A Really Big Challenge for President Obama

What U.S. President Barack Obama said last week actually ought to be perfectly obvious: The borders of 1967 have to be the foundation for the upcoming peace talks between Israel and its Arab counterparts. However, nothing is obvious in this conflict.

Obama was not uncompromising on the question of borders. He argued that it is no longer possible to evacuate some of the Israeli settlements and that therefore a Palestinian state should be compensated with land from other portions of Israel. It was enough to infuriate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who considers the return to the borders as they were before the June War of 1967 as impossible.

Here are the two arguments that Netanyahu makes. The first one is security policy-related: Israel would not be able to defend itself given the borders of 1967. The second one has to do with realist politics: Almost half a million Israelis have colonized the West Bank since 1967.

Both arguments are distinctive. Israel has a crushing, conventional military predominance and is equipped with nuclear weapons. The scenario of an Arab invasion of Israel seems today totally unrealistic from political and military points of view.

The argument that there were “changes on the ground,” in other words, that in violation of international law half a million people came to occupy Palestinian territory, is not any better. A long succession of American presidents have hemmed and hawed partly agreeing with this statement, which simply signifies nothing but the fact that infringement of international law should be able to pay off in a particularly distressing case.

The fact that Obama does not concur testifies to both his sound judgment and courage. The fact that he dared to challenge the Israeli government precisely at this moment is certainly no coincidence either. After the liquidation of bin Laden, the hooting on the home ground against Obama for being a vacillating, leftist fusspot has temporarily subdued.

Beginning to talk about a new start for peace would be hasty even now. There is still a considerable growth of extremists both among Israelis and Palestinians, and if there were more and clearer signals from the United States about an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, that would give rise to convulsions in Israeli society.

Israel is driven by the principle that a small elite of competent, modern and creative individuals provide for a heavy load of unproductive, fanatic and violent stowaways. However, this elite votes unfailingly for the parties that are never going to win any elections. Netanyahu is their formal and only formal leader. They dream of an outsider who will step onto the stage and turn the Wheel of Fortune. The Swedish-Israeli journalist Nathan Shachar writes about this in Dagens Nyheter.

If Obama succeeds in becoming this outsider who steps onto the stage and turns the Wheel of Fortune, then yes, he is definitely going to make history as the one who made the world a safer place to live in.