Will Obama Go for the Game Changer–the Arab-Israeli Peace Plan?

F. Gerges: Will Obama Bring Mideast Peace?

Although now we know the leading players of Barack Obama’s national security team, we still do not know his foreign policy priorities. By opting for a team whose character is, for the most part, right of center, the president-elect sends multiple messages at home and abroad. With establishment figures in charge of national security–Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, James Jones–there will likely be no radical experimentation or paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy.

America will reclaim the realist compass that guided its international relations from the end of Second World War to September 11, 2001. Back to national interests and power politics, with symbolic emphasis on human rights and the rule of law. Obama’s foreign policy will be an extension of the Clinton administration policy.

The irony is that the presidential candidate whose rallying cry was “fundamental change” has surrounded himself with advisors whose motto is continuity.

Obama is too intelligent and politically shrewd to overlook the tensions between the pledges he made during the presidential election and the conservative character of his economic and national security cabinet. At a news conference last week, Obama defended his choices, saying that he will raise the banner of change in the White House and be its guiding force.

“Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost,” he told reporters. “It comes from me. That is my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing it.”

II
The danger is that Obama’s vision will be lost amid the competing interests of his team of rivals. The Middle East crisis is where Obama’s vision could make a pivotal difference in restoring America’s power and prestige. But will Obama go for the game changer—that is, help to broker a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement and break the psychological barriers between Muslims and Jews and Muslims and Americans? Or will he, instead, focus on the current pressing challenges facing the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran?

For the president-elect, Iraq is important for symbolic and personal reasons (he opposed going to war and during the presidential campaign he often pledged to withdraw most U.S. troops within sixteen months) and economic necessities. America spends around $148 billion annually in Iraq, a staggering sum in an economy weighed down by recession. Obama is desperate to find savings to finance his big economic recovery projects and pay for increased spending on the Afghan-Pakistan conflict.

But ending the American military mission in Iraq will neither dramatically alter the regional landscape nor resolve America’s security predicament in the Islamic world.
Similarly, political returns from a more active engagement in Afghanistan will be limited and fraught with risks. As past great powers belatedly discovered, Afghanistan is a death trap that wrecked their imperial designs and bled them to decline. America must ultimately reduce its military involvement and rely on a region-wide formula to stabilize the war-torn country. Recent pronouncements by the Obama national security team show a recognition that there is no military solution in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, as Pentagon chiefs now publicly acknowledge.

The game changer is for Obama to invest his considerable political capital in engineering an Arab-Israeli peace deal. This is not wishful thinking or an academic exercise. Obama’s senior advisers—including Dennis Ross, former Middle East envoy during the Clinton and Bush administrations; Daniel Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel and Egypt; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser—have reportedly told him that the time is ripe to broker an ambitious peace settlement between Arabs and Israelis in the first six to twelve months in office when he will enjoy a maximum amount of goodwill.

Contrary to the doomsayers and naysayers, there now exists a real potential for a breakthrough in the one-hundred-year-old Middle East crisis. A relative consensus appears to have emerged in the Arab world and Israel alike that a comprehensive peace settlement, as opposed to bilateral agreements, will be most viable and durable. Top leaders in both camps reference the Arab peace plan advanced by Saudi Arabia in 2002 and endorsed by the Arab League which involves recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders.

Opinion polls in Israel and Palestine show a majority of Israelis and Palestinians favor a settlement based on a two-state solution.

Supported by all Arab governments, including the so-called rejectionist states of Syria, Libya and Sudan, the land-for-peace formula has recently been endorsed by Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima party, as well as departing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. At a Saudi-sponsored United Nations conference on religious reconciliation in New York in early November, President Shimon Peres publicly praised King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was behind the Arab peace initiative and who lobbied hard to get it officially endorsed at the 2000 Arab Summit in Beirut.

“I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region, of all people,” Peres told King Abdullah before almost 50 heads of states and other world leaders. Widely reported by Arab/Muslim and Israeli media, Peres’ comments engendered a big debate about prerequisites for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace deal.

III
In its first seven years, the Bush administration neglected the peace process and spent its precious political capital on the so-called global War on Terror and democracy promotion in Islamic lands. Obama has vowed to change all that. On the morning after he clinched the Democratic nomination, the president-elect appeared before a gathering in Washington for the pro-Israel, Likud-leaning American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and told a somewhat skeptical crowd: “As president, I will work to help Israel achieve the goal of two states, a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security. And I won’t wait until the waning days of my presidency.”

Hillary Clinton followed the man who had defeated her to the podium, and echoed his themes. Although Obama’s selection of Clinton as top diplomat dampened optimism in the Arab world about the peace prospects, Clinton’s views are almost identical to the president-elect’s. She will be an effective and respected mediator abroad and sell the president’s foreign policy agenda at home.

On his visit to Israel and Palestine, Obama reportedly questioned President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli leaders about the prospects for the Arab peace initiative. “The Israelis would be crazy not to accept this initiative,” Obama told Abbas according to the Sunday Times of London. “It would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.”

Ross and Kurtzer, Obama’s senior advisers who accompanied him on his visit to the Middle East, have written policy papers to the president-elect on the urgency of making an immediate move to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All that remains now is for Obama to act on their advice.

The risks he would take in doing so are worth the possible rewards. A U.S.-brokered Arab-Israeli solution would help to hammer a final nail in the coffin of Al Qaeda and militancy in general. It would facilitate America’s political engagement with Iran and its decision to find a region-wide formula to stabilize Afghanistan and deal with the rising political extremism in Pakistan.

Fawaz A. Gerges is Christian A. Johnson Chair in Middle Eastern Studies and International Affairs at Sarah Lawrence. His most recent books are The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global and Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy. Photo: Obama and Tzipi Livni during Obama’s presidential campaign. (David Katz / Obama for America / Creative Commons).