Obama Made The Construction Moratorium The Issue That It Is. Now the Palestinians Are Stuck With It. And So Is He.
...The “blind to opportunity” phenomenon is an old story. The most egregious instance of it was the Palestinian rejection of Ehud Barak’s initiative, coached and coaxed by Bill Clinton, at Camp David in 2000. But the letter from George Bush initiative of 2004 outlining the “road map” to a settlement was a further instance of the Palestinians’ throwing away opportunities that might occur again.
...But, in a way, the person who has most defined the recent history of the conflict is President Obama whose ignorance of the real issues is matched only by his arrogance about the wisdom of his views...passion mixed with only a glimmer of learning is toxic when it is expressed with power and control.
[Obama] took a clear Palestinian view of their conflict with the Jewish state, Israel.
Indeed, it was only in what I guess was desperation that he for the first time admitted (in his speech at the United Nations) that the land the Romans called Palestine was actually “the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” This admission was very, very late in coming, and it certainly was not something that Khalidi taught his innocent pupil. Perhaps it was a sop to the Israelis to get them to continue the ten-month construction moratorium on the West Bank. This moratorium, which was established at Obama’s insistence, had been in effect for more than nine months without the Palestinians negotiating at all. The Israelis hadn’t even gotten one session when they sat down across a table with the Palestinians. (Not sitting down with the Jews is an old Arab habit, going back to the Paris peace conference which opened on January 19, 1919 and continuing on and on until only recent times. But then you had two presidents who understood the issues: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.)
The currency for verbal intercourse was now that the Israelis stop construction in the territories. But whose idea was this? The fact is that Obama made it the center of his peace strategy from the beginning. This put Israel in a bind. But, worst of all, it put the Palestinians in a much greater bind. They had no room to maneuver. If the president of the United States insists that new building not be done even in settlements that every one knows will remain with Israel how can the Palestinians palaver in any other circumstance? The Palestinians are trapped in Obama’s truculence. The president also urged the Palestinian Authority to consult with the Arab League about its conundrum. This is the most concrete evidence that Obama knows squat about the region...
And let's add this from his previous blog post on Chris Hitchens:
...he still has a soft and blind spot for the Palestinians, who can apparently do no or little wrong...In "Hitch-22" Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic: A man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him. To which Hitchens adds - and the falling man lands on the Palestinian again and again (the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the suppression of the intifadas, the construction of settlements in the territories, etc.).
But the metaphor is disingenuous, and it requires amplification to conform to the facts of history. In fact, as the leaping man nears the ground he offers the bystander a compromise - let's share the pavement, some for you, some for me. The bystander responds with a firm "no," and tries, again and again (1920, 1921, 1929, the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 and the 1947-48 War of Independence), to stab the falling man as he descends to the pavement. So the leaping man lands on the bystander, crushing him. Later, again and again, the leaping man, now firmly ensconced on the pavement, offers the crushed bystander a compromise ("autonomy" in 1978, a "two-state solution" in 2000 and in 2008), and again and again the bystander says "no."
...In "Hitch-22" this is somehow omitted. Rather, the often-enlightened Hitchens (who provided a roof and haven for his friend Salman Rushdie when he was under an Islamist death sentence, and who speaks quite forthrightly about "Islamist murderers" and cowardly, naive or deluded Western liberals bent on appeasing these "murderers"), fails to note the continuous, powerful religious impulse underlying the Palestinian national struggle since its inception in the 1920s. (What other national liberation movement in modern times, with the exception of that of the Greek Cypriots, was led by a cleric?). Who, if not the Islamists, won the Palestinian general elections in 2006?
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