Obama in Israel but Without Strategies: "Obama Could Be the First Sitting US President to Visit Israel as a Tourist"

Many symbols. Few actions. This is how we can summarize Barack Obama’s trip to Israel — and the Palestinian Territories and Jordan — that begins in a couple of hours. The president’s staff did the most to lower expectations as much as possible. “His visit is not about trying to lay down a new initiative or complete our work on a particular issue,” said Deputy National Security Adviser for Stategic Communication Ben Rhodes. In line with this statement, most of the public events Obama will attend are ceremonial, including an homage to the tomb of the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, a visit to the Dead Sea Scrolls and a stop in Bethlehem. Unlike his two predecessors in the White House, Obama will not speak to the Knesset, preferring instead to address young Israelis at the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

“Obama could be the first sitting American president to visit Israel as a tourist,” quipped Thomas Friedman in his New York Times column. In fact, the visit takes place during a particularly empty moment in political projects and prospects: [there are] no new plans to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the bargaining table; no significant increase in aid to the Palestinian Authority; no real strategy to confront the chaos in Syria; no historic speeches, like the one Obama delivered to the Muslim world during his June 2009 Cairo visit. The fact that the new Israeli government — the third led by Benjamin Netanyahu — came into being only a few hours ago and has within it some of the most uncompromising voices in the world of the settlers, does not bode well in terms of the possible results of a new U.S. initiative.

It is therefore not surprising that the White House aims low — very low — to avoid the boomerang of inevitable disappointment and sense of defeat that the American and international public would take away from a president who returns home empty-handed once again. The curious thing is that in the next few hours, Obama will do exactly what he swore he would never do a couple of months ago. In an interview with NBC last October, the president explained: “When I go to Israel, I want to make sure that we are actually moving something forward.” This idea marked his entire first term: A visit to Israel should be based on closing a deal, achieving something concrete and not raising new symbols and false hopes.

Why then does Obama defer to a politics of symbols over facts? The answer is that in politics, symbols often carry the same value as facts and serve to stabilize conditions for facts to become a reality. Apart from having the worst relations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, the current U.S. president has also never enjoyed a particularly favorable opinion among Israelis. His 2009 Cairo speech did a lot to stir up Israeli distrust. It seemed to many that Obama justified the existence of an Israeli state as an inevitable consequence of the Holocaust’s horrors and not as a historic right.

Therefore, the primary reason for Obama’s trip is precisely the following: the will to mollify, if not overcome, the distrust of Israeli Jews. Obama will visit the tomb of Herzl, the most important voice in modern Zionism, but will pay his utmost respects to the central texts of Hebrew culture and religion, the Dead Sea Scrolls, “written 2,000 years ago by Jews, in Hebrew, in their homeland, the Land of Israel,” according to a statement by Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren.

Therefore, the first symbol Obama intends to redefine is precisely the following: the emphasis on the profound ties of Israel and Israeli Jews to the Middle East and Israel’s right to be exactly where it is. “This is not a country that fell out of the sky after the Holocaust. This is a country that is truly rooted in the region, and it is permanent and it is legitimate,” further explained Oren on Israeli television’s Channel 2. Paying tribute to the historical and, in some way, religious legitimacy of the Israeli state should help Obama soften public opinion and — together with the Israeli government — create better conditions for the near future when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visits the area by himself to try to resume the currently stagnant dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. Obama not entering Knesset but preferring to speak to students and young Israelis obviously has another point of significance then: his exit from the shallows of Israeli politics, its extortions and conditions, to turn to those sectors of the population more open to the possibility of dialogue.

We are talking about an opening toward Israeli politics that, most likely, is not destined to glean consensus in the Palestinian world. Obama will meet with Palestinian President Abu Mazen and visit Bethlehem by helicopter, skipping checkpoints, bulldozers and any other sign of Israeli military occupation.* At no point during the visit will Palestinians come into contact with the president. In dozens of small protests during these hours, Palestinians have expressed their frustrations, burning U.S. flags and defacing images of the U.S. president. Even Abu Mazen, last Friday, confronted the White House, freely venting his disappointment: “President Obama has said on various occasions he is opposed to Israeli settlements…Israel has continued to make mistakes and no one has ever blamed it.” The visit to Bethlehem has another, more subtle but nevertheless obvious significance: calling attention back to the fate of Christians in countries swept by Arab Springs.

The Iran situation remains more urgent for the U.S. administration than the declining Israel-Palestine peace process. It was Elliott Abrams, Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy under George W. Bush, who emphasized that “the Iranian question is at the center of current discussions with Israel.”** Speaking to the U.N. last September, Netanyahu affirmed that Tehran would complete the final phase of its nuclear program in the spring or summer of this year. The Israeli military intelligence director has softened the stance, explaining that Iran’s nuclear program is “advancing slower than Iran had hoped, but it is progressing.” American fears of a possible Israeli military attack on Iranian targets, with serious repercussions in a region already marked by crisis and disorder, will be at the top of Obama’s agenda during his visit to Israel.

*Editor’s note: Abu Mazen is a nickname for Mahmoud Abbas.

** Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.