How to please the Arab League

http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/warpedmirror/entry/how_to_please_the_arab

Sunday Mar 14, 2010
Petra Marquardt-Migman, JPost.com

Right from the beginning of his administration, President Obama made it a priority to win over the Arab and Muslim world. So here's a thought: while you struggle to keep up with the flood of commentary about the "new low" in US-Israeli relations, it's perhaps worthwhile to keep in mind that the next Arab League summit is scheduled for the end of March.

The summit will be held in Tripoli, Libya's capital, where the Arab League representatives will be hosted by Muammar Gaddafi, who just last month called for a "jihad" against Switzerland - well, actually, not just Switzerland, because he reportedly added: "Let us fight against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression." A quip about this call for "jihad" from a State Department spokesman required an official apology that apparently seemed warranted after the head of Libya's state oil company summoned executives from US energy companies Exxon Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, Occidental, Hess and Marathon and warned them that "the dispute could hurt US businesses in Libya."

Arab commentators don't seem to expect much from the meeting in Tripoli: "Another lame summit" was the dismissive headline in a recent issue of Al-Ahram. Nevertheless, the related article offered a lot of advice on how to overcome the "lameness", and unsurprisingly, Israel was an important issue in this context. One piece of advice was that the Arab League should consider revoking any support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; instead, the Arab League was urged to endorse the so-called "one-state solution" resulting in "a single state covering the whole of historic Palestine in which all inhabitants would be guaranteed full and equal rights as citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation." Another piece of advice was that the Arabs should realize that with regard to the tensions with Iran, "Israel is the chief instigator."

It's against this background that Israel's undeniable diplomatic faux pas of announcing plans for 1600 housing units in Jerusalem - which was never included in Netanyahu's pledge for a construction freeze - may have triggered frantic efforts to soothe any displeasure that Israel's Arab neighbors might have felt with US Vice President Biden's visit in Israel and his speech at Tel Aviv University. But it is far from clear that American efforts to appear "even-handed" can ever go far enough to really please the Arab and Muslim world. A Pew opinion survey published last summer was optimistically entitled "Confidence in Obama Lifts US Image Around the World" - but the subtitle read: "Most Muslim Publics Not So Easily Moved".

Some of the most revealing results were summarized under the headline "Obama vs. bin Laden":

There is little evidence that a more positively regarded US president has spurred further declines in support for terrorism in Muslim countries. Pew Global Attitudes surveys over the last few years have found many fewer Muslims than earlier in the decade saying that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilians are justified to defend Islam from its enemies. However, support for suicide bombing has not fallen further over the past year.

Opinions about Osama bin Laden have followed a similar trend line among the Muslim publics surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project. Views of him have been far more negative in recent years than they were mid-decade, but overall they have not declined further over the past year. However, for the first time over the course of Pew's surveys, there is more confidence in the American president than in bin Laden in a number of countries with predominantly Muslim publics; including: Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria and Indonesia."

This reading was arguably a bit too positive, because Obama's ratings in Indonesia clearly benefited from the fact that he had spent a few years of his childhood there; and his ratings in Jordan were only marginally better than Osama bin Laden's. Moreover, the results also showed that "in the Palestinian territories and Pakistan, bin Laden's ratings still top Obama's by sizable margins."

Conservative critics of the Obama administration have argued for quite some time that it is hard to see how America benefits from a foreign policy that eagerly courts hostile countries and entities while alienating long-time allies. Towards the end of Obama's first year in office, it wasn't hard to find similar concerns expressed by a broad spectrum of voices, and particularly the administration's Mideast policy was widely criticized as misguided.

Yet, in this context it is important to acknowledge the fact that Israel's settlement policies have been regarded as problematic for US (and Israeli) interests by all American administrations. The Obama administration chose for a variety of reasons to make sure that their disapproval would be headline news, but it has been forgotten all too quickly that initially, Washington seemed to expect that any Israeli concessions would be mirrored by some goodwill gestures from Arab governments.

This didn't work out, and the news last summer was that "the meeting in May in Riyadh between President Barack Obama and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia did not go as expected. 'President Obama went to Saudi Arabia and got nothing.'" Indeed, the lack of a positive Arab response to US efforts was even described as "one of the administration's biggest disappointments."

It may be hard to please the Arab League, but delivering Israel on a silver platter should do the trick - though the result wouldn't be a peaceful two-state solution. As President Obama himself acknowledged earlier this year in an interview, this outcome would be "really hard" to achieve. The main reason why this would be so hard to achieve isn't often mentioned in the media, but another recently published Pew survey provided all the necessary clues by documenting once again the deep and abiding hatred of Jews throughout the Arab and Muslim world.