RICHARD BAEHR: OBAMA’S PARTING GIFT TO ISRAEL
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=17341An Obama parting gift to Israel?
U.S. President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry all flew off to Israel and attended the funeral of Shimon Peres, the last remaining political figure from modern Israel’s founding generation. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic Party nominee for president, had at one point been listed to attend, but did not make the trip.
The United States is fewer than six weeks away from the conclusion of what is now a tight presidential contest. The race conceivably could soon lean more toward Clinton after the widely watched first debate last Monday night (84 million viewers) between Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump, which most pundits suggested she won, a conclusion supported by results from the first polls released after the debate.
However, it has been an unusual and surprising election contest, and there are no guarantees that the broader voting public saw things the same way their media superiors expected it to see them.
The high-level attendance at the funeral by Obama and Bill Clinton will certainly be a plus for Hillary Clinton’s prospects to win a large share of the Jewish vote in closely contested states such as Florida and Pennsylvania. Obama won about seven of every 10 Jewish votes in 2012, down from about eight in 10 in 2008. Bill Clinton scored even higher than this in his two runs for the White House, in 1992 and 1996, so Hillary Clinton can only benefit from association with presidents with far more popular support than she has demonstrated so far. Both Obama and Bill Clinton issued statements full of praise for Peres’ long career and also his commitment both to keep Israel strong but also to seek peace.
Obama’s tribute may be a harbinger of something more to come, presumably in the nine weeks he has left in the White House after the Nov. 8 vote has been cast. The president has just concluded an agreement with Israel for a 10-year military aid bill. The most contentious part of that agreement was Israel’s acceptance that if Congress votes for more assistance in the first two years of the agreement than the agreed $3.8 billion annual amount, it would have to return the excess to the United States. There are constitutional separation-of-powers issues that arise from the agreement, and already Trump has said he does not consider himself bound by the limits, a view also taken by a large number of members in Congress.
In any case, with this settled, Obama may feel free to try his hand at some legacy-building on the Israeli-Palestinian track, an area in which his record of failure follows a long pattern of presidents who thought they had the magic elixir to achieve the two-state solution.
What has been rumored, with no denials offered by either the State Department or the White House, is that Obama may seek to obtain passage of a Security Council resolution in which the president offers his view on the parameters of the deal between the two parties who should end the conflict. As with all such two-state plans, Israeli settlement activity is viewed as the primary culprit in the conflict. Members of the Senate, anticipating some new initiative of this sort, have now sent a letter to the White House, signed by 88 members from both parties, requesting that the president, for the duration of his term, continue traditional American policy, which has been to block any one-sided U.N. resolutions targeting Israel.
”Even well-intentioned initiatives at the United Nations risk locking the parties into positions that will make it more difficult to return to the negotiating table and make the compromises necessary for peace,” the senators wrote, adding that the U.S. “must continue to insist that neither we nor any other outsider substitute for the parties to the conflict.”
Quoting from a 2011 address Obama gave to the U.N. General Assembly in which he said that ”peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations,” the senators reminded him that his ”administration has consistently upheld the long-standing U.S. policy of opposing — and if necessary vetoing — one-sided U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
Longtime peace processor Dennis Ross, a likely appointee to a Clinton administration if she wins in November, argued that the president’s willingness to try to obtain a resolution with a defined peace plan would be far higher if Trump wins the presidential contest. Then the initiative could be seen as a way to try to bind the incoming president to an Obama-preferred course of action. Further evidence that such a plan is in the works, conceivably regardless of who wins the White House, was a statement by an unusually angry Secretary of State John Kerry. Kerry, busy as always attending to his many other diplomatic failures — the never-ending Syrian carnage, the continued appeasement and excuse offering for the behavior of the U.S.’s new Iranian ”partners,” relations with Russia, seemed ready to pounce once more into the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic wasteland by condemning Israeli settlement activity, as well as offering a standard (for appearance of balance) criticism of Palestinian incitement.
It is hard not to see this as laying the groundwork for the president cynically offering the ”Obama peace plan” as his final tribute to the late Shimon Peres, who was always committed to the two-state solution and achieving peace. The United Nations is of course a vipers’ nest of Israel hatred with its obsessive and uniquely hostile treatment of the Jewish state on any number of issues.
Other than a Security Council resolution that President Jimmy Carter allowed to get through in 1980 by abstaining on a resolution calling Israel’s unification of Jerusalem illegal, America’s role in Security Council debates on Israel has generally been to try to water down condemnations of Israel. Failing that, the U.S. has vetoed one-sided resolutions aimed at Israel.
Carter’s acquiescence in the U.N. Security Council resolution cost him with Jewish voters. He won only 45% of the Jewish vote, to 39% for Ronald Reagan and 15% for third-party candidate John Anderson, on his way to losing 44 states, the worst defeat ever for an incumbent president. No Democrat since 1920 has performed worse among Jewish voters. This presumably is why Obama’s latest attempt to squeeze Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will come, if it does, after the presidential election, when it can do no immediate electoral damage to his party or preferred candidate.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Obama made clear that he plans to be an activist former president, pursuing the causes he cares about. Attacking police and the criminal justice system for their alleged racism is a near certainty. Climate change seems to be a big matter for Obama, as well.
But eight years of bad relations with Netanyahu did not come from nowhere. Obama is one of the more ideological presidents the U.S. has had (Reagan, Carter, and Franklin Roosevelt are others). His vision of Israeli-Palestinian relations comes out of his “Third World” view of colonialism, and the power of the strong versus the weak, their victims. If he can take one more shot at what he regards as balancing the scales and weighing in on the side of the Palestinians, he will. Those last nine weeks of the Obama presidency are a red-alert warning to Israel and many others.
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