Nessie and why Obama can’t

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
05 February '10

Two extraordinary recent events seem entirely unrelated, but they are in actual fact no less than peas in the same proverbial pod. US President Barack Obama of “yes we can” fame confessed that he can’t (impose instant peace on us). A concurrent shock was delivered by reports of the possible (premature?) demise of lovable Nessie – the maybe monster that has made Loch Ness one of the UK’s top tourist attractions. Though ostensibly far-fetched, the connection between the two news bombshells is inexorable.

Obama owned up that his diktat (which he calls “peace” and which he superciliously supposed he could inflict upon us overnight) has so far failed to reinvent the Mideast. Obama, of course, blames Israelis and Arabs equally (for the sake of hallowed postmodernist evenhandedness).

It matters diddly that the most unlikely government in Israel offered concessions that likelier governments had earlier refused to contemplate. It equally matters diddly that the Palestinians under Mahmoud Abbas’s fictional leadership regressed to more intractable positions than they had ever held in all previous negotiation rounds with previous Israeli governments.

Staggeringly, the White House resident has handed out identical demerits regardless of Israel’s compromise of vital interests and Palestinian intransigence on what was beforehand never insisted upon. No differentiation between compliance and obstructionism.

But while Obama spent the past year discovering that “this is just really hard” (we told him so), he evinces remarkable never-say-die spirit. Ever-valiant Obama vows to press ahead with the apparently ever-viable (contrary to all empirical evidence) two-state solution. Despite all clinical indications, Obama maintains that his phantom peace yet lives.

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