|
The Commander-in-Chief who embraced Hugo Chavez and kowtowed to the Saudi royals treated the head of government of one of America’s oldest allies as a diplomatic tumor. Not since Monica Lewinsky has a president been more circumspect in acknowledging a visitor to the executive mansion.
|
|
| "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God."
That legendary line from scripture could just as easily be applied to the prospects for peace in the region where Jesus delivered it. Yet that fact hasn’t kept virtually every White House in recent history from thinking that it can defy the relevant physics and bring tranquility to the Middle East. Carrying the metaphor to its logical conclusion, we can expect the would-be peacemakers to kill the camel and ruin the needle.
It should come as no surprise that Barack Obama – a president for whom any sense of limitation is a hangnail – swallowed the White House soma and followed the tradition of coming to believe that his princely powers could at long last bring peace to the Middle East (perhaps he was unaware that a two-state solution can’t be passed through reconciliation).
Over a year into his efforts, however, the peace process is crumbling. Israelis and Palestinians are at loggerheads. And a region that largely perceives the Jewish homeland as a pariah state is taking succor from a U.S. government that flogs Israel on the notion that punishing allies while embracing enemies is the highest form of equality.
President Obama has insisted on the cessation of new Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem as a precondition of meaningful peace talks. This is equal parts eccentric and extraneous. Eccentric because no Prime Minister who has held office since Israel acquired the territory in 1967 – and especially not the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, who currently holds the job – would ever have seriously considered a settlement freeze in the area. Extraneous because the issue that East Jerusalem represents – how much of the holy city may eventually end up under Palestinian sovereignty – is both one of the most contentious in the peace process and one of the last that will need to be addressed. Obama's position is the equivalent of negotiating terms of divorce moments after proposing.
Yet it is on this ground the President Obama has chosen to plant his flag – and he’s called in the cavalry to take this molehill. When the Israeli government announced new settlement construction in East Jerusalem during a recent state visit from Vice President Joe Biden, the administration and its amen corner of Beltway pundits pronounced it an “insult” and an “affront.” The Vice President even went so far as to “condemn” the decision, a choice of diction that diplomats usually reserve for only the most heinous acts of violence.
During Netanyahu’s visit to Washington this week, the White House went to great lengths to further the message, branding the prime minister with a scarlet letter for all the world to see. Netanyahu was denied the routine niceties of Oval Office diplomacy, from a White House photo-op to a joint statement with the President. The Commander-in-Chief who embraced Hugo Chavez and kowtowed to the Saudi royals treated the head of government of one of America’s oldest allies as a diplomatic tumor. Not since Monica Lewinsky has a president been more circumspect in acknowledging a visitor to the executive mansion.
This is Netanyahu’s penalty for having exposed the fact that Obama’s weightlessness is a product of hot air. As Iran develops a nuclear capability and Palestinians name a town square after a terrorist who murdered 37 Israelis (including 13 children), the President of the United States publicly lashes a friendly government for building apartment complexes. Netanyahu, meanwhile, returns home to tend to the task of ensuring his nation’s survival. Nobel committees aside, which is the serious man? |
