Time for Obama to justify his Nobel Peace Prize

Time for Obama to justify his Nobel Peace Prize

Operation Protective Edge will go down in the annals of the Arab-Israeli conflict as the first crisis in the 21st century in which there was almost no American involvement.

The focal point of the negotiations between Israel and Hamas has migrated to Cairo.

The hub of international pressure has moved to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Over three months ago (April 25), when the nine months that US Secretary of State John Kerry allotted to his own peace initiative were up, President Barack Obama said that, “There may come a point at which there just needs to be a pause and both sides need to look at the alternatives” to negotiations between them. The first alternative was the establishment of a Palestinian reconciliation government and Israel’s announcement that the diplomatic process had ground to a stop. The second alternative was the war in Gaza, which has claimed almost 2,000 casualties on the Palestinian side and 67 casualties on the Israeli side (including three civilians).

With the cessation of the fighting, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is weighing the alternative of waging its campaign in the corridors of the United Nations, while Israel is preparing to engage in yet another public diplomacy campaign. There is no indication whatsoever that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering the alternative of opening serious negotiations over a permanent agreement, while recognizing the temporary Palestinian reconciliation government. Nor is there any indication that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has given up his demand that Israel present its border map at the beginning of the negotiations and freeze all construction in the settlements. The only person who could take advantage of the fresh trauma caused by rockets and missiles, tunnels and sirens, is Obama. Only he can drag the two parties, forcibly if necessary, to a round of serious talks, while offering emergency treatment to the physical and emotional ruins left by the war.

It is very disappointing to see that Obama is unwilling to use the enormous power that the American public granted him on two separate occasions. As the president said in an interview with Thomas Friedman of The New York Times: “If he [Netanyahu] doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking on the settler movement.” Obama told the senior journalist that the problem is that “Netanyahu is too strong [and] in some ways Abu Mazen is too weak,” and that this combination of Bibi’s (Netanyahu’s) strength and Abbas’ weakness makes it difficult on both of them to “make the kinds of bold decisions that Sadat or Begin or Rabin were willing to make.”

Obama has apparently forgotten President Jimmy Carter’s bold decision to employ external pressure on both parties at Camp David. Carter recognized that without this pressure from the outside, internal pressure alone would not have been enough to bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace agreement. Maybe Obama does not remember President Bill Clinton’s bold decision in 1995 to oppose AIPAC’s legislative initiative to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem at the most sensitive point in the talks that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was having with PLO leader Yasser Arafat (whose name Obama didn’t even mention).

It is hard to believe that internal pressure, and not American pressure, would have gotten Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula at the end of the 1956 Sinai Campaign. It is highly doubtful whether internal pressure alone, without former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s threat to reassess the US relationship with Israel, would have resulted in the Separation of Forces Agreements with Egypt and Syria in the 1970s. Were it not for President Ronald Reagan’s bold decision in 1988 to begin a dialogue with the PLO and the decision of his successor, President George H.W. Bush, to invite Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Peace Conference in Madrid (1991), the parties would never have concluded the Oslo Accord. Without President George W. Bush’s brave move of putting the road map on the table, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would not have disengaged from Gaza in 2005.

In the early days of his presidency, in spring 2009, it looked as if Obama would follow his predecessors’ lead and apply his pressure and leverage tools to ensure that the road map was implemented. He went all the way to Cairo to declare, “All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear.” The responsibility lies with “all of us,” he said at the time, not on “the parties.” The US president noted in his speech that ”the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states,” a solution, which, according to him, suits not only the interests of both sides, but also “America’s interest, and the world’s interest.” As such, he made his commitment “to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires.”

How does a public commitment to personally see to the fulfillment of a goal correspond with abandoning that goal to “internal pressure” on the leaders in Israel and the PA? What kind of internal pressure does he mean? Don’t his advisers even bother to show him the polls sent by the embassy in Tel Aviv? Doesn’t he know that in Israel in 2014, the greatest pressure being applied to Netanyahu is to use more force and build more homes in the West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem?

Does the US National Security Council not know that the most powerful internal pressure being applied to Abbas is to end the plodding diplomatic process and to impose difficulties on Israel in the form of sanctions and diplomatic isolation? The people pressuring the PA chairman in that direction can be encouraged by what Obama said to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg (March 2) before he took a break from dealing with our conflict. Obama told Goldberg that Israel “could face a bleak future — one of international isolation and demographic disaster — if he [Netanyahu] refuses to endorse a US-drafted framework agreement for peace with the Palestinians.” Furthermore, Obama warned that the United States cannot defend Israel in the United Nations forever.

Can the leader of the free world, who takes pride in the title of “friend of Israel,” stand idly by when its leaders threaten its very survival? True, Obama is also the leader of the Democratic Party and as such, he must take into account all the internal pressure by his party members who will run for their seat in Congress in three months. It is quite safe to assume that the break he is taking from our conflict will not end before the Nov. 4 elections. However, in the succeeding two years, which make up the final quarter of his time in the White House, Obama will have one last opportunity to justify the Nobel Peace Prize that he was awarded. That will be just the right time to apply bipartisan pressure on him within the United States to advance a two-state solution.

The common denominator is already on the shelf, as Obama said in his Cairo speech, and the commitments that both parties agreed to in the road map are still firm and valid. That road map, which received unanimous approval from the UN Security Council (Resolution 1515) came from the desk of a Republican president. It was and still is the best, if not the only, alternative to a rapid descent down the slope.