Obama’s peace proposal: An affront to Israel?

In a bold attempt to jump-start the stalled Middle East peace process, President Obama displayed “uncommon grit” last week, said The Christian Science Monitor in an editorial. Obama made a major address on the Arab Spring, warning Israel that the growing hunger for freedom in the region makes the creation of a separate Palestinian state “more urgent than ever.” Negotiations, he said, must start with borders established before the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, but can allow for “swaps” of small parcels of land. In speeches and in an icy, face-to-face meeting at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted with fury, asserting that Israel would never retreat to “indefensible” 1967 borders and branding Obama’s plan a radical departure from past U.S. policy. As a supporter of Israel, I find Netanyahu’s disrespectful “hissy fit” puzzling—and alarming, said Jeffrey Goldberg in TheAtlantic.com. In citing the 1967 borders as a basis for negotiations, Obama was simply using the same framework that Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat talked about at Camp David 12 years ago. So why did Bibi “go out of his way to alienate the president”?

It’s Obama who picked this fight, said Bret Stephens in TheWallStreetJournal.com. Showing a mastery of the concept of “chutzpah,” he called for Israel to concede to the 1967 borders before the Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This “deeply troubling policy shift” comes at the worst possible time, said the New York Post. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas recently forged a unity agreement with the “blood-stained terrorists of Hamas, who are committed to Israel’s destruction.” And last week Abbas confirmed plans to seek U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state this September, a diplomatic nightmare for Israel. With his reckless talk of 1967 borders, Obama has supported Abbas’s argument to the U.N. that Israel is now engaged in an illegal occupation.

Obama understands something that Netanyahu does not, said Roger Cohen in The New York Times. The status quo no longer favors Israel’s long-term interests. As Obama noted in his speech, occupation is “humiliation,” and humiliation has given rise to the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. As the hunger for “dignity and self-governance” grows throughout the Arab world, Israel will not be able to keep the Palestinians safely walled up forever. I sympathize with Bibi’s fears of Israel’s enemies, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, but events have made his belligerent, black-and-white worldview dangerously obsolete. At current birthrates, Arabs will soon outnumber Jews inside Israel’s borders. Abbas is the most reasonable Palestinian leader Israel could ever face across the bargaining table. The world now sides with the Palestinians. It’s time to make a deal.

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For now, the stalemate will continue, said Jackson Diehl, also in the Post. Netanyahu followed up his hostile meeting with Obama by trying to go around the president, arguing for his hard-line position in a speech to Congress that drew repeated standing ovations. If this feud continues, the results could be catastrophic, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. Peaceful Palestinian demonstrations at Israel’s borders are bound to grow in size and number. A belligerent response by Netanyahu would end any chance for peace and leave Israel known throughout the world as “the Jewish apartheid state.” If that happens, the “tensions between the U.S. and Israel displayed in Washington last week will seem quaint by comparison.”