In today's Forward, Nathan Guttman writes an article noticing this trend and documenting the fact that there could be other solutions to the problem. Buried in page two of this article is a revealing bit of information about how the Obama administration views the peace process.
But so far, the Obama administration shows no signs of giving up on the peace process paradigm. “The U.S. still believes this issue has a lot of resonance in the Arab world,” said David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.The US believes that this issue has a lot of resonance in the Arab world? What does that even mean? Either it is a completely self-evident statement that the Arab countries have consistently refused to live at peace with a Jewish State in the Middle East... or it is more revealing. The Obama administration is sympathetic with the Arab world in its refusal to live with a Jewish State in the Middle East... or more realistically, as long as the Arabs are against Israel, the US must push Israel to meet their demands.
This has long been the worst fear of pro-Israel anti-Obama voters. The fear that Obama really doesn't care about Israel and is returning to the Eisenhower days with a policy of how can a few million Jews hope to prevail against 80 million Arabs? (or over a Billion Muslims?) We worry that he believes the US should follow a completely pragmatic foreign policy, which means that the the US should cut Israel loose, because siding the with Arabs has a great potential benefit.
Any open discussion of this scares the hell out of the Jewish community. While I happen to disagree that US policy would be better served by siding more closely with the Arab world, that argument is by no means self-evident. General David Petraeus said as much a couple of years ago with his statement to Congress that support for Israel in the region comes with some baggage. Ron Paul made it an issue in the Republican primaries. Pretending that US-Israel foreign policy synergy is beyond dispute does not serve anyone's interest... but pretend we do, and so this conversation only takes place behind closed doors.
Many in the Jewish community believe that Israel is simply not important to Obama, except in the context of Jewish votes and Jewish money for his reelection. In fact, there is a vaguely anti-Semitic narrative developing int he US media about how Obama is being forced into silence about Israel because of the upcoming election. After the election he will be free to pursue his preferred policy toward Israel... one of forcing Israeli concessions to please the Arab world. If that is the case, the next statement by Makovsky in the Forward article can be viewed very ominously. (Cue scary dramatic music)
[Makovsky] argued that the lack of movement on the peace process should be seen as an election-related hiatus that could end in 2013.
“This is more of an intermission than the end of the play,” Makovsky said.That is exactly what scares me about Obama.
