Australia / Israel Review

Update from AIJAC

September 24, 2009
Number 09/09 #05

Today’s Update examines Tuesday’s Obama-Abbas-Netanyahu meeting ahead of the annual UN General Assembly talkfest. Opinion about the meeting, from the Israeli left and right as well as the Palestinians has been one of near universal cynicism. An exception was the meeting’s host, US President Barack Obama, but even he admitted the discussions were “frank” – diplospeak for ‘we agreed to disagree.’

We begin with the Jerusalem Post‘s Herb Keinon – who visited Australia last year as a guest of AIJAC – who writes a sober analysis of the meeting. He tells us that the “dramatic age of Middle East diplomacy” is over, and the “long haul and drudgery of trying to change the reality on the ground” has begun. Keinon explains that both Abbas and Netanyahu are not currently interested in entering final status negotiations (as opposed to Obama, who is pushing them to do so), but rather to build Palestinian infrastructure from the ground up. For his hopeful analysis, CLICK HERE.

Writing for the New Republic was Shmuel Rosner, who suggests that although Obama has backed down a little from his ‘over-eager’ demands of Israel, Israel was also forced to back down in its own way. Our second article is a thoughtful editorial from the Washington Post, assessing Obama’s miscalculations on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, and giving him suggestions as to how to change tack. To read what the Post has to say on the matter, CLICK HERE.

The Guardian‘s Jonathan Freedland paints a black picture of Obama’s prospects, but insists Obama shouldn’t yet be written off. But YNet’s Nahum Barnea delivers a colossal spray about Obama, telling him he needs to stop concentrating on being cool, and start concentrating on delivering results. Meanwhile, Zvi Mazel looks at the Arab world’s blanket refusal to make any goodwill gestures to Israel asking, ‘Is the Roadmap dead?’ And Steve Rosen, writing in Foreign Policy, calls this Obama’s ‘first real moment of truth.’ Like most other commentators on this issue, he thinks Obama has got it wrong.

Finally, Peter Berkowitz of the Weekly Standard looks at the big picture. He reminds us, in a lengthy article, of the issues needing resolution if any peace is to be achieved, the parameters that have largely been agreed upon, and the need for the US and the Arab world to both help Israel and Palestinians be confident in peace, but also to play useful roles in doing so. Neither Obama nor the Arabs are doing so, according to Berkowitz. For this useful backgrounder, CLICK HERE.

Readers may also be interested in:

• A Jerusalem Post editorial canvassing many of the same issues in this Update.
• A discussion paper from Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies’ Zvi Magen on Israel’s place in Russia’s foreign policy.
• A report in England’s Daily Telegraph that British officials threatened to walk out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN General Assembly had he repeated his Holocaust denials there. The Canadian delegation didn’t bother turning up. In the end, Ahmadinejad avoided the Holocaust, but blasted Israel and the US, prompting the American delegation to walk out.
• Simon Schama complains in the Financial Times about the West’s mumbled response to Ahmadinejad’s latest denial, on the eve of the Jewish New Year last week.
• Egyptian Cultural Minister Farouk Hosni, who has called for Israeli books to be burned, has lost his bid to be UNESCO director-general. Needless to say, he blamed the Jews for his loss.
• More criticism on the Goldstone Report has been written by Yoram Dori,  Alan Baker,  and Yagil Henkin in the Jerusalem Post, the Economist’s editorial writers, and Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post. Alan Dershowitz also weighed into the debate.

Analysis: Building drama-less diplomatic paradigms

Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post, September 23, 2009
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1253627542038&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

Tuesday’s tripartite meeting at the gilded Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan ushered in the end of the dramatic age of Middle East diplomacy.

Good-bye to the dramatic summits that raise expectations sky-high. Gone are the days when a three-way handshake is interpreted as a “tipping point.” Hello to the long haul and drudgery of trying to change the reality on the ground.

In the long run-up to Tuesday’s meeting – a meeting that actually served US President Barack Obama’s domestic and international purposes more than that of either the Israelis or the Palestinians – all sides tried to play down expectations. And with good reason. The meeting did not present an “Oslo moment,” with the sides believing they were going into the parley facing a dark reality, and emerging facing a different, sunny one.

