Obama's Israel-Palestine Gamble

President Barack Obama boasts
that he's a good poker player. On Middle East policy, he seems to be
betting all his chips on a high-stakes gamble. It's not clear yet,
though, whether the gamble is working or what the ultimate outcome will
be.

Months ago, the
president and his advisors decided to stake the prospects for Middle
East peace - and the U.S. reputation - on a non-negotiable demand that
the Israelis halt all settlement expansion. There were to be no
exceptions, no loopholes. But now it seems the demand was really quite
negotiable - which seems to show that the world's only superpower was
only bluffing.

That could give
credence to the charges that Israel really pulls the strings in
Washington. The administration's vague, evasive explanations only add
to the perception of uncertainty and weakness.

But diplomacy is
all about the difference between perception and reality. Part of a
diplomat's job is to bluff, to create public images that mask what's
happening behind the scenes, where the real action is. Another part is
to create images that help the diplomat manipulate the secret
negotiations, while the real truth remains hidden until it's time to announce that the deal has been cut.

That's what the
Israelis and Palestinians did back in 1993. While the Palestinian
Liberation Organization publicly declared ongoing enmity with Israel
and Israel still had a law forbidding its citizens from talking to the
PLO, the two sides were holding secret talks in Oslo. When they stunned
the world with a public agreement, no one complained about the
deception. In diplomacy, it's the end result that counts, not the
illusions along the way.

Then there's
another cardinal rule of diplomacy: Always start by demanding what you
really want, but then expect to make compromises. So, despite the
administration's insistence on a total building freeze, the State
Department has officials saying to
reporters: "The settlements aren't the be-all, end-all" of American
policy efforts. Israeli announcement of new West Bank construction
"doesn't mean we're going to stop working toward setting the conditions
for negotiations."

Indeed, The Los Angeles Times reports,
"U.S. officials said privately that they never had expected to win a
total settlement freeze and noted that Mitchell had avoided stating
this as an objective" - though that may be an after-the-fact excuse for
an administration that seriously expected to win a total freeze but
couldn't get it and decided to back down.

Eventually a
tough negotiator may issue a take-it-or-leave-it deal. But that comes
only at the end of the process. Along the way, everyone at the table
knows that the other parties are asking for more than they can
reasonably hope to achieve. If the diplomacy is skillful, everyone will
be able to claim some kind of victory, and the compromises will soon be
forgotten. Judging the administration's Middle East strategy by these
traditional rules of diplomacy, the charges that the president is
caving in to Israel are premature. It's far too soon to say who is
really stronger than whom.

Jewish Peace Groups Optimistic

The largest
Jewish peace groups are giving the administration high marks so far.
Their Washington staffers won't predict exactly what Obama might
propose, or when. But Lara Friedman, Director of Policy and Government Relations at Americans for Peace Now (APN), sees political wisdom in the unpredictability:"Obama
is smart to not lay out specific parameters, since any 'Obama
parameters' would then just become the focus of the debate." She said
she hopes that whatever strategy he puts forth will be "well
choreographed," with Israeli and Palestinian buy-in secured in advance
for a negotiating process in which the United States will be active.

Daniel Levy,
a senior fellow directing Middle East peace initiatives at the Century
Foundation and the New America Foundation, agrees that the United
States "will shepherd the talks," though he hopes that the shepherding
will be aggressive enough to bring success. A strong hand is needed,
some say, because the Israelis and Palestinians have shown that they
are incapable of forging a peace on their own.

Can the
administration provide that strong hand if it is already backing down
on its no-settlement-expansion demand? Deepa Domansky is Washington
Liaison for Brit Tzedek v'Shalom,
a group that has launched a "We've got your back, Mr. President"
campaign to build Jewish support for Obama's Middle East policy. She
says: "While a complete settlement freeze would be optimal in laying
groundwork for renewed negotiations, practically speaking though, the
United States does not have to have perfect decisions about settlements
before negotiations." In fact Obama might be leaving the issue
unresolved to give the United States some "political capital" that it
can use in negotiations down the road.

