Middle East Report has published an excellent analysis by Chris Toensing and Mouin Rabbani on Obama's approach to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict at their website. The article shows how change in American foreign policy is never decided by the presidency. Rather change requires consensus from competing interests in Washington and that the president merely formalizes the new direction, rather than initiates it.
I find it interesting that many people I speak to in Beirut have no hope for Obama to make a difference on Palestine. They may not articulate the reasoning as well as Toensing and Rabbani do in this essay, but they have experienced many decades of U.S. support for Israel at the cost of everyone else in the region and they are not easily duped by the appointment of an envoy, kind words about respect, and more talks that lead nowhere.
I encourage you to read the piece. I'll excerpt and summarize the essay below the fold.
US media outlets were quick to pronounce Obama’s "big phone calls to the Middle East" "another marker of change" that the new president is, rather unfairly, expected to bring to every domain of American life. Yet the American political system is not one given to sudden and significant shifts in foreign policy, least of all on account of directives emanating from the Oval Office. Rather, foreign policy, and perhaps nowhere more so than toward the Middle East, is characterized by evolution, typically at a slow pace. Produced by a variety of competing interests encompassing the bureaucracy, business elites, the military, Congress and various lobbies, policy tends to change only when consensus is achieved on a new direction, with the role of the president generally limited to formalizing rather than catalyzing the process. Bush’s notorious aphorism, "I’m the decider," represented ambition, not reality.
The authors go on to show that the idea of regime change in Iraq was a brainchild of the elder Bush and it became U.S. policy under Clinton. Shrub was the one who pursued the policy. The continuity of policy toward Israel and Palestine is the same from Bush to Obama, they argue.
Even at the rhetorical level, a bromide like, "we are confronted by extraordinary, complex and interconnected global challenges: the war on terror, sectarian division and the spread of deadly technology. We did not ask for the burden that history has asked us to bear, but Americans will bear it," could just as easily have emanated from Obama’s predecessor. The same is true of the president’s statement: "Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians." The source of Israeli fears is named, but the perpetuator of Palestinian despair is not. In fact, though Obama went on to call for opening the Gazan border crossings, he first hinted, as the Bush team had done, that the Palestinians are partly to blame for their closure. Israelis cannot abide the rocket fire, he said, and "neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror."
The negotitations pursued by Clinton and Bush always required Arab action before placing a burden on Israel to end the occupation.
The Mitchell report shared the structural flaw of all US interventions on the Israeli-Palestinian front subsequent to the collapse of talks at Camp David in July 2000. Whether through a stoppage of Palestinian resistance, constitutional and security reform, or institution building, it placed the onus for progress toward peace and Palestinian statehood upon the occupied people, and deferred the duties of the occupying power until later. And it spoke not at all of the foremost of those obligations, the duty to end the occupation.
Two factors offer hope that Obama may push hard for a break from Bush on this issue, the essay continues. Obama has stated that he hopes to improve relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world, and this cannot be accomplished without a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. The second factor is that the impact of the war on Gaza makes it difficult for Obama to put this conflict on the backburner, as many predicted he would.
Mitchell, they agrue, has been given a limited toolbox. Will he talk to Hamas? Is there going to be space provided for a Palestinian reconciliation? Will the ceasfire hold if Israel continues to hold humanitarian aid hostage?
The real test, the essay concludes:
will therefore be not how often Mitchell shuttles to and around the region, but how rapidly it acts to freeze Israeli settlement expansion in all its forms and reverse Israeli impunity in the Occupied Territories. If the issue of settlements, the elephant in the room left unmentioned ...has still not been seriously addressed by the time Mitchell returns from his first trip (and in 2001, recall, he only said Israel should "consider" a freeze if the Palestinians effectively disarm), it will be time to write the two-state paradigm’s definitive obituary.
Many here in Beirut have given up hope that diplomacy will work. This puts the region in a more vulnerable position for radical elements. A lot is riding on how this conflict is handled in the next few months. Will Obama be able to strongarm a Washington consensus for some new thinking on how to achieve Middle East peace? The answer from the region is idealistic hope tinged with realistic despair.