to address Israel’s rush to build settlements, in spite of the American government’s official declaration that the settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace. These men demanded that the new president have a decisive position and a determination to solve the conflict according to the negotiation timetable. These three are Aaron David Miller, Daniel Kurtzer and Martin Indyk. This is aside from the document prepared by a group of 10 senior figures headed by Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor for President Bush Sr., who presented to Obama a detailed, step-by-step plan for finally resolving the conflict.

The climate of the current negotiations has inspired some people to plans for failure in some stage of the negotiations. For a while, Netanyahu was repeating his commitment to peace, whereas the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, expressed the opinion that peace would be unlikely in the short term, repeating the argument previously made by Ariel Sharon in 2000 and saying, “Let future generations solve the Palestinian problem; temporary measures for settlement and the Palestinian state are all we can accept.”

This brings us to the point made by those experts: There will be no solution without American pressure on Israel.

So will Obama’s name be added to the list of three or four who liberated their will and chose the side of national security over personal interests and their ambitions to win a second term in office?

Jewish pressure within the United States is expected, but this time the situation is different from past experiences; any weakness in President Obama’s position in the face of Israeli pressure will not simply be a detriment to Arabs’ rights and a blow to their confidence in the United States, but more importantly would be to the disadvantage to America’s national security interests, as acknowledged by senior statesmen in the United States themselves.

But this does not mean the responsibility for the failure — if it happens — falls on the American president, which would excuse the Arab states from all responsibility. The Arab states’ potential for applying pressure remains inactive, as though isolated behind solid walls, confined and unable to move. Because what we are dealing with — that is, the United States — is a state whose political system is unlike any other country in the world, because its system permits — constitutionally and legally — the application of pressure on the president’s foreign policy, even in the interests of foreign powers.

This corresponds exactly with something I heard directly from a senior official in the Clinton administration, who said, “We are a society of pressures.”