Obama to Israel: Status quo carries a cost

Israelis who consider themselves centrists – “no fans of Netanyahu” according to the New York Times’ Jodi Rudoren — appear to be suddenly aware of the scale of international isolation facing their country as a result of its electorate’s choices. They’re not happy, and those cited in Rudoren’s story appear to be blaming President Barack Obama.

Rudoren quoted a number of Israeli establishment political figures warning that unless the Obama Administration backs off criticizing Netanyahu over his stance on Palestinian statehood, centrist Israelis will rally behind their Prime Minister. That threat is unlikely to change anyone’s calculations — the underlying principle of the international consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been that Palestinian rights can’t be restricted by the preferences of Israeli voters.

The confusion of Israeli centrists, however, may be grounded in the habit of U.S. administrations over the past two decades. Over that time, Washington has, as a matter of principle, avoided pressuring Israel into taking steps with which the Israeli electorate were uncomfortable. That de facto policy choice was based on the assumption that a peace process was underway that would end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories — an assumption difficult to sustain 22 years after the Oslo Peace Process began. 

Netanyahu simply made explicit the fact that there is no process currently underway to end the occupation, effectively negating the rationale for continued U.S. shielding of Israel from the consequences of its choices — a consequence the Obama Administration had long warned about. The Israeli electorate has opted to maintain an open-ended occupation, which puts it at odds even with most of Israel’s allies in the international community.

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough warned Monday that “an occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end,” and that  “the Palestinian people must have the right to live in and govern themselves in their own sovereign state.” More damning was the language he used to describe the status quo: “Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely.”

That was a reminder that, from the perspective of the international community, ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories was an obligation rather than an option.

Obama had first articulated these principles in his long-forgotten June 2009 speech at Cairo University, portraying Israel’s creation and protection as a cast-iron international obligation in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, but also noting that Israel had been created at the expense of another people. The process that established the State of Israel forced more than two thirds of the Palestinian Arab population into exile, and the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967 put many of them back under Israeli military control.

“For more than 60 years, [Palestinians] have endured the pain of dislocation,” Obama said. “Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations, large and small, that come with occupation.”

And then the president set out what he saw as U.S. obligations to the Palestinians: “Let there be no doubt, the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable,” he said. “And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

Obama’s Cairo logic recalled the international community’s original recognition of the State of Israel, which had been premised on the 1947 U.N. resolution proposing a partition of British-mandate Palestine into adjacent Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian statehood, then, had been the unfinished business of the process that established Israel’s international legitimacy.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 — which brought an end to the first Palestinian Intifada — were internationally recognized as an attempt to resolve the conflict by finally creating a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. The peace process effectively put the Israeli-Palestinian file in U.S. hands; Washington would oversee the resolution of the conflict through negotiating the creation of a Palestinian state. Washington’s stewardship served as a basis to deflect any other international involvement in the conflict, lest that “interfere with the peace process.”

But the Oslo process effectively collapsed in early 2001, as the Second Intifada raged in the aftermath of the failed Camp David talks. In the 14 years since, amid sporadic unsuccessful rounds of negotiation, Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank has steadily deepened. Meanwhile, successive U.S. administrations largely observed a policy of not making demands of Israel that its electorate was not willing to support. But Israel’s steady drift to the right over the past two decades has rendered increasingly remote any prospect of Israel voting in a government willing to end the occupation — the reelection of Netanyahu has simply confirmed the trend.

Removing the prospect of Palestinian statehood makes clear that the rituals of the peace process no longer alter the occupation status quo. That, in turn, has appeared to prompt Obama to step away from shielding Israel from the consequences of that status quo. Both the president and Secretary of State John Kerry have warned, on a number of occasions, that failure to end the occupation would see Israel increasingly isolated internationally.

Obama, for example, cautioned that if achieving a sovereign Palestinian state was no longer viable, “our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.” And Kerry warned that failure of a two-state solution would leave Israel facing the prospect of being viewed internationally as an “apartheid” state. European countries have already begun implementing sanctions against Israeli settlements – and a French company pulled out of a scheme to build a cable car in Jerusalem after being warned against the project by the French government.

What may now be taking shape is the “diplomatic tsunami” predicted by Israel’s then-defense minister Ehud Barak in 2011. For two decades after Oslo, expanding the occupation carried no specific consequences for Israel. The Obama administration may now be signaling that the status quo will carry a rising diplomatic cost — one that Israeli voters may have to factor in during future elections.