Revelations and events of recent weeks have done much to buttress Israel's narrative of the Middle East. First came the Wikileaks revelations that laid bare the emptiness of the American claim that resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict is the key to preventing Iran from going nuclear. The revelations showed one Middle East potentate after another conveying the explicit message to American diplomats to forget about peacemaking and concentrate all American efforts on denying the Iranians an offensive nuclear capacity. "Cut off the head of the snake," was the pithy advice of the Saudi ambassador to the United States to General David Petraeus.

Cables from American ambassadors to Washington all carried the same message. Wikileaks thus confirmed what Israel had been saying along: Arab governments are far more leery of Iran than of Israel. Inasmuch as the released documents were all internal U.S. diplomatic messages, they also revealed that the Obama administration knew that the argument it had been pressing since day one in order to pressure Israel was bogus.
 

SECRETARY OF STATE HILARY CLINTON'S unusually frank speech in Qatar in mid-January also constituted a sotto voce retreat from one of the pillars of the Obama administration's foreign policy. In words that would prove prophetic, Clinton warned that without respect for human rights, improved business climates, and an end to pervasive corruption, the Middle East's Arab regimes will "increasingly turn towards radicalism and violence that will bleed outside of the region [and threaten] the rest of the world."

Those words constituted an implicit repudiation of the linkage doctrine that has been repeatedly articulated by every top Obama administration official, from the president down, according to which resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict holds the key to solving all the region's pathologies. At most, Israel is a means by which Arab rulers distract their peoples from their own failures, not the source of those failures and the attendant instability.

Not once during her speech did Clinton veer from her focus on the internal failures of Arab regimes and the connection between those failures and the attraction of radical Islam. She did not throw out any bromides to her largely Arab audience about the necessity of creating a Palestinian state before Arab states could possibly be expected to undertake internal reform.

Fouad Ajami noted in the Wall Street Journal that the speech represented a second sharp policy reversal. Everywhere that she visited in the Gulf States, Clinton met with representatives of civil society groups, in order to drive home her message that the creation of a democratic, civil society is the precondition for the emergence of Arab states from their current backwardness.

In doing so, she effectively adopted President George W. Bush's vision of a "new Middle East," which had been so ridiculed by the Obama foreign policy team and blamed for much of the animosity towards the United States in the Muslim world. Until recently, according to Ajami, the Obama administration had effectively accepted a doctrine of Arab exceptionalism, which posited the inevitability of tyranny in Islamic countries. That approach was reflected most notably in the "moral and strategic failure" of refusing to strongly condemn the Ahmadinejad regime's brutal suppression of popular protests over its election chicanery, and in the Obama administration's passivity in the face of the Syrian regime's systematic reversal of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. Rather than confront the Syrians over their reentry into Lebanon via Hizbullah, the United States has returned its ambassador and been engaged in constant efforts to repair ties with Syria.

In this context, Clinton's Qatar Speech suggests a retreat from two failed aspects of the Obama administration's Middle East diplomacy, as welcome as it is surprising.
 

LAST WEEK'S RELEASE of alleged Palestinian Authority internal documents by Al Jazeera and the Guardian provided another teachable moment. The accuracy of the documents, which purport to show that Palestinian negotiators were prepared to cede Jewish neighborhoods built since 1967 to Israel, is questioned. Some on the Left argued that the documents demonstrated that there is a Palestinian peace partner, though the Guardian was a bit schizoid on this point, as it simultaneously denounced the Palestinian negotiators for signing away their patrimony.

The supposed Palestinian concessions are highly questionable. Yasir Arafat refused to even acknowledge any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount at Camp David in 2000. Doing so, he told President Clinton, would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. And PA Chairman Abbas has publicly acknowledged that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians virtually the entire West Bank, recklessly agreed to international peacekeepers on the Jordan River, and renounced Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Abbas never even responded to the proposal or offered a counter-proposal.

What ultimately matters, however, is not what Palestinian negotiators acknowledged as the parameters of any possible peace agreement in private discussions, but what they were prepared to present to their own people. In that regard, the only thing relevant last week was the Palestinian Authority's fervent denunciations of the Al Jazeera "plot" to bring it down through the publication of the alleged concessions. With those denunciations the Palestinian leadership tacitly admitted what their behavior has consistently demonstrated: the Palestinian public is not prepared to accept even the most minimal concessions upon which all Middle East negotiators have assumed a peace agreement would be built.

In short, the Palestinian leadership has utterly failed to prepare its people for peace in any form. As a consequence, the two goals enunciated by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton for a peace agreement — an end to the "occupation" for the Palestinians and safe and secure borders for the Israelis — remain irreconcilable. There can be no safe and secure borders for Israel, as long as the Palestinians have not reconciled themselves to the existence of a Jewish state and renounced forever the resort to arms to remove that state. The unrest currently roiling the entire Arab world only demonstrates further how precarious is any agreement contracted with non-democratic leaders and which does not command overwhelming popular support. In that context, what the Palestinians broadcast in their media and teach in their schools is far more important that what their leaders tell American interlocutors.
 

ALAS, EVENTS IN EGYPT have trumped any victories Israel might have claimed in the narrative wars. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is no friend of Israel. He prevented a warm peace from developing between Egypt and Israel, has fostered open anti-Semitism in Egypt's arts and media, has always imperiously insisted that Israeli leaders come to Egypt for discussions. And Egypt has used every international forum to undermine Israel's nuclear ambiguity. But under his rule, the peace treaty signed by President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Begin at Camp David has held.

Street demonstrations in Egypt will not bring about a stable, parliamentary democracy. The necessary civil society does not exist, and the grinding poverty in which most Egyptians live makes long-range stability unlikely. Either the army will retain control, with or without Mubarak at the helm, or rule will pass to the Moslem Brotherhood, by far the best organized opposition force, and Egypt will experience its own version of Iran's Islamic Revolution.

The latter outcome terrifies (or should) both Israel and the United States. The Moslem Brotherhood spawned both Al Qaeda and Hamas, and has always held the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty anathema. It it took over, the Arab world's largest army, armed with tens of billions of dollars of the most sophisticated American arms over the last 33 years, would fall under Islamist control. The IDF, which already faces threats of great magnitude on multiple fronts, would have to increase its troop strength and once again deploy in anticipation of a possible attack from Egypt. In addition, Israel would either have to confront the Egyptian army and retake control of the Philadelphi Corridor or watch armaments flow into Gaza unimpeded. And finally, Israel could expect the abrogation of the contract under which Egypt supplies half of its natural gas needs today.

If there is any ray of hope in massive demonstrations in Egypt, which are doubtless causing the rulers of many Arab states some sleepless nights worrying about their own restive populations, it is that the same thing could as easily happen to the hated rulers of Iran and bring about the Middle East's first anti-Islam revolution since Ataturk. Hopefully, if millions of Iranians take to the streets, President Obama will show at least as much support for them as he has for protesters in Egypt and not remain neutral under the quest that it is "improper for America to meddle," as he did in response to widespread protests after the stolen Iranian elections of summer 2009.
 

Jonathan Rosenblum founded Jewish Media Resources in 1999. He is a commentator on Israeli politics, society, culture and the Israeli legal system; and he writes for the Jerusalem Post and the Hebrew daily Maariv. He is the author of seven biographies of major modern Jewish figures. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. Rosenblum lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children.

This article was archived February 4, 2011 as a Jonathan Rosenblum column on Jewish Media Resources
http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/1421/narrative-isnt-everything

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