No, this is a new period of diplomacy, a period marked not by drama, but by waiting to see what happens on the ground.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a seminal interview with Jackson Diel in The Washington Post at the beginning of the summer – one quoted again Monday by a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office on the way to New York – said he was in no hurry. He said that his negotiations with former prime minister Ehud Olmert had left gaps “too wide,” that life was improving in the West Bank, and that he could wait until the US pressure on Israel led to the collapse of the Netanyahu government.

In short, he was willing to wait. And waiting is indeed what he is doing. Abbas climbed up a massive redwood tree, saying negotiations would not begin until Israel declared an all-out settlement freeze. And he has, so far, held on to the branches. Which means that the negotiations are not continuing, and the waiting game is on.

Paradoxically the waiting game also serves Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, as long as – and this is indeed taking place – the Palestinians continue institution-building: improving their ability to govern, improving their security apparatus with the help of US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton, and improving their economy.

There may be little high-profile diplomatic drama right now, but on the ground, there are changes. The story is not in New York, but in changes in the West Bank.

The Palestinians are doing this so that in two years’ time, they will have the ability to declare a state – unilaterally if necessary – and actually have institutions in place that would make that statement not completely void of meaning.

And for Netanyahu, this fits in very well with his economic peace approach, an approach once ridiculed by many, that holds that peace will come from the bottom up, not the top down. In this conception, peace does not flow like a river from high-level meetings, but from incremental changes on the ground that change attitudes.

Netanyahu, like Abbas, does not need diplomatic bells and whistles. He, too, can wait: His government is stable, and the US – apparently cognizant of its mistake at the beginning of the Obama tenure in calling for an impractical total settlement freeze – has turned down the pressure.

The prime minister can wait to see how things develop on the ground in the West Bank, and then – two years from now – make decisions. And in the meantime, he can continue, as he said, to provide for normal life in the settlements – not anything “provocative,” but enough to ensure his coalition’s survival.

There may be those who were disappointed that no white smoke emerged from Tuesday’s meeting. Obama may be disappointed that he did not have an earth-shattering announcement to declare before the gathering of world leaders. But a new diplomatic paradigm has been developed, and it consists of making progress where possible, hoping that progress begets progress. It is a paradigm, as Tuesday made quite evident, singularly void of high drama.

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A Middle East Handshake

Editorial, Washington Post, September 23, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/22/AR2009092203474_pf.html

THE SUMMIT President Obama convened Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fell well short of the administration’s hopes. Mr. Obama had wanted to announce agreement on the opening of talks on the creation of a Palestinian state, with a deadline of two years. He wanted to outline agreements on how those negotiations would proceed and some of the principles that would underpin them. And he expected to reveal a series of opening confidence-building measures by the two sides, including a freeze on Israeli settlement construction and steps toward normalization by several Arab states.

What Mr. Obama oversaw, instead, was little more than a photo opportunity with the two leaders — who continue to disagree with each other and with the Obama administration over the terms of the talks. Officials said they still believe they can achieve the administration’s aims in the coming weeks. But the gap between their initial hopes for the U.N. meeting and what occurred is revealing about the difficulties Mr. Obama’s diplomacy is encountering — and the miscalculations the president and his team have made.

Mr. Obama and his aides assumed that Israelis and Arab governments around the region would welcome an aggressive effort by the new U.S. president to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace. As a practical matter, that hasn’t proved true. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government would prefer to bolster Mr. Abbas’s government economically before beginning final peace talks; Mr. Abbas himself has been preoccupied with consolidating his own authority and gaining the upper hand over the rival Hamas movement. Their rhetoric aside, leading Arab states such as Saudi Arabia appear — like Israel — much more concerned with how the Obama administration will handle the threat of Iran.

The administration also concluded, wrongly, that obtaining an unconditional Israeli settlement freeze was an essential first step. In fact settlements are no longer a strategic obstacle to peace; as a practical matter, most of the construction is in areas that will not be part of a Palestinian state. The administration’s inflexible stance, unwisely spelled out in public by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, led to an unwinnable confrontation with Mr. Netanyahu, turned Israeli public opinion against Mr. Obama and prompted Palestinians to harden their own position. The compromise now being discussed between Washington and Jerusalem will differ little from past deals.

