By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
With the truce in the
week-long Gaza war, Barack Obama is being prompted by right and left to
re-engage and renew U.S. efforts to solve the core question of Middle East
peace.
Before he gets re-involved in
peacemaking, our once-burned president should ask himself some hard questions.
Is real peace between
Palestinians and Israelis even possible?
Is there any treaty that could
be agreed to, or imposed, that would be acceptable to Israel and the
Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, let alone to Hamas, which has emerged
from its defiance of one of the most intensive bombardments of modern time with
new prestige?
What are the obvious
impediments to such a treaty?
First, Bibi Netanyahu, who has
presided over the expansion of Israel settlements and joined Avigdor Lieberman,
a supporter of ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs, in a coalition of the Israeli
hard right.
Would Bibi agree to a treaty
that required removal of scores of thousands of Israeli settlers from Judea and
Samaria, when he opposed Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of a few thousand settlers
from Gaza?
Would Bibi agree to Jerusalem
becoming the capital of Palestine as well as Israel, a non-negotiable demand of
Arab nations?
Could a Palestinian Authority
that gives up all rights to Jerusalem survive?
A second roadblock is the
correlation of forces in Washington.
Should Obama begin to pressure Israel to remove settlers from the West Bank
and accept a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, he would ignite a firestorm
among evangelical Christians, the Israeli Lobby, the neocons, and a Congress
that, not long ago, gave Bibi 29 standing ovations after he dressed-down Barack
Obama right in the Oval Office.
Obama has acquired much
political capital with his election victory, but not that much.
In a Bibi-Barack face-off over
settlements and Jerusalem, with whom would ex-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and other Democrats looking to 2016 stand? As for the Republicans, we
already know. Their policy on Israel: “No daylight between us,” and, “We’ve got
your back.”
A third impediment is the
altered environment between Israel and a newly radicalized Middle East.
Israel now looks north to a
Lebanon where Hezbollah possesses more and better rockets than the metal-shop
jobs Hamas fired off. Beyond lies a powerful Turkey whose prime minister just
declared Israel a “terrorist” state.
To the northeast lies Syria,
where the 40-year truce on the Golan is unlikely to last after Bashar al-Assad
falls and is replaced by a Sunni regime rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, or
becomes a failed state saturated with jihadists and loose chemical weapons.
To the east lies Jordan,
wracked by riots, a monarchy that looks to be a candidate for an Arab Spring
uprising.
To the south and west are
Hamas, a Sinai that is a no man’s land, and an Egypt dominated by the
Brotherhood, millions of whose people would like to see the Israeli peace
treaty trashed.
Israel is as isolated as she
has been in a region that is more hostile to her presence than perhaps at any
time since the war of ’48.
The time of Yitzhak Rabin,
when Israel had treaties with Egypt and Jordan and had entered into the Oslo
Accords with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, seems ancient history. Looking back, with the
Rabin assassination and Netanyahu accession, the window that appeared to be
open may have closed for good.
Israelis appear now to have
entrusted their future to a U.S.-guaranteed military superiority — F-16s, smart
bombs and an Iron Dome missile defense — rather than peace talks and parchment.
Which is their call. But what
of us? What do we have to show for decades of involvement in the Middle East?
Despite our “liberation” of
Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya at a cost of thousands of lives and
trillions of dollars, despite plunging hundreds of billions into foreign aid,
America’s influence has never been lower.
Hillary Clinton, who cut off
her Asian tour to fly to Israel and Egypt, was a bystander in brokering the
truce. She is not even allowed to talk to Hamas. For we have designated Hamas a
terrorist organization.
Astonishing. What was Joe
Stalin when Harry Truman talked with him at Potsdam? What was Nikita Khrushchev
when Ike invited the “Butcher of Budapest” to Camp David? What was Chairman Mao
when Richard Nixon toasted him in Beijing in 1972?
We tie our own hands and
wonder why we cannot succeed.
Today, as Obama is being
pushed toward another futile round of peacemaking in the Mideast, prodded to
intervene in the ethnic-civil-sectarian war in Syria and goaded to draw a “red
line” for war on Iran, he should ask himself:
How would America’s vital
interests be imperiled by staying out of this particular quarrel, conflict or
war? Why are all of these crises somehow ours to resolve? What are the odds
that we can resolve them?
We are out of Iraq, and
leaving Afghanistan by 2014. Should we go back in, or as Obama pledged, do our
“nation-building” here at home?
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