Another Ride On The Merry-Go-Round

Well, I guess someone had to come right out and say it, so why not President Obama?

In a major policy address on the Middle East yesterday, the President called for a viable Palestinian State to be created based on the 1967 borders Israel once had. The Israelis, predictably, were not at all pleased by this and will probably make great efforts to ignore this as much as they possibly can which to me, makes no sense at all- either from their point of view or the President's point of view.

First of all: demographics is destiny. There are just going to be more Palestinians than Israelis. Numbers don't lie- and those demographics threaten the essentially exclusionary nature of Israel. If you want to be the Jewish state, you can't have the West Bank and Gaza Strip- and if you're fine with not being a Jewish state, then you've got to be some other kind of state one that recognizes the basic rights of the Palestinian people.

Second of all: This, I think, was a fairly useless statement to make on the part of the President. Did he really think that Israel was going to say- 'OK then. Let's DO this.' and everything would go from there? Probably not- I seriously doubt he's that dumb, but more to the point, he doesn't have a lot of political capital to spend in the region right now and this statement pretty much ensures nothing will happen. The Israelis have spent three decades or more trying to create 'facts on the ground' in the West Bank so they can grab as much land as they can- the only politician over there who could have sold them on a land for peace deal that Obama is envisioning was Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu might agree in principle, but he doesn't have the chops to get it done.

But, give President Obama props. He put it right out there- there needs to be a contiguous, viable, Palestinian state in the Territories. There needs to be an end to the occupation- and even though Israel may cross its fingers and hope Obama gets ousted next year (Romney has already weighed in) the facts remain: any President who is serious about a last peace is going to have to be blunt and Israel nor the Palestinians are going to be able to hide from that.