All this is not to say that Mr. Obama should not keep trying to lay the groundwork for a Middle East peace. There are some good ideas for how Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas can begin constructive negotiations: One is to focus early on the final border between Israel and a Palestinian state, which would have the benefit of eliminating the settlement issue. Officials say the president pressed the Israeli and Palestinian leaders hard to move forward during bilateral meetings Tuesday. That’s good, but Mr. Obama must also do more to convince average Israelis as well as Arab leaders that his diplomacy is worth investing in. We’re told the president reminded Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas Tuesday of an old diplomatic verity: that the United States cannot want peace more than the parties themselves. That’s a reality that this president, like a few before him, will have to live by.

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Obama’s Middle East Gambit

Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard, September 28, 2009
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/982ahtem.asp

Masters of the art teach that subtlety, indirection, and on occasion mis-direction are crucial to successful diplomacy. Perhaps, then, President Obama is up to something shrewd.

When he took to the stage in Cairo in early June to address Muslims and discuss “the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world,” he called on Palestinians to renounce violence and develop their own political institutions, Israel to stop building in the West Bank, and Arab states to assist the Palestinians and recognize Israel’s legitimacy. Since the speech, however, much has been heard from the administration about the need for an Israeli settlement freeze and little about Palestinian and Arab state obligations.

If something shrewd does lie behind the decision to focus on Israeli concessions, then Obama and his administration are executing a dangerous gambit. It is likely to reinforce the false analysis popular among Palestinians, Arabs, and European and American intellectuals, an -analysis reaffirmed earlier this month in a Washington Post op-ed by former President Jimmy Carter: “A total freeze of settlement expansion is the key to any acceptable peace agreement or any positive responses toward Israel from Arab nations.”

And if the high-profile imposition of pressure on Israel is not a gambit, if the president believes that once Israel freezes West Bank settlement construction then the parties will proceed to successfully negotiate a final status agreement that brings into existence a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that lives in peace with Israel, then he is dangerously deluded about the basic elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the overall logic of Middle East politics.

Either way, the hard truth is that, much as the settlements represent a formidable challenge to a peace agreement, other and intractable differences on critical issues separate Palestinians and Israelis. To make negotiations a top priority as the Obama administration appears to have done is to expend limited time and energy on what at best will be a sideshow.

Meanwhile, real, if incremental progress toward the day in which Palestinians can establish a state of their own consistent with Israel’s national security interests depends on tasks to which the Obama administration has paid lip service but which it has done little to advance. These include improving dysfunctional Palestinian political institutions and political culture, building up the Palestinian economy, containing and defeating Hamas, cajoling or compelling Arab rulers around the region to assist the Palestinians and normalize relations with Israel, and, looming over all, countering Iran’s multipronged strategy–involving the acquisition of nuclear weapons and sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas terror–to impose its brand of Islamic rule on the entire Middle East.

According to the generous interpretation, which informed Israelis following the comings and goings of Middle East envoy George Mitchell and special assistant to the president Dennis Ross consider plausible, the Obama administration is well aware that the settlements are not the sole or even most significant obstacle to peace. But seeking to set America’s relationship to the Muslim world on a new footing and needing Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas and Arab rulers on board for his ambitious plans, Obama has sought to earn good will around the region by demonstrating his readiness to require painful concessions from Israel.

If such is Obama’s gambit, it has thus far failed to bear fruit. No Arab ruler has come forward to propose a thawing of relations with Israel should Israel agree to freeze settlements. Fatah’s recently concluded Sixth General Conference was short on conciliatory statements and long on reaffirmations of Palestinians’ right to engage in armed struggle. And Hamas continues to attack Fatah for failing to embrace jihad to destroy Israel.

Perhaps Obama will announce a breakthrough in his September 23 address to the United Nations General Assembly. The reopening of Israel’s tiny, unmarked trade mission in Qatar or a few meetings at the U.N. with Arab leaders or the launching of a few cultural or scholarly exchanges would be nice, but more than gestures will be necessary to build Israeli confidence. Permission from Saudi Arabia for El Al passenger jets to fly through Saudi airspace en route to Asia would be a step forward.

The sort of action that is long overdue and almost certainly not slated anytime soon, say an invitation from the Saudis for the Israeli foreign minister to visit Riyadh, would be a momentous one. It might not instantly produce crowds in Israel demanding substantial withdrawals from the West Bank, but it would transform public debate. The sight on TV screens in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem of an Israeli foreign minister shaking hands with his counterpart in the Saudi capital would spark enthusiasm for major concessions in a nation that has not ceased to yearn for peace even as it has, with each passing year, grown more resigned to persevering in the absence of a willing and able peace partner.

