Josh Ruebner of Arlington is the author of “Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace.”
Posted: Wednesday, July 24, 2013 11:45 am | Updated: 11:48 am, Wed Jul 24, 2013.
Verso recently has published “Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace” by Arlington resident Josh Ruebner, national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation.
Ruebner contends that while “there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Obama’s intentions” toward securing Middle East peace when he entered the White House, the president’s first term resulted in that goal’s being even further out of reach.
“Obama’s political instincts were at loggerheads with his political calculus – thus began an inexorable slide from a plausible, coherent and proactive strategy . . . to a series of reactive and defensive measures that results in the U.S. being even less of an ‘honest broker’ at the end of Obama’s [first] term than it was at the beginning,” Ruebner writes.
The Sun Gazette asked Ruebner a number of questions related to his work:
Was it your belief in 2008 that Barack Obama (then a candidate, not yet president) took the issue of solving the Israeli-Palestinian matter seriously? If so, to what do you attribute the lack of progress on the issues involved in this conflict?
Absolutely. Obama put Israeli-Palestinian peace at the top of his foreign-policy agenda at the outset of his first term, on a par with Afghanistan and Iraq. His initial strategy – urging Israel to stop its colonization of Palestinian land – made perfect sense as a coherent way to restart the moribund “peace process.”
The problem was that he was extremely naïve about the amount of political capital he would have to expend to battle Israel and its supporters over this question. When Obama caved in on this issue in the summer of 2009, all of his efforts thereafter were doomed to fail.
No president from Truman to George W. Bush was able to bring a lasting accord between these two sides. Is it realistic to blame President Obama for not getting the job done himself?
Each president, undoubtedly, deserves his own fair share of blame for not brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace. The problem with our country’s policies toward Israel and the Palestinians, however, is structural and the inability of the United States to broker peace is not solely, or even primarily, a failure of the individuals involved.
As long as our country continues to provide more than $3 billion of weapons to Israel per year and shield Israel at the UN from accountability for not implementing UN resolutions, not only will we continue to fail to bring about peace, but we will remain deeply complicit in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians as well.
Given that a second term of any president usually is more about holding down the fort that pressing daring new initiatives, are you expecting any positive U.S. action on dealing with this issue in the remaining years of the Obama presidency?
Despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement in July that Israeli-Palestinian talks may resume in the near future, I am highly doubtful that the Obama administration will be able to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace in its second term.
Rather than learning from its mistakes, the Obama administration seems to be reading from the exact same policy playbook that it used in its first term. It brings to mind Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Did any of your views on the issue, and the Obama administration’s handling of it, evolve during the period it took you to complete the book?
When Obama appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace, many analysts, myself included, thought that this appointment presaged a more even-handed U.S. policy than that pursued by the Clinton and Bush administrations, which both relied heavily on staunchly pro-Israel individuals to fill “peace process” roles.
As I dug into the “Palestine Papers,” however, I was sadly disabused of this notion, as they show Mitchell reneging on Obama’s initial insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze and instead arm-twisting the Palestinians back to the negotiating table while Israel continued to gobble up land for a supposed future Palestinian state.
Who is the target audience for your book? Why would someone with a general interest in the Mideast be interested in reading it?
I think my book will be of interest not only for an audience that is interested in the Middle East, but for anyone interested in how U.S. foreign policy is made.
Because of the immense amount of official diplomatic documents leaked during Obama’s first term – both the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” and Al Jazeera’s “Palestine Papers,” thousands of documents leaked from within the Palestinian negotiating team – the contemporaneous researcher has unparalleled access to policymaking almost as it unfolds.
This access gives the reader an ability to go behind the headlines and see how policy is actually made.