Israel Matzav

'Obama is rip s**t with Israel'

Marty Peretz of the left-leaning New Republic had some blunt news for Israel on Friday. After reviewing the attacks on Israel by Vice President Biden, by Secretary of State Clinton and by David Axelrod, Peretz comes up with this:

Still, Axelrod, a strange guy to go out and comment on Obama’s foreign policy, was not just speaking for himself. Like Hillary Clinton, this kind of talk was a decision of the president himself. No one on the White House staff denies this. You don’t have to ask about it. Almost everyone who’s anyone at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or in Foggy Bottom will volunteer the news: Obama is “rip shit” with the Israelis. So how long has he been rip shit? I believe that he has been sitting in waiting for the opportunity to have others send the message: “The president has blown his top.” When talks fail, which they inevitably will, he will present his own plan. Beware.

Obama had gone out on a limb about Israel-Palestine. It was based on very faulty history or, rather, on a canny distortion of history. The fact is that neither George Mitchell nor Hillary Clinton nor the president himself has wrangled a single concession from the Palestinian Authority, not one. In fact, the whole structure of the talks is built on yet another concession from Israel. The press is so unknowing that it simply didn’t realize or didn’t care about the nature of the concession. But, to anyone who knows and cares about history, the arrangement is nothing less than spooky.

The idea of proximity talks goes back very deep into the past. It was actually transcended in the negotiations between Yasir Arafat and the strained Israeli duo of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Since then, in fact, face-to-face consultations had become more or less routine. Sometimes they were desultory; other times they were not. On occasion, they were very productive, as with the agreement to field a U.S. training mission for Palestinian police with deep cooperation from Israel.

So, proximity talks are a big retreat from reality--not a surprise, but a big retreat nonetheless--when the Palestinians want only to talk with the Americans. And then, the Americans will talk to the Israelis, and back and forth through the American mediator, presumably a tired Mitchell who hasn’t had a fresh idea in years. Now he has allowed the Palestinians to push him back to the idea of indirect negotiations, and, apparently, Obama also does not object--or maybe it was his own fix-it device. This is an old nightmare in the Jewish memory bank. Already, at Versailles, there was no contact between the Zionists and the Arabs and no contact at later conferences at which the question of Palestine was discussed.

Read the whole thing. You have to wonder why our historian/Ambassador to the United States wasn't able to talk Netanyahu out of these talks (I'm sure he tried).

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:13 PM