But suppose Obama’s gambit, if gambit it is, pays off. Suppose Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to a settlement freeze sufficient to bring Abbas back to the negotiating table. What then? Most likely the Obama administration will relearn the sobering lesson taught to the Bush administration during the frustrated quest for a peace agreement that began at the 2007 Annapolis Conference. As in 1949, 1967, and 2000, Palestinians are unprepared to make hard decisions and accept the painful concessions necessary to bring into existence a Palestinian state.

People of good will and understanding on both sides of the conflict have for several years recognized the broad outlines of a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Having in 2005 withdrawn from every last inch of the Gaza Strip and in the process removed 10,000 civilians from 21 settlements, Israel will, in exchange for “secure and recognized boundaries,” return most of the West Bank territories that it seized in 1967 when Jordan attacked it during the Six Day War. The suburbs of Jerusalem and a few large settlement blocs will remain under Israeli sovereignty, but Israel will evacuate tens of thousands more citizens. Jerusalem will stay Israel’s capital, even as accommodations will be made for Palestinian self-government in East Jerusalem. And, because if implemented it would spell the destruction of Israel, the Palestinians will need to abandon their claim that all Palestinians–not merely those who left or were forced out of their homes between 1947 and 1949 during Israel’s war of independence, but the millions of their children and their children’s children living in Gaza, the West Bank, and in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria–have the right to return to Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa.

It was an even more generous offer–including the dismantling of most of the settlements and Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem–that Ehud Barak delivered to Yasser Arafat in July 2000 at Camp David. Rejecting the offer outright, Arafat proceeded a few months later to launch the Second Intifada and to release against Israel wave after wave of suicide bombers. While it is unlikely that, if Obama administration-initiated negotiations fail to yield an agreement, Abbas will launch a third intifada, little has changed that would allow him to sign the very generous deal rejected by Arafat, let alone the undoubtedly more restricted offer which would come from Netanyahu.

A wide swath of Israelis in and out of the national security establishment believe that Abbas does not want to go down in history as the Palestinian leader who yielded land or Jerusalem to the Jewish state. Abbas, they believe, will settle for nothing less than a return to the 1949 armistice boundaries or Green Line, which would place the entire Old City of Jerusalem under Palestinian authority and give Israel indefensible borders. And Abbas has given no sign that he is prepared to abandon the Palestinians’ uncompromising belief in their right of return. Indeed, according to Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council, the right of return is not merely non-negotiable for the Palestinians, but it and not a state of their own has all along been the Palestinians’ main goal.

The inability of their leaders to compromise on crucial issues is only the beginning of the obstacles to peace emanating from within the Palestinian people. Even if their leaders were able to summon the courage to compromise, the dozens of hostile Fatah factions show no signs that they could be persuaded or compelled to go along. And there are more formidable obstacles to implementation.

Start with the lack of basic political institutions. Fifteen years ago Israel rescued Yasser Arafat from growing irrelevance in Tunisia and, under the auspices of the Oslo Accords, brought him and hundreds of his fighters and followers to Gaza and the West Bank to preside over the PA. Arafat proceeded–as he had in Lebanon and before that in Jordan–to govern as a despot and bring chaos and anarchy. He stole most of the billions of dollars of foreign aid that the United States and the international community transferred to the PA between 1996 and 2004, billions that should have been used to build roads, factories, hospitals, homes, and schools. Mahmoud Abbas is not a colossal thief and may be devoted to pragmatic accommodation, but he governs in the Arafat mold, and the PA has never had free and fair elections, and lacks clear laws, impartial law enforcement, administrative efficiency, and sound financial practices.

In late August, PA prime minister Salam Fayyad made news by announcing his intention to concentrate on building Palestinian political institutions so that in two years’ time, regardless of progress in formal peace negotiations, the Palestinians would be in a position to declare their independence. No seasoned observer in Israel believes that Fayyad can come close to preparing the PA for independence on such a timetable. It is not that they doubt Fayyad’s competence or commitment. He has both and can certainly point to real successes. The West Bank economy is growing. The streets of Ramallah and Nablus are bustling. The Palestinian security forces are gradually assuming greater responsibility for maintaining internal security and, in cooperation with the Israeli Defense Forces and the Shabak (Israel Security Agency), have dealt Hamas a series of setbacks.