For APN's
Friedman, the administration's insistent focus on settlements has the
potential to be a "game-changer," giving new life to the prospects for
final status negotiations. "We'd prefer to see Israel stop all
settlement activity, permanently, but we can't let getting a 'perfect'
settlement freeze be the central issue," she says, if that might block
overall progress toward an agreement that could end the conflict and
definitively resolve the settlement issue.

The test of success, she says, is not whether there is a 100% stop in activity, but"whether
the freeze that Israel agrees to undertake is serious enough to
catalyze the kind of political process and negotiations that can once
and for all resolve all the final status issues - including
settlements, at which point the whole issue of a freeze is no longer
relevant." Levy agrees that once the border issue is resolved, the
settlement problem will be laid to rest too.

Keeping the Voters Happy

To reach that
point, U.S. policymakers can't ask either Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu or Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen)
to commit political suicide. They have to offer both leaders some way
to please their voters, because both face the same political problems.

As recent research
shows, most Israeli and Palestinian voters want to inflict symbolic
defeats on the other side. What Israel wants to win above all,
according to its leaders, is recognition of its right to exist (as a
Jewish state, they sometimes
add). What Palestinians want to win, beyond the end of occupation, is
Israeli admission of the wrongs done since 1948. But those concessions
will be hard for Netanyahu and Abu Mazen to make. Both have to deal
with hardline voters who refuse to accept any symbolic defeats. Those
hardliners are a minority of the electorate on both sides, but they
carry enough weight to bring down the government if they get really
angry.

And if it looks
like the other side is winning too many symbolic victories, centrist
voters will turn against their government too, insuring political
disaster for the leaders. So the Obama administration has to find ways
to let both sides inflict some symbolic defeats on the other, helping
both leaders make credible claims of strength.

The Palestinians
can never claim to be tougher than the Americans. They've got to win
their victories against Israel. Netanyahu's public embrace of a
two-state solution, and his private decisions to approve no new settlements for five months and to cut back
Israeli arrests of West Bank Palestinians, are a good start for Abu
Mazen. Now he can tell his voters, "If the United States has forced
Netanyahu to make such compromises already, we can expect that they'll
force him to make more compromises as negotiations proceed." And when
settlement expansions are announced, Abu Mazen can publicly proclaim
his strong opposition. The strategy may already be working; some polls show support for Fatah growing while pro-Hamas sentiment weakens.

The Israelis, on
the other hand, can create the impression of being tougher than the
Americans by refusing to accept a total settlement freeze. Like so much
else in diplomacy, this may be a matter of image obscuring reality. In
what The New York Times' Isabel Kirshner calls "the
strange and arduous choreography of Middle East peacemaking," the
recent announcement of new construction permits "was not seen as likely
to derail movements toward renewing stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks."

Israel will apparently agree, for the first time, to a temporary freeze. And, as Ha'aretz headlined,
the ballyhooed "'New' settlement projects aren't really new." Most were
re-approvals of projects already initiated. The Israelis may well
intend to use these projects as bargaining chips in future talks;
construction can be cancelled at any moment. For now, though, seeing
the United States back off from its demand for a total settlement
freeze has made plenty of Israeli Jewish voters happy, especially the
right-wingers.

And that has
made Bibi Netanyahu happy. Had he accepted Obama's dictate, right-wing
wrath would likely have brought down his government. And (as an Israeli
analyst noted)
if there were "no Israeli government, the peace process [would] be set
back even further." Now, Bibi can say that "if the United States has
made such compromises already, we can expect that they'll make more
compromises as negotiations proceed." He's already won broad (if
grudging) right-wing acceptance of his strategy.

In effect, U.S.
compromises substitute for Palestinian compromises. Many Israeli
voters, especially on the right, may not care much who they inflict
their symbolic defeats on - the Palestinians or the Americans - as long
as they've got some tough opponent they can beat.

The trick here
is to find the right balance: to limit Israel's public victories so
that the Palestinians don't feel like losers, and vice versa. But there
are many ways to fall off this high-wire. And that's the greatest risk
for Obama and his administration. They could make an all-out push for
Middle East peace, put their prestige on the line, and end up with
nothing to show for it but an image of embarrassed impotence.

