President Barack Obama's intelligence and enlightened approach to world affairs are widely recognized and admired. All the more puzzling, therefore, has been the abject failure of his attempt at peace-making in the Middle East. His recent comments at a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida, offer clues to an understanding of that failure. The informality of the town hall setting and of his impromptu responses to questions may be more revealing of his thinking than his carefully crafted formal pronouncements on this subject. The president was asked why, despite his condemnations of human rights abuses in various parts of the world, he has failed to condemn the human rights abuses committed by Israel and Egypt against the Palestinian population in Gaza. In his response President Obama reaffirmed his unqualified commitment to “helping Israelis secure themselves” in a dangerous part of the world. He also expressed his concern “for the plight of the Palestinians,” who, he noted, suffer from lack of opportunities, such as jobs, education, and so on. By formulating the Palestinian case in such narrow humanitarian rather than in political terms, Obama risked damaging the Palestinians' struggle for their national rights. When Benjamin Netanyahu assumed office in January of last year, having run on a platform opposing Palestinian statehood, he sought to make that opposition more acceptable in the West by declaring his intention to improve the social and economic life of the Palestinians. It is a deception to which President Obama should provide no aid or comfort. While there is no questioning the humanitarian dimensions of the Palestinian situation under Israeli occupation, the heart of the problem is a political one: Palestinian statelessness and the denial of Palestinian individual and national rights. The Palestinians' right to an independent national existence should be seen as no less fundamental and compelling than Israel's right to security, particularly since Israelis long ago achieved their national independence. Language that allows one to think of the Palestinian “plight” as a humanitarian problem only risks undermining the legitimacy of their political struggle. A second point made by President Obama was that Palestinians must “unequivocally” renounce violence, something Hamas has refused to do. To put the matter bluntly – which is one thing that U.S. peace policy in the Middle East has never done, preferring instead cowardly euphemisms – we have no moral or political right to demand that one side in this conflict renounce violence in its struggle for self- determination if we are not prepared to demand that same “unequivocal” renunciation of violence from the other side. For Israel regularly and unhesitatingly uses violent means in support of its confiscations of Palestinian land and the construction of its settlements. How does President Obama imagine the government of Israel would have reacted to Palestinian efforts to establish their own settlements within Israel's borders? Would they not have shot every last one involved in such an attempt, irrespective of whether they were civilians or armed fighters? Not a single Israeli settlement could have existed in the West Bank or in Gaza without the threat and actual use of deadly violence by the IDF against Palestinian protestors. If the resort to violence by Israel in support of its theft of Palestinian land draws only rhetorical condemnations from the U.S., but never any sanctions, what is the justification for U.S. support of Israel's suffocating stranglehold on one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza in punishment for Hamas's violence? And how exactly would President Obama explain the difference between Prime Minister Netanyahu's lifelong rejection of the Palestinian right to statehood, which no one has ever threatened with sanctions, and Hamas' denial of Israel's legitimacy? Even if it were true, as the president said, that Netanyahu “is making some effort to move a little bit further than his coalition wants to go,” that “little bit further” does not begin to represent a change in Netanyahu's essentially rejectionist stance. His attitude towards a Palestinian state is defined not by his grudging rhetorical acceptance of a two-state solution in a speech at Bar Illan University but by conditions he has imposed for the creation of a Palestinian state that empty it of every shred of sovereignty. According to the settler leader Israel Harel (writing in Ha'aretz), Netanyahu told members of his cabinet and leaders of the settlers' council at a closed meeting that the conditions he attached to his acceptance of a Palestinian state were expressly designed to make their acceptance by even the most moderate Arab leader impossible. It is inconceivable that President Obama would not be fully responsive to Israel's genuine security needs (as opposed security measures that are nothing more than a cover for land grabs), no matter how deeply he may disagree with some of its policies. That is as it should be. But it should be equally inconceivable that an American president would abandon America's core values and strategic interests to keep Netanyahu's far-right government in power. An Israeli government that seeks to permanently disenfranchise and dispossesses the Palestinian people by denying them a viable state within their pre-1967 territories should not expect to retain America's friendship and support. Until President Obama decides to credibly convey that truth to Netanyahu and his government, his exertions for Israeli-Palestinian peace will remain empty gestures that lead nowhere other than to the loss of his declared two-state objective. Henry Siegman, Director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress.
