Jamie

Weinstein

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July 21, 2008

Radical Vision for Middle East: Someone Needs to Make Obama Explain Himself

Among the many stops Barack Obama will make this week during his Rainbow Tour of the Middle East and Europe is in the state of Israel. While in the Holy Land, Obama should take the opportunity to explain a radical policy statement he made July 13 on CNN, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria.

"I was not trying to predetermine what are essentially final status issues," Obama told Zakaria, backing away from a pledge he made on the status of Jerusalem at AIPAC's 2008 Policy Conference in early June. "I think the Clinton formulation provides a starting point for discussions between the parties."

Obama didn't expand upon this comment and Zakaria didn't press him to clarify it, but taken at face value the comment represents a drastic shift away from not only President Bush's policy on the Middle East peace process, but former President Bill Clinton's as well.

To understand why this statement is so radical, we must go back to late 2000. During the waning days of the Clinton Administration, President Clinton invited then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and the late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat to Camp David in the hopes of hammering out a peace agreement before he left office.

According to the account provided by former chief Middle East peace negotiator Dennis Ross, at Camp David in 2000 Ehud Barack agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and in over 95 percent of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in exchange for peace. This was a politically risky deal for the Israeli Prime Minister to accept, but Ehud Barack did so in the name of peace. Arafat turned it down.

No written document of this peace plan was ever given to the parties because President Clinton did not want Arafat to take the proposal as a starting point for future negotiations. This was a final settlement agreement. It was an end point, not a starting point. In an interview in 2001, Ross put it this way:

"Camp David broke the taboos. The Clinton ideas reflected the best judgment of what was possible between the two sides in terms of their essential needs. But the Clinton ideas were, as I put it, the roof, not the ceiling, the roof. They were not the floor, they were not the ceiling, they were the roof."

Now, in the comments Obama made on July 13 to Zakaria, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president is saying that the "Clinton formulation" represents a good "starting point for discussions between the parties." This is precisely what Bill Clinton sought not to have happen. Arafat must be smiling in his grave.  

There are two possible explanations for Obama's radical policy statement. The first is that Obama believes that Israel was not generous enough at Camp David in 2000. If this is the case, it is important for Obama to clarify exactly what he would consider a fair peace deal. If it means, as Obama implied, even greater concessions than Israel was willing to make in 2000, it is hard to see any Israeli Prime Minister being able to accept such an agreement, especially in the current environment. This interpretation gives credence to the concern held by many supporters of Israel in the United States that a President Obama would put tremendous pressure on the Israeli state to go beyond the generous agreement it accepted in 2000. 

The other alternative interpretation is that Obama is again showing that he is lacking when it comes to his understanding of foreign policy. Perhaps he is unaware of the grand concessions offered by Israel at Camp David in 2000. Like his statement during the Democratic primary campaign that he would meet with the world's worst tyrants without preconditions, this recent comment to Zakaria may just represent another example of Obama's foreign policy naiveté, which he will have to correct later.

So far Obama has escaped controversy over his radical policy statement of just over a week ago.  But this comment shouldn't be allowed to simply fade away. As he makes his way to Israel this week, the press should push Obama to either retract his statement or clarify what he foresees Israel having to give up in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

Clear policy stances may not be Obama's forte, but as a presidential candidate he owes such clarity to the American people.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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