But one shouldn’t be misled. An American-trained technocrat, Fayyad has little grassroots support. The Palestinian legislature is powerless, and the Palestinian judiciary both corrupt and incompetent. Worse could be said about municipal government throughout the West Bank. A decent criminal justice system will require years of concentrated effort. In addition, much of the Palestinian economy’s growth is due to massive injections of foreign aid finally reaching their target. Even so, unemployment remains high. Finally, while the Palestinian security forces, trained in Jordan by U.S. Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, have made impressive strides in the last few years, they will need many more years of recruitment and training before taking over sole responsibility for maintaining peace and order on their streets, let alone developing the wherewithal, should Israel security forces cease to operate around the clock inside the PA, to prevent the West Bank from becoming an armed Hamas camp posing intolerable threats to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

A viable peace also depends on transforming the Palestinians’ poisonous political culture. Israeli experts argue that most Palestinians still don’t accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. According to the estimates of senior security officials, perhaps 30 percent of West Bank Palestinians are pragmatic like Abbas and Fayyad, believing that Israel, despite its fundamental illegitimacy, is a regrettable fact with which Palestinians must learn to live. About the same number believe that Israel is illegitimate and refuse to learn to live with it. The remaining 40 percent or so are up for grabs. Unfortunately, according to Reuven Berko–who recently left the Israeli army after serving for ten years as adviser on Arab affairs to the chief of the Jerusalem police–PA-run schools, newspapers, and television are tipping the balance by assiduously cultivating hatred of Israel and Jews. Berko, fluent in Arabic, remarked sardonically, “After watching 10 minutes of Palestine TV, I want to pick up a knife and find a good Jew to kill.”

Even if Palestinian political institutions were reformed and Palestinian political culture detoxified, Hamas would still present an insurmountable obstacle to peace. Abbas only got serious about taking on the Iranian-sponsored terrorist group in 2007 after it conquered the Gaza Strip and brutally murdered many of its Fatah rivals. Today, Hamas functions in Gaza not just as a terrorist organization but also as the elected government and a military organization. And it aspires to bigger and better things. It is not out of sensitivity to -Israel’s security concerns but because of Hamas’s aim to take over the PLO and transform itself into the one genuine vehicle of Palestinian nationalism that Abbas threw his support to the Bush administration’s efforts to bolster the Palestinian security forces in the West Bank. Their success in fighting Hamas in the West Bank has enabled Israel to reduce the number of roadblocks and checkpoints, which has promoted commerce and improved the quality of life for ordinary Palestinians. Hamas suicide bombers have not pulled off an attack inside Israel for more than a year, and not a single rocket has been fired into Israel from the West Bank. But the progress is fragile.

Even if PA and Israeli security forces make further strides in the West Bank to weaken Hamas, Abbas exercises no influence over Gaza and has little plausible claim to represent the 1.5 million Palestinians living there. Consequently, should the Obama administration succeed in relaunching talks, Abbas will be negotiating a separate peace for the West Bank. There too, however, Hamas has an effective veto. So long as the battle against Hamas requires Israeli security forces to operate freely within the West Bank–as, according to Israeli national security assessments, it will continue to do so in the near and intermediate terms–the PA cannot pretend to be a sovereign state.

There are those who favor giving Hamas a chance. If treated with respect, if included in talks, if allowed to govern in Gaza without crippling blockades imposed by the Israelis and Egyptians, if given more opportunity to share authority in the West Bank, it will mature as a political organization and become a useful partner. According to this argument, Hamas’s 1988 charter, which calls for permanent jihad to destroy the state of Israel, should be discounted as an outdated document written by hardliners not reflecting the inevitable moderation caused by the passage of time and the acquisition of responsibility for governing. But this, maintains Reuven Berko, is wishful and reckless thinking. Hamas’s only reason for being, he contends, is the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Its defining Muslim beliefs forbid it from giving up any part of the Waqf, or land once ruled by Muslims, to non-Muslims, especially to Jews who under Muslim law are prohibited from governing themselves in a state of their own. In other words, Hamas cannot, without ceasing to be Hamas, abandon the quest to reclaim for Islam all the land that lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Nor is Hamas the only one obstructing peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Arab rulers, especially American allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia, exercise effective vetoes of their own. To offer concessions–on boundaries, on Jerusalem, on the right of return–and survive the fury of rival Fatah factions and the violent opposition of Hamas while winning the support of ordinary Palestinians, Abbas would need a legitimacy that only can be conferred by the willingness of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak and Saudi King Abdullah to persuade their own peoples that Palestinian compromises with the Jewish state are in order. Neither Mubarak nor Abdullah has shown much proclivity for such leadership.

