Obama's Mid-East Policy Boils Down To 3 Assumptions--All Of Them Wrong

Daled Amos
02 July '10

Tablet Magazine has a symposium of foreign policy experts on Obama’s Middle East policy. One of them, Elliott Abrams, writes in part:

The Obama Administration appears to have three basic premises about the Middle East. The first is that the key issue in the entire Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is that it is a territorial conflict that can be resolved in essence by Israeli concessions. The third is that the central function of the United States is to serve as the PLO’s lawyer to broker those concessions so that an agreement can be signed. I think these premises are all wrong.

I think we can agree that there is nothing in Obama's conduct of his Mideast policy that would contradict any of the 3 premises that Abrams ascribes to him.

Now of course, there is nothing novel in assuming that the conflict is at the center of everything that goes on in the Middle East. The problem is that considering the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular to be the key to peace in the Middle East means conveniently forgetting that the long history of Arabs killing Arabs predates the reestablishment of the State of Israel.

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