President Barack Obama’s speech on the Arab Spring yesterday embraced some of the themes of regional freedom and democracy that George W. Bush was sounding as far back as November 2003 in his address to the National Endowment for Democracy.
Yet Bush’s message of freedom was bolder and more self-confident–even targeting Saudi Arabia, which Obama neglected. And unlike Bush, Obama has placed the burden of regional progress on Israel.
That is unfortunate, given Obama’s welcome observation in his speech today that Arab regimes had long used Israel as a scapegoat to distract from their own repression and failure. Obama also incorrectly cited Israeli settlement construction as the primary reason for the failure of progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, despite Israel’s voluntary settlement freeze in 2009-2010.
Indeed, President Obama has set up a potential confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after calling for a Palestinian state to be established “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” Netanyahu responded immediately, reminding Obama that the 1967 lines–really, the armistice lines at the end of Israel’s war of independence in 1949–are “indefensible.”
The 1949 armistice lines (Source: Republican Jewish Coalition)
That has been the position of every Israeli government for the past 40 years, left and right. The dovish Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once referred to Obama’s new proposed border as the “Auschwitz” lines, meaning that they placed Israel in such a vulnerable position–making the country just a few miles wide at one point–that they were a constant temptation to Israel’s enemies.
Yet was Obama’s proposal really a departure from past U.S. policy? The AP thinks so, as does NPR and the BBC. But Noah Pollak (no relation) notes that President Bush called for a Palestinian state in 2005 based on the 1949 armistice lines, stating that “changes to the 1949 Armistice lines must be mutually agreed to.” And though Obama referenced 1967 rather than 1949, he used the term “lines,” not “borders.”
It’s likely that Obama is trying to have it both ways, continuing to use the ambiguous rhetoric about the West Bank that he has used since the beginning of his presidency. In his Cairo speech, for example, Obama declared: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.” He did not specify whether he meant new settlements, or existing ones.
If Obama’s “strategic ambiguity” is indeed deliberate, it does represent a subtle but significant break with past U.S. policy of leaving borders open to future negotiation between the parties. It signals to the Palestinians that Obama empathizes with their demand for total Israeli withdrawal, while at the same time assuring Israel that he does not intend to break with past US policy.
That, in turn, would quietly shift negotiations away from the question of what guarantees Israel must receive from Palestinians in order to withdraw further, and toward a new question of how much more Israel must concede in order to legitimize its existing settlement blocs. That is probably an unacceptable basis for talks for any Israeli government, which has no margin for error on security.
It is also a violation of specific understandings reached between the Bush administration and the government of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (and even the Clinton administration before that). As former Bush adviser Elliott Abrams has noted, Bush accepted that some settlement blocs in the West Bank would remain part of Israel, and that there would be some growth within existing settlements.
The Obama administration has tried to pretend these understandings did not exist, but they do, and Israel paid a price to achieve them. They provided Sharon with the political cover he needed to carry out his “disengagement” in 2005–a painful withdrawal from all of Gaza and several settlements in the West Bank that Palestinians quickly exploited not as an opportunity for negotiation, but for further terrorism.
Ironically, Obama’s rhetorical ambiguity on borders won’t appease Palestinian demands. For instance, after Obama tried to separate the issue of boundaries from the question of Jerusalem’s status, Matthew Yglesias of the left-wing Center for American Progress lamented: “How does Obama think ‘borders’ can be separated from ‘Jerusalem’? [1967] Border runs through Jerusalem and environs.”
So while Obama’s rhetorical move to replace Bush’s “1949 Armistice lines” with “1967 lines” may have been intended to push negotiations forward, his speech has probably done the opposite, and created new friction with the Israeli government. It is, of course, possible that Obama’s “strategic ambiguity” on borders is not deliberate, but the result of sheer clumsiness. If so, it could be a dangerous mistake.
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