President Obama is in Europe, supposedly trying to dissuade the Europeans from participating in the Palestinians’ attempt to gain statehood without offering peace to Israel. At his
press conference he, no surprise to his critics, revealed
he really doesn’t have a clue how to proceed when he described the major issues between the parties...
Alan Dershowitz points out the key error that Obama made on the Middle East policy,
one so fundamental one can only imagine it was his idea rather than anyone with a modicum of experience in the Middle East. Dershowitz explains:
There is no way that Israel can agree to borders without the Palestinians also agreeing to give up any claim to a “right of return.” As Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad Salaam once told me: each side has a major card to play and a major compromise to make; for Israel, that card is the West Bank, and the compromise is returning to the 1967 lines with agreed-upon adjustments and land swaps; for the Palestinians, that card is “the right of return,” and the compromise is an agreement that the Palestinian refugees will be settled in Palestine and not in Israel; in other words, that there will be no right to “return” to Israel.
President Obama’s formulation requires Israel to give up its card and to make a “wrenching compromise” by dismantling most of the West Bank settlements and ending its occupation of the West Bank. But it does not require the Palestinians to give up their card and to compromise on the right of return. That “extraordinarily emotional” issue is to be left to further negotiations only after the borders have been agreed to.
That is what has gotten sophisticated observers, including Democrats, on Capitol Hill so riled up...
It’s not some
misunderstanding about Obama’s position on the 1967 lines, unfortunately. No,
this is the same pattern that has driven American Jewish leaders and pro-Israel congressmen to distraction for over two years, as Dershowitz notes:
Once again, President Obama, by giving the Palestinians more than they asked for, has made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Palestinians to compromise. Earlier in his administration, Obama insisted that Israel freeze all settlement building, despite the fact that the Palestinians had not demanded such action as a precondition to negotiating. He forced the Palestinians to impose that as a precondition, because no Palestinian leader could be seen as less pro-Palestinian than the American President. Now he’s done it again, by not demanding that the Palestinians give up their right of return as a quid for Israel’s quo of returning to the 1967 borders with agreed-upon land swaps.
Democrats are loath to admit the president doesn’t know what he is doing, so they are left trying to convince themselves and others that this is a fuss about nothing. The most honest defense I heard from a pro-Israel Democratic staffer was to acknowledge that
Obama had made mincemeat out of the “peace process” but to remind me that talks aren’t going anywhere anyway. In essence, “no harm, no foul” and look at all the hardware and military support we’ve given Israel
