A Little Benign Neglect, Please,Editorial Board

Many of us were jolted last week by reports that Robert Malley, the foreign-policy adviser very publicly banished from the Obama campaign amid concerns about his perceived anti-Israel perspective, was conducting secret missions to the Middle East and establishing a back channel to Hamas, presumably at the behest of president-elect Obama.

Also jarring was a report by a London Times reporter that the president-elect planned to pressure Israel into accept the Saudi peace plan that essentially would require a return to the 1967 lines in exchange for recognition from the Arab world. The report was supposedly based on a comment Mr. Obama made at a July meeting to the effect that Israel "would be crazy not to accept" such a deal.

The Obama transition team quickly responded that Mr. Malley, whatever he may have been doing, has nothing to do with President-elect Obama. He had only informally offered unsolicited advice to the campaign, they said, and has had nothing to do with the transition team now in place.

Dennis Ross, President Clinton's representative at Camp David and a senior foreign policy adviser to President-elect Obama, said he was at the meeting described in the London Times and that Obama never uttered the comment in question.

The conventional wisdom is that the president-elect, preoccupied with the economic crisis, Iran, and the growing Russian threat, has, at least for now, put the Israel-Arab conflict on the back burner. If true, we think that is just fine in terms of long-range prospects for peace in the Middle East.

The last thing we need now is for a new and inexperienced president to come into office looking to establish his peacemaking bona fides by imposing his solution to a conflict that has proved so vexing to a long line of predecessors.

Although we've had differences with President Bush over his championing the establishment of a Palestinian state, we liked his overall approach of not pushing himself into negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. We actually believe that a continuation of that policy eventually will cause the Palestinians to realize they will have to make their deals directly with Israel - and without anyone running interference for them.

To our mind, Hamas has chosen to resume its rocket firings, in violation of the cease-fire, precisely to remind Mr. Obama that there is a problem in the Middle East that is about to explode and that he'd better focus on it at the very outset of his administration. On the other hand, we also think Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's recent comments - that no new ideas are needed from the U.S. at this time and that the negotiating process is working quite well - were designed to suggest to the president-elect that a period of benign neglect was in order.

In the same vein there was the release last week of an assessment by Israeli military intelligence chief Maj.Gen. Amos Yadlin that the probability of war between Israel and its neighbors over the next year is "low."

In the final analysis, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Israel may have more to fear from the likes of Ehud Olmert than it does from Barack Obama. It was Mr. Olmert who two weeks ago told Israelis that they will have to give up the West Bank and much of Jerusalem - the subject of the current negotiations - in order to achieve peace. As an article in Haaretz put it, "No Israeli leader before him has called explicitly for withdrawing from the territories and 'returning to the area that was Israel until 1967.' "

While one may take issue with an American president who pushes his own agenda against the wishes of an Israeli government, one can hardly fault him if he merely facilitates what an Israeli government advocates.

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A Little Benign Neglect, Please , Editorial Board

I am also hopeful
Date 09:11, 11-19, 08

One of the reasons I voted for Barack Obama was that he seemed to favor a less hubristic foreign policy for the United States. While the term "benign neglect" might be a bit charged, the idea that the US should not force solutions on unwilling parties is a very good one in general, and the conflict between Israel and its Arab enemies is no exception.

I wrote a brief diary on dailykos that referred to this article. It will be interesting to see how the largely left-wing readers of dailykos respond. (My dailykos name is charliehall.)

Charlie Hall