President Barack Obama’s “paternalistic” view towards Israel negatively impacted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Ben Cohen, Senior Editor of The Tower, wrote Thursday in a review of former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren’s new book Ally.
In his book, Oren wrote that “the Israel [Obama] cared about was also the Israel whose interests he believed he understood better than its own citizens.” This “paternalistic approach,” as Cohen described it, “has informed Obama’s stance on the entire region,” which has involved strengthening Iran’s power in the Middle East. The approach was also manifested in the president’s approach to the Middle East peace process. Oren quoted Obama’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly in 2009 saying “all of us must decide whether we are serious about peace or whether we will lend it lip service,” but observed that the president had a specific party in mind.
“All of us,” as Oren’s book makes clear, was really code for “Israel,” and, specifically, Netanyahu. The fork-tongued Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, never experienced the same degree of diplomatic pressure from the Americans, and nor was he subjected to the kind of ugly whispering campaigns that have targeted Netanyahu.
Ironically, though, Obama’s zeal to resolve the Palestinian question by insisting on the 1967 lines as the border between two sovereign states actually boxed in the Palestinian leader. Despite Abbas’s apparent willingness “to concede parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel,” Oren says, “the White House continued to condemn Israeli construction in some of the very areas that Abbas offered to forgo.” Obama’s visceral opposition to settlements also placed Abbas in an awkward position when it came to other potential concessions from the Palestinian side. “Mahmoud Abbas,” Oren memorably writes, “could not be less Palestinian than Obama.”
According to Oren’s account, Obama was also dismissive of previous efforts to keep Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, but eventually allowed Iran to keep the enrichment program that it developed illicitly.
On Iran—the source of a truly existential threat to Israel—Oren’s book offers little in the way of comfort. Oren recalls hearing Israel’s late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, warning in the early 1990s that Iran “was covertly working to produce nuclear bombs”—a deadly prospect that has been kept alive in the ongoing negotiations with Tehran. In Obama’s eyes, though, this reality has been inverted. “When I came into office, Iran was united and the world was divided,” Oren quotes the president asserting. “And now what we have is a united international community that is saying to Iran, you’ve got to change your ways.” Somehow, somewhere along the line, the successive U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding an end to Iran’s enrichment activities must have disappeared.
The effect of Obama’s approach to the Middle East, as recounted by Oren, led Cohen to observe that “the book can be regarded as an important reality check for those readers who still believe that the current administration has Israel’s back.”
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