Israel-Palestine: Obama’s Renunciation

Outwardly, nothing has changed. Barack Obama still thinks that the creation of a Palestinian state will repair a historic injustice and assure the security to which Israel has the right. He still thinks that “the occupation” is no more of a solution than “the expulsion” of the Palestinians. He still thinks that peace between these two peoples is “possible.”

From the Cairo speech that he delivered in June 2009 to the one in Jerusalem on Thursday, March 21, only one phrase disappeared, but it is essential. In the Egyptian capital, after having insisted on the importance of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, Mr. Obama had assured listeners that he intended “to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires.”

At the conference center of the city that Israeli authorities consider their indivisible capital, the president of the world’s biggest superpower dressed a renunciation as skillfully as possible. The White House does not want to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict anymore.

Clearly Mr. Obama does not wish to risk another failure such as the one recorded during his first term, when he obtained a partial and temporary freeze of Israeli colonization of the West Bank, which satisfied no one and triggered no momentum.

It is to his secretary of state that he turns now to try to reconcile two camps as distant as they have ever been in the past two decades. Very experienced, the former Massachusetts senator is by no means without character or qualities, but he unfortunately does not have the political capital of a president of the United States — even while in four years the colonization has not ceased to advance.

In Jerusalem, Mr. Obama urged the Israelis to “put [themselves] in the shoes” of the Palestinians to understand their frustrations, before inviting them to incite their policy makers to pursue the painful compromise of peace.

Nonetheless, it has been a long time since, out of ideology or weariness, the Israelis chased the Palestinians from their horizon into Gaza or the self-administrated pockets of the West Bank. When the Israeli youth mobilizes itself, as we were able to see in the summer of 2011, it is to denounce social injustices, not colonization. And the Israeli elections have not been referendums on peace for a long time, as was the case again in January.

The American retreat from the question of Palestine today closes the parenthesis of Oslo, a process initiated 20 years ago following the first U.S. intervention in Iraq. The United States committed to sponsoring a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians that would lead to peace. That time is over.

This retreat will last until a major crisis requires the United States to re-engage. Meanwhile it is doubtful that, left to themselves, Israelis and Palestinians will be able to overcome the trap of an asymmetrical conflict in which nothing incites the occupier to yield to the occupied.

It is in this time that the two-state solution risks dissolving fatally, tragically. Should this be the case, Obama will have been one of the most tangible gravediggers of hope for peace in the Middle East.