Obama at Ground Zero in the Middle East

The president is playing it cautiously, but this is the exact moment when strong leadership is needed.

The time is just a few days ago. The place is the lobby of a luxury hotel in Vienna. It is late evening, and a former top official of the U.S. State Department is just too tired to make any bones about it: “It’s bizarre. Both of them want regime change: Obama in Washington and Netanyahu in Jerusalem. The relations between the U.S. and Israel have never been worse. We can no longer talk about a Middle East peace process.” The words were spoken before the bloody confrontation off the coast of Gaza. Today, that diplomat would have to put it in even more drastic terms.

America’s Middle East policy has reverted to absolute ground zero with the convoy crisis. Little remains of the ambitions Obama had at the beginning of his term. The United States caved in on the question of halting Israeli settlement building, and whatever credibility he had among Palestinians went out the window. The Israelis, on the other hand, snubbed Vice President Joe Biden during his visit to Jerusalem by announcing new settlement building projects, and then dispatched Mossad murder squads with European Union passports on assassination missions — and now this disaster with the solidarity convoy.

The delayed reaction time on the part of the U.S. government, and the non-committal statements it has thus far issued shows how helpless Washington really is, and just how little maneuvering room Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have in the matter. In order to get health care reform passed earlier in the year, Obama needed every vote in Congress he could get, and to do so he had to throw in the towel on freezing Israeli settlement building. And now the approach of mid-term elections means a return to diplomatic caution. Middle East politics in the United States is still domestic politics. Many experts now think a Middle East peace can be achieved only by a Democratic president (and not necessarily Obama) in a second term, when he can take bigger risks because he isn’t running for another term.

But nobody can wait that long. The level of suffering, the pressure of war is just too powerful in the region. The United States needs to show its strength of leadership here and now, just as suggested by Israel’s most adept premier, Avi Primor, in a recent interview with this newspaper. Indirect talks begun a few weeks ago are totally out of place. All the participants know one another; many are even friends. Every point of contention between Israelis and Palestinians has been debated countless times over the past 15 years. What’s needed now is political integrity and diplomatic pressure that compels Jerusalem and Ramallah to come to the table with honorable intentions and make the painful decisions needed on both sides.

The first step toward building that pressure is an independent international investigation into the convoy incident. And here, it’s necessary that the United States play a clear and unmistakable role. The second necessary step is a revision of policy toward Hamas in Gaza. Whoever preaches peace has to be willing to talk to the enemy. That’s as true for Israel as it is for Hamas. If Obama is willing to take the lead in this new direction, then starting over at ground zero makes sense. If he isn’t willing to do so, then we’re all in for very sobering times to come in the Middle East.