Historians will dissect one day how President Obama tackled the complex and violent mess in the Middle East. For now, we have, as they say, a first draft of history, as in this cogent analysis from Steve Huntley of The Chicago Sun-Times.
Enter Obama. Rather than adopting a go-slow, build-on-the-past approach to a fragile situation, he did it his way -- with a speech. Inadvertently, he exploded two grenades amid the process.
First, he declared the "aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied" -- a reference to the Holocaust. By not combining that with an affirmation of the 3½ millennia of Jewish history in the Holy Land, he fed the Arab fantasy that a guilt-ridden West imposed Israel on the Middle East.
Second, he elevated Israeli settlements into a make-or-break issue for peace talks. "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," he said. Yes, past administrations opposed settlement expansion, but it wasn't a first-tier issue. And every realistic plan for a resolution to the conflict recognizes that Israeli communities comprising 80 percent of the settlers and located near the 1967 borders (actually cease-fire boundaries from the Arabs' 1948 war of extermination) would be included in Israel in a land swap.
Whereas the Palestinians once conducted talks while settlement construction continued, Obama gave them an excuse to just say no. Even after Netanyahu proposed what Hillary Clinton accurately called "unprecedented" limits on building, Abbas refused to return to the bargaining table. The Arab world, primed by Obama's speech, erupted in outrage at Clinton, and she had to backtrack.
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