Mick Hartley

Martin Peretz, on Obama's legacy in the Middle East:

Obama seemed at the time, and turned out to be, a reasonable, well-intentioned man. But he was a catastrophe on international affairs. His one triumph was something he didn’t have anything to do with: He won the Nobel Peace Prize, and, actually, maybe this ended up mattering more than anything else. The Peace Prize came less than a year into his first term: In desperate explanation for the choice, the prize committee’s PR fingered Obama’s opening to the Muslim world for special recognition. And so Obama was operating with what he thought was a promise to live up to—a promise no one could live up to against the fractured history of the Middle East. This added to what he’d felt he’d promised before, during that campaign, that he would make amends to the Muslim world. Between the recent history and the Prize, he had to be peacemaker, and damn whatever realities came up in the meantime.

He’d told us this in his speech in Cairo in June 2009, before the Prize was announced. For this speech, his speechwriters scavenged for Islamic allusions in American history and found two or three. Morocco was the first country to recognize the independence of America during the Revolutionary War. And, of course, that Jefferson had a Quran in his library. It was nice rhetoric—we all want peace, we all want good will with our Muslim brothers and sisters—but what about the realities of the region: a place where vicious, cynical dictators encourage the worst anti-Western, anti-liberal sentiments and impose unequal social customs on their people to maintain their own power; a place where Sunni and Shia are bitterly opposed?…

Obama’s first outreach had been to the Sunnis. He had made tight pals with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a bad sign even then, before Erdogan completely abandoned the pretense of secular liberalism. Obama was close to the Saudis—to King Abdullah. He had also delivered his address at Cairo’s Al Azhar, both a Sunni university and a mosque. Over time, he turned away from the Sunnis and toward the Shia, to Iran—the counterweight to Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, to Turkey, in the region—a state most of its neighbors saw as an immediate threat. Then there was Syria, where, out of the same mind-changing dynamic, he countenanced a human disaster, grim beyond calculation.

And the victims of the president’s good intentions were not just these populations and the liberal secularists within them, which was bad enough. The victim was also the one state that the Great Powers created right, the fortunate state, but the state that’s lived up to its fortune by staying democratic, sometimes imperfectly democratic but democratic nonetheless, against constant external threat of annihilation: Israel….

To be sure, Obama knew about the Holocaust: In his Cairo address, the president mustered it as the essential—no, the only—rationale for a Jewish state. But the Jewish state is more than that! What about the nearly 1 million ardent and repatriating Jewish exiles who’d lived for two millennia—and some for almost three—in the lands of Islam? And what of the implications to his audience: the implications of assigning Israel’s rationale for existing solely to the Holocaust? Upon hearing this, that the Holocaust is the single reason for the Jewish state, is it any wonder Sunni and Shia say they are the other victims of Naziism?

It isn’t that the president hated Israel. It’s that, to those of us who feel for Israel in our bones and feel its closeness to America as a fellow beacon of liberalism, and who look for that feeling in our presidents, his words never said that he did, too. He had some nice words, sure, but he never gave evidence that he had a sense of the intense struggle it took Israel to become what it is and to maintain its ideals in face of immediate threat. By the end it seemed like Israel to him was Bibi Netanyahu, and it’s not fair to make Bibi or the right wing everything that Israel is, because it’s much, much more. Zionism includes and has always included people of every race, from every corner of the globe, with every belief about God.

The president never gave this its due. And in the pursuit of outreach, to Palestinians and to Iranians especially, he did worse: He created an impossible situation, a situation that would have been untenable on its face for anybody who truly understood Israel’s history and the dynamics of its neighbors….