President Obama’s speech to the UN General Assembly last week and his interview with Steve Kroft on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday were encouraging in the sense that the president seems to be backing away from the Pollyannaish neo-isolationist foreign policy that largely dominated his first term.
(Indeed, many of us remember cringing when he told the world at the onset of his presidency that he would withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan because the insurgencies there were not our fights. The clear signal he was sending was that the defining characteristic of the U.S. under his leadership would be that of a chastened bully that would no longer seek to throw its weight around the world but would lean over backward to respect the sensitivities and sensibilities of other nations.)
But even as we welcome the generally tougher posture the president has begun to assume – “America leads,” he told Steve Kroft, “we are the indispensable nation; we have the capacity no one else has” – we are disturbed by something he said in his UN speech about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
In the only reference to that issue in his remarks to the General Assembly, he said in pertinent part:
We recognize…that leadership will be necessary to address the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. As bleak as the landscape appears, America will not give up on the pursuit of peace. Understand, the situation in Iraq and Syria and Libya should cure anybody of the illusion that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the main source of problems in the region…. [But] let’s be clear. The status quo in the West Bank and Gaza is not sustainable. We cannot afford to turn away from [seeking peace] – not when rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza….
Yes, the president’s dismissal of the notion that if the Israel-Palestinian issue were settled peace would break out all over the Middle East is certainly encouraging. As we noted on this page two weeks ago,
it is this notion that has long motivated a series of American presidents to seek to pressure Israel into making enormously risky concessions to the Arab world and in particular the Palestinians in order to facilitate a peace agreement and thereby create a more orderly Middle East.
But what are we to make of the president’s depiction of a situation where “rockets are fired at innocent Israelis, or the lives of so many Palestinian children are taken from us in Gaza”?
A statement like that, with absolutely no context or nuance, comes uncomfortably close to granting moral equivalency to both sides in the conflict. There is not even a hint of recognition that Hamas deliberately fires rockets at civilian targets in Israel while storing arms and rocket launchers among its own civilians in Gaza. There would be far fewer Palestinian children “taken from us in Gaza” if Hamas didn’t use them as human shields or propaganda props to blacken Israel’s image.
Given the lies and calumnies heaped on the IDF despite its many efforts to limit civilian casualties in Operation Protective Edge, Mr. Obama’s blanket lament for Israeli and Palestinian casualties, however innocently intended, can only lend aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies.