After healthcare, Obama can force peace in the middle east

The passage of the health reform bill has reversed perceptions of President Barack Obama’s weakness. He is now master of his own house and can perhaps out-achieve Lyndon Johnson’s and even Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda of domestic reforms. Foreign policy can also purr ahead. Very soon there will be a major nuclear arms accord with Russia, but one whose ratification would have quickly been bogged down in the senate had the president failed to muster the votes to approve healthcare. It gives him more room to manoeuvre and compromise with Iran, North Korea and the Taliban.

Above all, it should give him the muscle to push the Israelis to deal productively with the Palestinians. This is a Sisyphean task that has defeated all his predecessors. Since the misconceived Balfour Declaration that gave the Jews a homeland right bang in the middle of someone else’s, peace has been negotiated to death. The British tried again and again to clear up their mess and in the end ran away, literally depositing the keys of the administration building in an early morning stop on the doorstep of the UN mission.



It has consumed many strong politicians. Winston Churchill, Henry Kissinger (who only managed to achieve some modest changes), James Baker, who was secretary of state for George HW Bush and tried to browbeat the Israelis into change, and Bill Clinton, who at the end of his presidency tried to force Yasser Arafat to agree to a deal that would have deprived the exiled Palestinians of the right to return to their confiscated property. If Arafat had agreed, he wouldn’t have survived a week as leader. Clinton then compounded his error by spinning a gullible American and foreign press into portraying Arafat as a saboteur. Only President Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, made substantial progress when they midwifed the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt—in return for recognising Israel and pledging not to use violence against Israel, Egypt received the conquered territory of the Sinai peninsula.

Can Obama make a new peace on that scale? History would say no. But if it ever can be done, now is the time. Not only is the president strong, but despite all their huffing and puffing, the Palestinian government on the West Bank and the Hamas government in Gaza are, in principle at least, willing to make peace. It is the Israelis who are not ready. After all, it will be seen by at least a quarter of the population–the ultra-religious, and their settlers on the Palestinian land–as a policy failure, and Israel's government would probably have to use extreme force to combat their ferocious resistance. And there’s the rub.

Walter Russell Mead, writing in Foreign Affairs a year ago, wrote that Obama’s policy “needs to accomplish a Copernican shift in perception: looking at the same sun, moon and planets, it must reconceptualise the relations between them.” He adds this key proviso: “US peacemakers have had an Israel-centric approach to the negotiating process. The Obama administration needs to put Palestinian politics and opinion at the centre of its efforts.” This is the opposite of the Clinton and George W Bush approach. What's in it for the Israelis? First, the kind of security that they gained from their deal with Egypt, where they now enjoy a largely unguarded border. Second, they avoid becoming an apartheid state as the Palestinian population with its high birth rate begins to outnumber Jews. Sophisticated Israelis know this will be as unstable as South Africa was and can only end in the Jews playing second fiddle. Already, many of the most educated and liberal young people are leaving for North America and Europe, even Germany and Russia.

Until now, negotiations have always been front-loaded in favour of Israel. The Palestinians made the mistake a decade ago of agreeing to recognise Israel’s right to exist in return for Israel agreeing to start talking. (This was despite Israel accounting for 78 per cent of the land of the old British mandate whereas the Palestinians account for only 22 per cent.) The Americans and the rest of the Quartet on the Middle East—the EU, the UN and Russia—will be tempted, if past negotiations are any guide, to ask the Palestinians to put their most valuable cards on the table whilst the Israelis keep the best for themselves. This will not work. It has to be made clear at the outset that the US and its Quartet partners will only accept negotiations if Israel comes to the table having agreed that if negotiations proceed well it is prepared to dismantle its settlements, military posts and withdraw from Palestinian territory.

At this stage, anything less will fail.