Hope and change on Middle East policy?

March 9, 2009 by Elan Journo

The other day I gave a talk at U.C. Berkeley on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the major episodes I discussed is the so called Peace Process of the 1990s, a widely supported but ruinous scheme predicated on the idea of Israel surrendering land in exchange for peace with the Arabs. During the Q&A, someone asked what I thought about the Obama administration’s seemingly new approach. 

A genuinely new approach would incorporate lessons learned from the disasters of the past. Obama’s team appears intent on reenacting those disasters.

The White House’s goal of restarting negotiations with the Palestinians–and now Syria, too–is a re-run, with some minor differences, of the Peace Process (which also featured a sideshow involving Syria). And that policy of appeasement had the effect of rewarding Palestinian aggression. Add to this the fact that the U.S. has pledged several hundred million dollars in aid to Palestinians. We’ve been doling out aid to them for years. That has always been immoral, in my view, but it is all the more egregious today. The latest round is meant to help them rebuild after the Gaza war. Many Palestinians in Gaza are pro-Hamas and support its ongoing war on Israel. We’ve been promised that none of the aid will go to Hamas. Right. Even if there were a way to prevent that from happening (and there isn’t), much if not all of it will go to sympathizers and active supporters of Hamas. That cannot fail to teach them that their aggression will be rewarded.

There are also signs–which got too little attention in the media–that the Obama administration is willing to formally recognize Hamas. Caroline Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, recently noted how the administration’s “surrogate, Senator John Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, visited Hamas-controlled Gaza and so effectively accepted Hamas protection. While there, he accepted a letter from Hamas to President Barack Obama and duly delivered it to the US consulate in Jerusalem.” 

The administration’s policy promises to make matters even worse by encouraging and strengthening Palestinian aggression. George W. Bush helped put Hamas in power; now Obama policy’s is taking further steps to legitimize that Islamist group and its jihad.