Mideast Briefing: President Obama's Insight on Empathy

Ed Rettig, Director, AJC Jerusalem

September 27, 2011

Of the speeches at the UN General Assembly by the leaders of the U.S., the Palestinian Authority and Israel, President Obama’s was the least melodramatic but the most significant.

Some commentators allege that domestic American politics forced the president to change course. They point to the recent congressional election in New York as an event that “sent a message” to the Administration (to use Mayor Koch’s expression). They add the remarks of Texas Governor Perry, whose views are shared in Israel only by a minority on the far right, and suggest that the president had to “do something” to neutralize Israel policy as an American election issue.

Of course, no White House ignores an upset in a congressional election or the statement of a potential contender in the nest election. But in fact Obama’s UN speech shows that his policy on Israel and Palestine remains unchanged. He expressed longstanding American policies that have prevailed even in the face of tension between Washington and Jerusalem: the fundamental justice of Zionism, the need for direct negotiations, and the imperative of security for Israel.

True, he did not mention pillars of American policy that created that tension: settlements, Jerusalem and borders. But nothing in the speech suggests change in those policies.

If nothing has changed in U.S. policy why does the music sound so different? Because this time President Obama directed his considerable oratorical powers at the problematic leadership of the PA. He was responding to the defiant, even insulting, Palestinian insistence on turning their backs on American-led negotiations. Even some friends of the Palestinians pointed out that by going to the UN they were sacrificing real political assets in return for, at best, small changes in status. After all, measured by outcomes on the ground, the U.S. is the Palestinians’ most effective political supporter and a major financial backer.

Behind this refocus of his attention lay more than just presidential pique. When he decided to go ahead with a reckless exercise at the UN, PA president Mahmoud Abbas linked himself and his cause to a great regional challenge facing the U.S. based on the questionable and dangerous assumption of growing American powerlessness and withdrawal. The UN initiative was openly represented as an expression of frustration, if not contempt, for the leadership of the American president himself. With incredible fecklessness, Abbas insisted on putting the president in an impossible position. Barack Obama is probably at least as passionately committed to a Palestinian state as any other U.S. president in history. And there he was, forced to stand before the world and appear to put himself in the way of a UN resolution on behalf of Palestinian statehood. This was made necessary by a Palestinian attempt to ride roughshod over key components of any genuine peace – which Palestinians see as concessions but many of their interlocutors see as the basic foundations of negotiation.

Obama insisted on the painfully obvious. “Israel deserves recognition,” he said, “… the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other’s shoes; each side can see the world through the other’s eyes.” While this was largely a restatement of the obvious, President Obama, after twenty years of negotiations, speaking to that Abbas/Fatah leadership from the podium of the UN, reasserted the most basic truths about how to engage in peacemaking.

From this we see that President Obama accurately diagnoses the problem with the Palestinian strategic paradigm, confirmed later in Abbas’s disappointing General Assembly speech. Palestinian leaders appear not to grant any degree of justice to the Zionist side. The inability to recognize any measure of right in their enemy blinds them to their real options. They consistently fail to recognize the kind of conflict in which they engage. The Israel=apartheid slander, shamefully redeployed by Abbas, is a case in point. The Palestinians appear to truly believe that their enemy is as completely unjust as the apartheid regime in South Africa was. This delusion paralyzes them as negotiating partners – and evidently exasperates the United States.

When Abbas stated, “I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him),” he further confirmed the Obama diagnosis. In fact writing the Jewish People out of the history of the Land is not just an expression of lack of empathy. It is delusional.

Palestinian delusions about their enemy flow in no small part from broad ignorance of Jewish civilization. There are twenty-one Palestinian institutes of higher education and not a single Jewish studies department in any of them!

While some Palestinian leaders studied Zionism and Israeli history, they are shockingly ignorant of the fundamental ideas and events of Jewish civilization. This is true even among key members of the elite. Palestinian false hopes from negotiations and their ongoing disappointment when the Israelis do not respond according to an imagined post-colonial script to terror assaults and missiles flow inexorably from the lethal combination of that ignorance with the deficit in empathy that the president’s speech so effectively exposed.

President Obama has done them and the world an enormous service in showing the limits of their vision. Will the Palestinian leadership have the wisdom to rise to the occasion, to internalize the principles President Obama shared with them?

The Abbas regime will probably emerge from its UN adventure looking, as the Hebrew expression has it, “bald on both sides.” The best they can hope for is a change in status that will yield little if any real achievement in exchange for the political costs involved. And the costs go far beyond politics. The growth rate of the Palestinian economy is half what it was a year ago and dropping, in no small measure because of the instability introduced by the Abbas UN initiative.

Ismail Heniyeh, the Hamas dictator of Gaza, poised like a buzzard to pick at the carcass of the PA, noted with macabre delight that the Abbas/Fatah initiative only served to make them look craven. He proclaimed, in typical demagogic style: "Our Palestinian people do not beg for a state.... States are not built upon UN resolutions. States liberate their land and establish their entities."

Over the months of run-up to the Palestinian initiative at the UN, some of AJC’s interlocutors justified it as necessary to preserve the relatively moderate Palestinian government led by Mr. Abbas. However, rather than strengthening the hold of the Abbas regime, the miscalculation may hammer another nail in its coffin. What might replace it?

As a traditional Jewish New Year saying has it, “There ends a year and its maledictions, and a new one begins with its blessings.”

May we all be blessed with a year of peace, health and happiness.

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