What Should—and Shouldn’t—Be Obama’s Focus on the Middle East Peace Process
President-elect Obama would squander his assets and resources if he merely invested in another sisyphean effort to roll the peace process boulder up the hill again. With numerous competing demands on American leadership, energy and dynamism, the key for the new Administration is to separate those issues where American initiative is the key missing ingredient to success from those which will merely consume American effort. In this regard, it is difficult to argue that Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is ripe for a considerable investment of the finite resources of a new President.
There is, of course, much the United States needs to do on that front—prevent the collapse of the PA, work more expeditiously and soberly for Palestinian security reform, prevent Euro-slackening on the isolation of Hamas, cajole Arab states to put meat on the bones of the Arab League summit initiative, address the recrudescence of anti-Jewish incitement, invest seriously in the Blair mission on economic development and institutional reform—all of which can be advanced, at levels below the presidential, even while Israel sorts out its political mess.
Indeed, there is one arena in which Obama may be uniquely placed to make a personal contribution—I believe he has the great opportunity to be a change agent on the normative aspect of peacemaking—i.e., not the important and essential haggling over security and territory but the psychological, emotional, intellectual and ideological contest over legitimacy. I would be delighted to see his unique contribution to peacemaking be to bring about historic Arab acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. If he invests in that effort early and hard, and if that effort bears results, then no Israeli government—Likud, Kadima or Labor—will be able to withhold compromise on the issues most dear to their Arab side.
