Obama’s counter intuitive Middle East mission
US president Barack Obama heads for the Middle East and Europe this week. Having inaugurated his “opening” to the Muslim world during his inspired stop in Turkey on his first foreign foray, he heads for Egypt to make his keynote speech setting out his Middle East ambitions.
The Turkey trip remains a touchstone of his presidency, a completely counter intuitive move.
He did not do what all previous presidents would have done in this regard. He did not include Israel on his itinerary.
He has talked with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but instead of visiting Israel this time around he will pay tribute – at the concentration camp at Buchenwald in Germany – to the devastating number of Jews who died in Hitler’s gas chambers.
It was their suffering that so pricked the world’s conscience that the state of Israel was brought into being in 1948.
Obama has added Saudi Arabia to his itinerary, calling in on King Abdullah.
Interestingly there will be no public events. The Saudis are essential to a pan-Arab peace with Israel, but hardly a model of Islamic state Obama would naturally want to highlight so early in his presidency.
Saudi or Egypt could have been expected to provide an American President’s first brush with Islam. But instead, as I say, it was secular, majority Islamic Turkey.
Turkey has relations with Israel, even if strained by the war on Gaza.
It is the continued absence of a visit to Israel that provides the fascination, and potentially the hope.
Obama is pursuing a discreet, pragmatic, yet ambitious Middle East peace initiative. Interestingly Hillary Clinton, close to Democrat Jews in her previous senatorial state of New York, has issued the most robust US demand yet that Israel ceases ALL settlement building.
This is an American administration making moves we haven’t seen in generations.
On 19 May no fewer than 76 of America’s 100 senators signed a letter warning Obama of the risks to Israel of pursuing a two sate peace with Palestinians.
It’s a finely tuned counter point to Obama’s initiative and a necessary one if Israel is to feel reassured.
For the first time in generations, the Israelis are a trifle uncertain as to how far the US will really go.
The Israeli government has little interest in a Palestinian state of any shape. History indicates that the rejection of Palestine rights inside and beyond Israeli borders has gathered momentum down the years.
My sense from having been to the region during both the Lebanon and Gaza invasions is that Israeli morale and confidence are battered.
Where once my inbox was filled with invective from hardliners on both sides, it has all gone eerily quiet. It is as if those two conflicts, coupled with the arrival of Obama, have seriously reordered the chess board.
We live in seriously interesting times.
Here’s a mad prediction. That in this decade we will see peace in both the Middle East and Kashmir. Of the latter more anon, of the former watch for this fascinating week.