Why Are Arabs Unhappy with Hillary? Blame Obama

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
02 November 09

If Hillary Clinton is unhappy about the abuse she is taking from the Arab world over her equivocal attitude toward Israel, then she should blame President Obama and those of his foreign-policy advisers who urged him to make picking a fight with the Jewish state over settlements one of their top priorities once they took office. Clinton is taking flack for her comment that Israel’s offer to “restrain” the building of housing in Jewish settlements in the West Bank was “unprecedented.”

She’s right, in that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone a long way toward trying to mollify the Obama administration on this issue. But having spent much of the past year hounding Netanyahu over settlements in a futile attempt to undermine the Israeli’s hold on power (in fact, Netanyahu’s popularity has grown as a result of his refusal to bow to Obama, while the Israeli public has lost all faith in the U.S. president’s goodwill), the Americans have raised Arab expectations to the point where any Israeli gesture on the issue is considered insignificant. Even more, when the United States reacts to such Israeli gestures with anything but complete contempt, it is interpreted by the Arabs as American acquiescence with the entire settlement enterprise. The Arab world was wrongly encouraged by months of Washington skirmishing with Jerusalem to think that the administration intended to completely ditch the U.S.-Israel alliance. Anything less than a break with Israel winds up being seen as a betrayal of those unrealistic hopes that were engendered by Obama’s ill-advised strategy.

So what does Clinton say in her defense in response to Arab criticisms? All she can do is repeat past rhetoric that attacks Israel on settlements, which does nothing to ameliorate Arab hard feelings. Allowing more “daylight” between Israel and the United States has turned out to be dead end from which the administration cannot extract itself.

But let’s go back to the basics about this whole dispute. The settlements argument was utterly pointless, because even if Israel continued to build everywhere at a breakneck pace, it wouldn’t mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t surrender territory if a real peace deal was in the offing. But it isn’t. In fact, the Palestinians still have no interest in negotiating with Israel for reasons that have everything to do with the toxic nature of Palestinian nationalism and their refusal to accept a Jewish state within any borders and nothing to do with any gestures the Israelis have or have not made. So the argument with Israel accomplished nothing to undermine America’s standing on both sides of the argument, which is, when you think about, quite a trick.

The bottom line of Obama’s and Clinton’s first 10 months in office is worsened relations with both Israel and the Arab world, with peace just as far off as it was under Bush. All of which should leave us wondering just how much worse off another year of Obama’s foreign-policy incompetence will leave the Middle East.

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