Like a physician who washes his hands of his patient because he is a failure as a physician, or because he does not dare prescribe the necessary treatment, Barack Obama has washed his hands of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet Obama has done worse than such a physician. He has laid the blame for the failure of the treatment on the patient, because he is powerless and too cowardly to stand before his patient and frankly say: I am a failure as a physician. In detailing his prognosis of the reasons behind the failure of his mediation, Obama says (in his recent interview with Time Magazine) that he had overestimated what his administration could do to drive Israel and the Palestinians to serious dialogue at a time when their politics were headed in the opposite direction. He explains the reasons by the fact that “From Abbas's perspective, he's got Hamas looking over his shoulder and, I think, an environment generally within the Arab world that feels impatient with any process. (…) And on the Israeli front – although the Israelis (…) showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, they still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures.” In this prognosis of his, Barack Obama ignores the truth that what is driving Hamas to look “over [Abu Mazen']s shoulder” is the fact that it was US administrations and the Israeli governments they supported who paved all of the ways for extremists and suicide-bombers, with their policies that were unfair and biased towards Israel. Our region and the whole world have paid a very high price for these policies. Obama also ignores the fact that for the Palestinian President to accept what Netanyahu wants and the Americans favor, i.e. to negotiate on the background of bulldozers spreading settlements in East Jerusalem and in most parts of the West Bank, would lead Abu Mazen to political suicide before he even begins to negotiate. Abu Mazen is aware of this and Obama is supposed to be aware of it as well, because his Special Envoy George Mitchell has conveyed it to him in the words of the Palestinian President. As for the “environment within the Arab world” which Obama complains did not help his initiative, it is the environment which paved the way for a permanent, fair and balanced solution to the conflict, through Arab states agreeing to unanimously adopt the initiative launched at the Beirut Summit in 2002 (an initiative the US President has certainly heard of), the articles of which arrive at permanent solution to the conflict on the basis of the principle of international law and UN resolutions, which the president who was elected under the slogan of “change” was supposed to take some interest in, unlike his predecessors, or to admit to the reasons for his failure to do so. The reasons for such a failure are in fact simple and it would have been better for Obama to make them public rather than lay the blame on the victim, at the very least as did Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon in his statements the day before yesterday. These reasons can be summed up by the commitments pledged by Obama before the leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States, who had resented the high tone he had used in the first speech he gave after his inauguration, in which he had shown a tendency towards balance. In that meeting he held in the White House last July, which we had pointed to in a previous article, Obama made the commitment that no solution to the conflict should represent a threat to Israel's security (as Israel itself views such security), and that any “concession” made by Israel should be coupled with complete normalization with Arab states, even before reaching a final settlement. These commitments, and not Abu Mazen's shoulder or the environment within the Arab world, are what is preventing Obama from driving Benjamin Netanyahu to halt settlement as Hillary Clinton had demanded in her famous quote a few months ago, before Obama took the path of retreat: “Halting settlement means halting settlement. Period.” It would have been better for the US President, before giving his shameful recent prognosis of the reasons for his failure, to hear what the Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat, Netanyahu's friend, told the BBC's correspondent in the weekly program “Panorama” (which can be viewed on the BBC website) about the goals of the policy of implanting settlements in East Jerusalem, as “Jews have the right to live anywhere in Jerusalem”, and about what besieging this city will effectively lead to in terms of the possibility of turning it into the capital of the Palestinian state, not to mention the human and humanitarian impact resulting from the policy of uprooting Palestinians from their homes and throwing them out on the streets. Obama should have been more truthful and more daring… He has only disappointed those who had expected the color of his politics to be different, like the color of his skin.
