The blowup with Israel

Editorial

PRESIDENT OBAMA and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have a
powerful and urgent common interest. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
has turned his back on both Israel and the United States; he is seeking
accommodation with the extremist Hamas movement and has announced that
he will seek a declaration of Palestinian statehood from the U.N.
General Assembly in September. The result could be what Mr. Netanyahu’s
defense minister calls “a diplomatic tsunami” against Israel and
possibly the eruption of another Israeli-Palestinian war. As for the
United States, the U.N. vote could isolate it in support of Israel,
undermine the ambitious strategy that Mr. Obama has just announced to
promote democracy in the Arab world — and maybe derail the Arab Spring
itself. Now, of all times, the Israeli and U.S. governments ought to be working
closely together; they should be trying to defuse the U.N. threat,
induce Mr. Abbas to change course, and above all prevent a resumption of
violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead, Friday found Mr.
Obama and Mr. Netanyahu once again publicly and poisonously at odds with
each other, thanks to a handful of lines added by Mr. Obama to his
Middle East speech on Thursday. The president’s decision to publicly
endorse terms for a peace settlement seemingly calculated to appeal to
Mr. Abbas, over the strong objections of Mr. Netanyahu, has had the
effect of distracting attention from the new U.S. agenda for the region.

Mr. Obama’s intention is to persuade Mr. Abbas to give up his U.N. bid
and return to negotiations with Israel. To do so, he endorsed one of the
conditions Palestinians have tried to set for talks: that they be based
on Israel’s 1967 border lines, with swaps of land to accommodate large
Jewish settlements in the West Bank. This is not a big change in U.S.
policy. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, along with previous
Israeli governments, have supported the approach.

But Mr. Netanyahu has not yet signed on, and so Mr. Obama’s decision to
confront him with a formal U.S. embrace of the idea, with only a few
hours’ warning, ensured a blowup. Israeli bad feeling was exacerbated by
Mr. Obama’s failure to repeat past U.S. positions — in particular, an
explicit stance against the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.

Mr. Obama should have learned from his past diplomatic failures —
including his attempt to force a freeze on Jewish settlements in the
West Bank — that initiating a conflict with Israel will thwart rather
than advance peace negotiations. He may also be giving short shrift to
what Mr. Netanyahu called “some basic realities.” The president appears
to assume that Mr. Abbas is open to a peace deal despite growing
evidence to the contrary. And while he acknowledges that it is “very
difficult” to expect Israel “to negotiate in a serious way” with a party
— Hamas — that rejects its existence, Mr. Obama has been vague about
what the Palestinians must do to resolve this concern.

The renewed peace process that Mr. Obama seeks could, at best, have the
effect of curbing the Palestinian campaign against Israel or at least
depriving it of major European support. The idea that it could lead to a
peace settlement under the current Israeli and Palestinian leaders
strikes us as unrealistic. This president likes to portray himself as a
pragmatist in foreign policy. In this case, pragmatism would suggest
that restoring trust with Israel, rather than courting a feckless
Palestinian leader, would be the precondition to any diplomatic success.