Obama: Learning from his mistakes?

AJN WEB EXCLUSIVE

LAST week was one of the busiest periods of peacemaking in recent years. At least, that’s how the story went in Washington.

US President Barack Obama met with Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last Tuesday in the White House. During the visit, Netanyahu promised thatIsrael is “ready to make far-reaching concessions today.”

On a phone call to PA President Mahmoud Abbas a short time later, the US president promised to work toward a Palestinian state, and allegedly reaffirmedAmerica’s commitment to transforming the “proximity talks” into real negotiations.

Movement, dialogue, summit meetings, American involvement and goodwill — the makings of a renewed peace process, according to pundits.

So it’s a real shame that the whole thing was a figment of Washington’s imagination.

Many have tried to offer upbeat interpretations of the newfound faux-camaraderie on display last week between Obama and Netanyahu, which came in sharp contrast to the faux-antagonism of the Netanyahu visit last March. Has Obama moved from the supposed “stick” of American anger to an imagined “carrot” of American friendliness?

This nonsensical analysis symbolizes everything that is wrong in the Obama administration’s foreign policy, where everything is believed to hinge on semantics, on words and symbols. The administration behaves as though the diplomatic rhetoric is the essence of the debate, rather than genuine existential interests.

If a Palestinian “right of return” exists — not into their own state, as with Israel’s, Greece’s or Germany’s national immigration policies, but into a separate state altogether — then Israel’s fate is at the whim of another nation. If all previous negotiations are the starting point for future negotiations, including those whose results were rejected by the Palestinian leadership, then Palestine cannot be said to be honestly negotiating.

These are fundamental questions, and they point to failures not only on the Israeli side, but on the Palestinian side as well. When does it become legitimate to place the failure to restart negotiations at the feet of the Palestinians?

Not just yet, according to media outlets such as the New York Times.

“A single session in the Oval Office is not likely to have resolved a year and a half of deep policy differences,” the Times opined (er, that is, reported) from the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, “and the two leaders could hit more bumps in the months ahead, especially if Mr. Obama grows impatient with a lack of progress in the peace process.”

Stern stuff. Let us fervently pray, then, that there is no “lack of progress” that will once again make Obama “impatient” with Israel’s prime minister.

Especially since the lack of progress was already, last Tuesday, declared to be the new Palestinian policy.

The same Times article reports: “The Palestinian Authority reacted cautiously to the meeting, saying that it, too, wanted direct talks, but that the onus was on Mr. Netanyahu to halt the building of settlements and to agree on negotiations that would resume where the last direct talks, in 2008, left off.”

The same negotiations in which former PM Ehud Olmert offered a sweeping peace deal, a deal rejected by Abbas since, he claimed, the negotiations were useless with the lame-duck PM. Not useless enough to fail to become the new starting position of negotiations with Netanyahu, but just useless enough so that Palestineneed not step up to the plate and fulfill the demands placed on it in the discussions.

THE OBAMA administration’s foreign policy has perplexed many observers. On the one hand, the almost obsequious “second chance” granted to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan populist pseudo-dictator Hugo Chavez; on the other hand, little difference from Bush on issues such asAfghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, too, the administration’s overarching analysis is hard to read. Obama seems to have entered office with the unshakeable belief that the Palestinians are the victims, and that the failure of the negotiations is due to dishonesty on the Israeli side.

But since then, Obama has spent over a year trying to get the Palestinians to the table. Despite crisis after engineered crisis with the Israeli government, a settlement freeze, huge improvements in freedom of movement and economic development in the West Bank, a Netanyahu promise that Palestine will be a free state at the end of negotiations — the Palestinians are still waiting for “deeds, not words” from the Israelis, in the words of Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

The real news to come out of the Netanyahu-Obama summit is not how warm their handshake appeared to be, or whether the bond between Israel and America is “unshakeable” or “based on shared values.”

It is not, in short, about the trappings of diplomacy that so occupy the Obama team’s foreign policy bandwidth.

After a year of expending political capital on pressuring Israel, Obama may finally be facing head-on the grim reality that Abbas seems to have taken the American gift and, without the decency of a “thank you,” squandered it on another round of Palestinian refusal and rejection.

Obama, at long last, seems to be developing some healthy skepticism about Palestinian intentions.

PHOTO: Haviv Rettig Gur