Battle on the Home Front

That isn't
likely to happen if the administration is free to put all the pressure
it wants on both sides. When Bosnian leaders were caught in a seemingly
intractable conflict, the United States brought them to Dayton and
forced them to keep talking until they reached an agreement. Nothing is
likely to stop Washington from putting similar pressure on the
Palestinians, who have no supporters in the United States strong enough
to restrain the administration.

The Israelis are
a different story. Not only do they have well-entrenched allies in
Washington, they now offer a rich opportunity to the
conservative-dominated Republican party, which wants to inflict
symbolic defeats on the president every chance it can get.

The right is accustomed to controlling the issue effortlessly, with the help of the once-powerful
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Though U.S.
presidents have always been able to impose their will on a recalcitrant
Israel, they've rarely done so, because the political price at home has
been too high.

But now we are in a new political world. Obama signaled the change when he invited J Street and APN to his White House meeting
with leaders of major Jewish organizations. Obama owes groups like
these a political debt, because the pro-Israel, pro-peace community is
now beginning to provide a counter-balance to AIPAC and other
right-wing groups, who have traditionally defined what it means to be
"pro-Israel." That gives Obama more room to make whatever policy choice
he wants - a luxury previous presidents have not enjoyed.

What's more,
it's not a strictly partisan issue. Though most candidates favored by J
Street are Democrats, the lobby has also endorsed Republican House
members like Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Geoff Davis (R-KY).

Some of the
old-line Jewish organizations are "nervously looking about," Domansky
says, trying to grasp this new situation of a U.S. president making
serious demands on Israel as well as its neighbors. And they still have
a loud media megaphone. But she is confident that Obama has more Jewish
backing than "some of these louder voices would suggest," pointing to polls showing
that the 78% of Jews who voted for Obama still give him strong support.
And as Friedman notes, it will be hard for the right-wingers to
disagree with Obama "if Netanyahu is already agreeing with him" on the
need for peace talks.

Still, getting
the talks going is just the beginning. They are likely to drag on at
least into 2011. According to Israeli pundit Aluf Benn, Netanyahu has agreed to
bend to Obama's wishes (despite all the public kicking and screaming)
in return for Obama's promise to do "Iran first...The Palestinians will
have to wait their turn and pass the time in empty talks until Iran is
restrained."

Then there is
Hamas, the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Levy and
Friedman agree that there is no way to secure a lasting peace "without
at least serious participation of Hamas" (as Levy puts it), though the
form of Hamas participation is negotiable. If no Fatah-Hamas unity
agreement is forged, Hamas might be seated at the table as a separate
party or as part of some Arab delegation. Although "Israel's right to
exist is not subject to negotiation," Friedman adds, "recognition of
this right ought not be a precondition for talks" - yet another
diplomatic knot that will have to be disentangled.

Toward 2011

We can expect
more compromises on all sides, including from the United States, before
the process is done. With so little domestic political clout supporting
the Palestinian side, Obama will feel most pressure to let the Israelis
have their way and win more symbolic victories.

But Israel and
Palestine will not achieve a lasting peace unless the United States
forces them to keep their sights set on the goal of peace, not just
scoring symbolic points. Will the administration have enough political
freedom at home to exert that force over the many months, probably
years, of negotiation? That's the great unknown.

It will not be
decided in Jerusalem or Ramallah but in Washington, where
decision-makers always have their fingers up, checking the political
winds blowing from all 50 states. If the breeze from the peace movement
- especially the Jewish peace movement - keeps on growing as it has in the past year or two, Obama will have the freedom he needs to keep the pressure on both parties at the table.

That's ultimately
the gamble the president is taking. The outcome is not up to him. It's
up to the peace movement - all of us who recognize that peace and a
truly independent Palestinian state are just as important for Israel
and the United States as for Palestine - to turn the breeze we've
already created into a gale strong enough to be felt constantly in the
Oval Office and in the Middle East.