This is Obama’s third gratuitous, unprovoked, and unilateral picking of a fight with Israel. The prior two took place in May 2009 and March 2010. In the one, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared an end to Israeli building, even in eastern Jerusalem; in the other, Vice President Joe Biden got (mock-?) outraged when such building did take place.
In all three cases, the fight dwelt on a secondary issue that few had been focused on — Israeli building in the first two cases and the June 4, 1967, ceasefire lines as the basis for a permanent border agreement — until Obama turned them into headlines.
Obama’s picking a fight led in all cases to an immediate hardening of positions by both Israelis and Palestinians. Israelis retreated, wounded, disinclined to make concessions, while Palestinians added Obama’s demands, Jerusalem and the 1967 lines, to their prior list of demands of Israel.
When Obama realized his mistake — that Israeli governments make concessions more readily when relations with Washington are strong, and that Palestinians need to be pressured, not coddled — he crawled back to the Israeli prime minister, making nice as though nothing had happened. This has occurred twice already, in September 2009 and July 2010. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank used choice language to describe the latter episode, describing a “routed and humiliated” Obama in a White House flying “the white flag of surrender.”
