HASSAN TAHSIN When Barack Obama took over as US president, he was fully aware of the intensity of the special relations between the United States and Israel. This relationship had been widened in a considerable way during the administration of president George W. Bush who was a proponent of Christian Zionism. The United States had become strongly associated with Judaism as a result of the religious belief developed by Christian Zionism. However, political changes always demand unexpected positions which sometimes undermine political plans. Obama and his administration were committed to finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and took some strong steps in this respect. Obama made the Middle East issue one of his top priorities on the political front. He even claimed that it occupied the first position among those priorities. Because of this commitment, he asked the Israeli government, as a first step, to freeze settlement activity completely. That was rejected by Israel with Tel Aviv promising to find a way to take a position that was satisfactory to the White House. “Despite Israel's rejection of the demand,” a senior US administration official said, “Obama is determined that Israel should enforce a complete freeze on new settlements, including so-called population growth, for a year or more.” The official pointed out that the plan, presented by former Senator George Mitchell to the government of Israel for the complete freezing of new settlements for a year or more, stated that construction within settlements should not be excluded from the freeze. Also, the official emphasized that there would not be any rollback in the position of Obama who stressed that the settlements and construction within the settlements are illegal, and that there would not be any concession on the issue of a total freeze, the halting of expansion, and a ban on increasing the number of settlers. In retaliation for this political pressure on Israel, Tel Aviv took the course of mounting pressure on the president through its advocates in the US Congress. Accordingly, 71 members in the US Senate sent a letter to Obama. In the letter, they demanded that pressure be put on Arab states to start normalizing their bilateral relations with Israel. They falsely claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been instrumental in improving the living conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank after the Israeli armed forces removed several security barriers from roads in the West Bank. When the Israeli government realized that this US Jewish pressure would neither be sufficient nor convincing, it decided to explode a political bomb so as to embarrass Obama, as well as to distract him, even if only temporarily, from pressurizing the Israeli government. A US diplomat, who requested anonymity, revealed that Israel had planned a military strike against Iran during the unrest that followed the Iranian elections. The diplomat, who worked in occupied Jerusalem, said that the Israeli government sent a request, duly signed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres, to the US government, referring to Israel's desire to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. “The Obama administration ignored the demand and that frustrated the Israeli government,” the diplomat added. There is no doubt that broadcasting such news had a great impact on Obama's political plans. Perhaps leaking this story prompted the Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair to mention in his speech before the US Congress that Iran does not have the capability to produce a nuclear bomb before 2013, and that he had passed this information to the US State Department. These political changes and divergent positions have left Obama facing three very tough options. The first is to stop the mounting pressure on Israel with the aim of preventing it from becoming involved in the Iranian nuclear issue at least for the time being in the wake of the forthcoming US presidential elections. The second option before Obama is to ignore the Middle East issue totally, as is happening now, until the end of the US elections, and the third option is to try to involve Europe in the issue at least as a way of buying time until the elections are held. It seems that this last option is the one that the US administration has adopted in its bid to assert the credibility of its foreign policy in the eyes of the world and of the American public. – Hassan Tahsin is an Egyptian writer and political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected]