The unwillingness of Arab leaders to lead does not change the fact that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is irreducibly a regional matter. Full normalization of relations with Israel by Arab states may have to await a peace treaty with the Palestinians, but no lasting treaty will be possible that is not preceded by improvements in the relations between Israel and Arab states. Interim steps should include reining in Al Jazeera–the popular Qatari news network that broadcasts a steady stream of vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda to the Arab world; cleansing school systems around the region of textbooks that demonize Israel and teach that Jews are subhuman; releasing state-run Arab newspapers from the obligation to denounce Israel on a daily basis; and inviting Israel to open offices and eventually embassies in Arab capitals and then reciprocating.

Egypt can take another important short-term step toward a viable peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Recognizing the danger posed by an Iranian-sponsored jihadist government on its eastern flank, Cairo has begun to improve security on the border it shares with Gaza and block the smuggling of Iranian weapons and Iranian trained jihadists through the Sinai Peninsula. But it needs to do more. In the absence of dramatic improvements in Egyptian border security, Israel expects that within a few years Hamas will be equipped with missiles that can reach Tel Aviv, and Israeli soldiers will have to undertake another military incursion into Gaza to destroy them.

The picture is not pretty, but progress toward peace can be achieved. Given the unbridgeable issues that divide the Israelis and Palestinians and the enormous obstacles to implementation should the unbridgeable be bridged, the Obama administration needs to abandon its naïve and arrogant belief that it can bring peace by dictating top-down solutions. Instead, it should take a page out of the community organizing tradition in which Obama was educated and for the near term concentrate U.S. policy on assisting Fayyad’s efforts to develop Palestinian political institutions and the economy. Make no mistake: Political and economic development in the West Bank is not a distraction from the peace process but crucial to constructing the conditions under which Palestinians can one day govern themselves and Israelis can live within secure and recognized borders.

And because of the threat that Hamas poses to development efforts and to Israel, and because Iran funds, trains, and equips Hamas and strengthens Hamas’s stature by fanning the flames of Islamic extremism around the region, making the curbing of Iran’s influence a centerpiece of American foreign policy equally is essential to the peace process.

That Obama has nothing positive to show for eight months of engagement with Iran sets back the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. While he has been waiting patiently, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror has been busy expanding its conventional arsenal, crushing democratic dissent, and pursuing nuclear weapons. In February, Iran launched the Omid, its first locally produced satellite. In May, it launched the Sajil, a missile with a range of more than 1,200 miles. In June, it rigged a presidential election and violently broke up peaceful public demonstrations. In July and August, it conducted Soviet-style show trials. All the while, as the Obama administration has apologized to it, reached out to it, and covered for it, Iran has continued to enrich uranium. Earlier this month, Tehran announced it would not discuss or consider ceasing its nuclear program. And when, in the face of a September 24 deadline to resume talks or face another round of international sanctions, Iran agreed to wide-ranging discussions but excluded the subject of its nuclear program, the United States promptly agreed, with scarcely a word of displeasure, to an October 1 meeting.

Since, as masters of the art teach, subtlety, indirection, and on occasion misdirection are crucial to successful diplomacy, perhaps there is more to the president’s conciliatory ways with Iran than meets the eye. But occasionally diplomacy calls for candid, precise, and public pronouncements. Just now it would build Israeli confidence, command the attention of waverers among the Palestinians, and provide a much-needed teaching moment for the international community if the president of the United States were to lay the groundwork for October 1 discussions with Tehran by insisting that Iranian sponsorship of Hamas (and Hezbollah) terror has no place in the civilized world. If the president were prepared to back up such words with deeds, it would promote international order, reassure our Arabian Gulf allies, and substantially improve the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.