Daily Sun
March 31st., 2013
M.
Serajul Islam
President
Obama’s just completed a three day visit to Israel that was a standout for two
reasons. First, it was his first overseas trip after his re-election. Second,
it was his first to Israel as President. That a US President would spend a
whole first term and not visit its closest ally in the Middle East once (this
apart, Israel’s importance to USA both in domestic and foreign affairs contexts
is unquestioned) was unbelievable but true. Nevertheless, it was also
surprising that he chose this ally for his first overseas visit on his second
term because of the poor personal relationship that the two demonstrated in the
last four years each has been in charge of his respective country.
In
fact, so poor was the relationship that Prime Minister Netanyahu openly
supported Governor Mitt Romney when he contested in the last presidential
election against President Obama. President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s publicly demonstrated dislike for each other was a main focus of
the international media in the context of USA-Israel relations and news from
the region. In his first term, President Obama did something that the Israelis
thought was even worse.
When
he went to Egypt in 2009 and made what he expected to be a landmark visit to
heal the wounds on the Muslim world that President Bush’s war on terror had
inflicted, he ignored the Israelis. The fact that he travelled from Cairo to
Germany after the speech to underscore the holocaust was more objectionable as
it undermined Israel’s biblical and historical claim to statehood. This time,
the President did a reverse of the Cairo trip of his first term. He ignored the
Palestinians almost totally except for a
meeting with the Palestinian President and the Prime Minister and that
too, to remind them to do things the Israelis would want.
In
retrospect, the visit did not achieve much on substance. It however achieved a
lot to make the Israelis and Prime Minister Netanyahu happy. President Obama
corrected what the Israelis were upset about in his first term, his failure to
stress Israeli’s biblical and historical claims on its present territory. Thus
immediately upon alighting from Air Force One, he said at the airport ceremony:
“More than 3,000 years ago, the
Jewish people prayed here, tended the land here, prayed to God here. And after
centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the
founding of the Jewish state of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any
in history.” He also visited the grave Theodor Hertezl the 19th
century Hungarian Jew who envisioned building Israel on Palestinian land (but
avoided visiting the grave of Yassir Arafat) and viewed an exhibition of Dead
Sea Scrolls to please Israel at the expense of the Palestinians.
The
President’s irport speech set the theme
of his visit which was to correct the mistakes of his first term and to get on
the right side of the Israelis and also of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Every
program of the visit was carefully designed to achieve this objective. In fact,
so unabashedly and overtly did Present Obama try to please the Israeli Prime
Minister that Washington Post commented that “the unusual degree of solidarity”
between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu was “either a turn in
their vital if volatile relationship or a cool tactical display of diplomatic theater.”
Whatever
be the real reasons behind the President’s move towards Israel and Prime
Minister Netanyahu, he was able to make his case of appeasement to both a
strong one. This was evidently visible from the public display of warmth
between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Apart from their broad
smiles, the two went to make personal references to each other’s family that
also did not fail to catch the eye of everyone. When President Obama made
references to the sons of Benjamin Netanyahu as having taken their handsome
looks from their mother, the Israeli Prime Minister quickly responded, “I could
say the same of your daughters! These very personal exchanges took place while
the President visited the residence of the Israeli Prime Minister that in
itself was crafted into the schedule as a “tactical display of diplomatic
theatre.”
Nevertheless,
the two sides also did not waste the opportunity of discussing the main issues
of concern between the two countries. The most important of these was their past
differences on Iran. President Obama was able to convince his host to relent on
his country’s intention to attack Iran to take out its nuclear capabilities on
the assumption that it had crossed the “red line” to give diplomacy a chance. The
Israeli Prime Minister said that he thought “there’s a misunderstanding about time.
If Iran decides to go for a nuclear weapon — that is, to actually manufacture
the weapon — then it will take them about a year.”
In return, the President committed his administration to provide
US$ 200 million for the Iron Dome system that proved very successful in dealing
with the missiles and rockets from Hammas recently. The President said that “Israel’s
security needs are truly unique” and in that context stressed that he and the
Israeli prime Minister would start talks to extend USA’s military aid
commitment to Israel after it expired in 2017.
Analysts
are still unsure whether the public display of warmth of the two leaders was
genuine. Nevertheless, they felt that the change of stand of Israel on “the red
line” would create pressure upon Iran to convince its leaders that it is, as
President Obama has suggested on this visit to Israel, not in their interest to
pursue the option to build the nuclear bomb. This was the major concession that
President Obama was able to get from the Israelis. The President was also able
to get a commitment from the Israeli Prime Minister for the “two state”
solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict but for a heavy price in the asking.
These apart, it was President Obama that made the concessions and commitments
and public displays of the importance of Israel to the United States to please
Israel a lot of it at the expense of the Palestinians.
He
called upon the Palestinians to go for the peace talks that was held only
briefly during the entire first term of President Obama by withdrawing their
demand on stopping the illegal settlements. In this call, the US President’s
commitment in his first term to the Palestinians to back their legitimate claim
for return of Palestine land to pre-1967 borders with also a claim on a part of
Jerusalem was forgotten. Although the new
US Secretary of State John Kerry was on the visit and the President said that
he would guide the peace talks between the two sides, he did not suggest any
plan to start the peace talks. He did of course make some references to issues
in the talks that have all been favourable to the Israelis and none to the
Palestinians.
Thus
the US President’s visit to Israel was little more than a public relations
exercise to please the Israelis and his domestic constituents. It will do very
little to encourage the Palestinian to hope for a resolution to their sad and
unfortunate predicament. President Obama has given Israel the historical and
biblical stamp of legitimacy that Israel wanted, mostly at the expense of the
Palestinians who have been left at the mercy of the Israelis. To the Muslim
world that was encouraged by President Obama’s Cairo speech of 2009, this visit
was a perfect U-turn, an “insult” as a prominent Arab scholar Dr. Ghada Karimi
stated. Perhaps this was a pay back to the Palestinians for displeasing the
United States with their UN initiative last year towards statehood.
The writer is a
former Ambassador to Egypt and the Chairman, CFAS
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