A week ago Monday, Barack Obama hied himself to the land—well, a land—of his forefathers. Like Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton before him, President Obama deemed it politic to drop in on his ancestral village on the auld sod of Ireland. In tiny Moneygall, surrounded by beaming regulars in a pub that had been renamed O’Bama’s for the occasion, the President lifted his glass and drained a pint of Guinness. He was enjoying himself. Perhaps it was the pub, perhaps the pint, perhaps the people. Or perhaps he was just glad to be on foreign soil that, with a bit of American prodding, has managed to overcome a history of religious hatreds, ethnic division, imperial meddling, war, and terrorism. Later that day, in Dublin, he lauded the Northern Ireland peace agreement, saying, “It sends what Bobby Kennedy once called ‘a ripple of hope’ that may manifest itself in a whole range of ways.”
There had been talk of peace back in Washington, too, but not much agreement. The Thursday before, anticipating the imminent arrival of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama had said that the borders of Israel and a future Palestinian state “should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”—a fundamental tenet of American policy for decades, a goal of Israeli and Palestinian representatives in every serious negotiation, and an obvious feature of any conceivable settlement. On Friday, as the two men sat for the cameras before the Oval Office fireplace, Netanyahu delivered a lecture about the unacceptability of those 1967 borders, exactly as if his host had said nothing about land swaps. The Prime Minister sounded more like a Fox News “contributor” than like the leader of an ally dependent on the United States for its survival. On Sunday, the President, addressing the convention of AIPAC—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobby as feared as the National Rifle Association—corrected him. “Since my position has been misrepresented,” Obama said, “let me reaffirm what ‘1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means: by definition, it means that the parties themselves—Israelis and Palestinians—will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” A few hours later, he was airborne.
With the cool cat away, the mendacious mouse would play. And roar. Netanyahu had engineered a Republican invitation to address a joint meeting of Congress; he is only the fourth foreign leader to do so more than once. (The three others were Churchill, Mandela, and Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination, in 1995, by a right-wing fanatic, opened the way for Netanyahu’s first premiership and, in 1996, his Capitol Hill début.) As the moment approached, someone tweeted from the floor: “@ChuckGrassley: I’m in House Chamber waiting for Netanyahoo to address Congress. Watch CSPan.”
What followed was a speech that amply justified Senator Grassley’s little jeu d’esprit. The Prime Minister ladled on the bonhomie. “Mr. Vice-President,” he said, turning to Joe Biden, “do you remember the time that we were the new kids in town?” (Biden was more likely to be remembering another town and another time: last year in Jerusalem, when his arrival to promote peace talks was greeted with the announcement of a vast new housing project for ultra-Orthodox Jews in the occupied eastern part of the city.) Bibi took it upon himself to spike the football that Barack had carried into the end zone: “Congratulations, America. Congratulations, Mr. President. You got bin Laden. Good riddance!” He served up chestnuts—about Israeli democracy, Israeli stability, Israeli pro-Americanness—that have been roasted for many an Israel Bonds dinner. He had kind, if slightly patronizing, words of praise for the Arab Spring. He reiterated his verbal acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state. He glided away from his Oval Office misrepresentations. (“As President Obama said, the border will be different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.”) He praised Salam Fayyad, the technocratic modernizer who serves as the Palestinian Authority’s chief administrator.
But he also cast the dispute in the Biblical-tribal terms favored by the religious right, Israeli and American. In a settlement, Israel will be “required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.” (Yes, but the Palestinians have already been required to give up parts of an ancestral Arab homeland.) “In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.” (Perhaps, but in the West Bank the Israel Defense Forces are indeed foreign occupiers.) “This is the land of our forefathers, the land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God.” (Fair enough, but Israel itself is a land of other people’s forefathers, too, and they are children of Abraham as well.) More important, Netanyahu, in some cases retreating from positions his predecessors had tentatively accepted, laid down maximal demands: recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition; no negotiations with a Palestinian political entity in which Hamas is represented; no Palestinian refugees, no matter how few or how symbolic, to be admitted to Israel; indefinite Israeli military control of the Jordan River; an undivided Jerusalem as “the united capital of Israel,” no part of which, presumably, would be available to be the capital of Palestine. (“I know this is a difficult issue for Palestinians,” Netanyahu said of this last point—his idea of a concession, perhaps.) For those who had hoped for some new thinking, some bold initiative, some something, some anything—there was nothing.
Nearly as appalling as Netanyahu’s intransigence was the mindlessness of the senators and representatives, Republican and Democratic, who rewarded him with ovation after standing ovation. This had less to do with studied convictions about the issues than with the political salience, actual and perceived, of certain Jewish and evangelical constituencies. (For many in the House chamber, the two-state solution is their own plus Florida.) But Middle East diplomacy is always distorted by short-term domestic politics. At the moment, Israel-accepting Fatah has its untested détente with Israel-denying Hamas; Netanyahu has a cabinet stocked with ministers openly determined to keep every inch of the West Bank; Obama has 2012. The President has put down some markers but has no discernible plan to make them stick. Time is short. In much of the Arab world, public opinion is supplanting the whims of malleable tyrants. Palestinians are beginning to discover the possibilities of nonviolence, which Israel, with its ethical and political traditions, would find far harder to resist than rocks and rockets. The longer the occupation lasts, and the larger the Arab and Palestinian populations grow in territory under Israeli control, the more untenable Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic becomes. And a tsunami approaches. “There is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab world—in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe,” Obama told the AIPAC delegates. In September, the United Nations may consider a Palestinian request for admission as a sovereign state. Such a resolution would not make Palestine sovereign, of course. But it would damage Israel’s legitimacy in unprecedented ways, and probably threaten its economy. In Europe last week, Obama sought support to head off such a U.N. resolution, or, at least, to avoid having to veto it in isolation. If he is to succeed in even that limited task, he’ll need a lot more than the luck of the Irish. ♦