Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Ass-Backwards in the Middle East

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It’s been like dueling banjos in Washington this week. President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu each got to say the same thing at length and at least twice. Last Thursday, the president gave his “Arab Spring” speech in which -- after a reportedly “furious phone call” between Netanyahu and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- he included the following line: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

And a storm of commentary burst forth. Though this, it was said, had long been a privately agreed upon American presidential position, it had never before been stated publicly by a president (or perhaps any other top U.S. official). Netanyahu was reportedly incensed and on Friday could be found “hectoring” a polite but uncomfortable-looking Obama before the cameras in the Oval Office on the “indefensibility” of those 1967 borders. On Sunday, Obama nonetheless went before the wildly pro-Israeli lobbying group AIPAC and gave a speech restating his position on the 1967 borders, but qualifying it as well.

On Monday, to rapturous ovations, Netanyahu appeared before the same crew to restate his position on the indefensibility of those borders and on Tuesday before Congress -- in an invitation initiated by the House Republican leadership and clearly meant to embarrass the president -- he did it again to more standing ovations (29 of them).

It was a clash of titans over a difference so basic that... in November, the two governments were theoretically in accord on the very same point. Chris Nelson of the insider Washington newsletter The Nelson Report has just uncovered a “joint statement” agreed to and issued after a Netanyahu meeting with Secretary of State Clinton last November which said in part: “The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that ‘the United States believes that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.’"

No screaming. No complaints. No hectoring. Nothing. An old Miller Lite ad comes to mind: “Tastes Great. Less Filling.” Or perhaps the immortal lyrics given to Eliza Doolittle in the musical My Fair Lady: “Words, words, words! I’m so sick of words!... Is that all you blighters can do?”

All that sound and fury signifying, well, maybe nothing at all. As TomDispatch regular Ira Chernus points out, it’s not just what the president says, but what he does that counts. And when it comes to doing, with George Mitchell, Obama’s special Middle Eastern envoy (appointed on his second day in office) abruptly quitting -- whether in frustration, despair, or disgust we don’t know -- there’s no evidence that the president will do anything at all when it comes to those 1967 borders, not before the 2012 election anyway.

Let’s give David Bromwich, writing on the President’s Thursday speech for the New York Review of Books, the last word for now: “Obama has always preferred the symbolic authority of the grand utterance to the actual authority of a directed policy -- a policy fought for in particulars, carefully sustained, and traceable to his own intentions.” (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Chernus discusses the strange, looking-glass world of Israeli-Palestinian nonnegotiations, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

Israel and the Palestinians Through the Looking Glass

The Myths That Underpin the Failure of American Policy in the Middle East

By Ira Chernus Tuches aufn tish: Buttocks on the table. That’s the colorful way my Yiddish-speaking ancestors said, “Let’s cut the BS and talk about honest truth.” It seems like a particularly apt expression after a week watching the shadow-boxing between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that brought no tangible progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace. The truth, like the table, is usually hard and uncomfortable. President Obama’s carefully hedged public call for a two-state solution along Israel’s 1967 borders may indeed represent a new step. Maybe it will even prove part of some long-range game plan that will eventually pay off. But here’s the problem: as of now, Obama shows no inclination to back his words with the power the U.S. government could wield. Until he does, those words won’t provoke any change in Israel’s domination of the Palestinians. And there’s a deeper issue. The influential Israeli columnist Sever Plocker pointed to the heart of the matter: the American president has “unequivocally adopted the essence of the Israeli-Zionist narrative.” Plocker might have said the same about all top American political leaders and the U.S. media as well. The American conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dominated by the story that most Israelis tell.