In effect, Obama pressured the Palestinians to accept a real evil in the present for the sake of some hypothetical good in a hard-to-imagine future. Though that may make sense to the president, the Palestinian Authority understandably sees it as senseless to enter prolonged negotiations that would simply give Israel a green light and more time to gobble up Palestinian land.
Obama's other glaring omission was his refusal to visit Gaza and meet its prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, of the ruling Hamas party. In his peace speech, Obama explicitly called on Israel to negotiate only with the Palestinian Authority, which rules in the West Bank, dismissing Hamas with the usual false picture: "Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with anyone who is dedicated to its destruction."
In fact, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has been saying for years that his party is ready for a long-term truce that would, de facto, accept the existence of Israel inside its pre-1967 borders. These are, of course, the very borders Obama himself has called for as the basis for a final status agreement. In recent talks with the king of Jordan, Meshaal reportedly made his most explicit statement yet accepting such a two-state solution.
The only realistic hope for peace is to encourage this growing moderation in Hamas, which would open the way to a unified Hamas-Fatah government. The idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank alone, living happily side by side with Israel, while an impoverished and ignored Gaza somehow doesn't cause trouble for anyone, is an impossible fantasy.
But the Obama administration and the Israeli government prefer such a fantasy world in which there's simply no place for a conciliatory Hamas policy, because the globe must always be divided between "the international community" and a threatening "radical Islam," its banner held high by Hamas as well as Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and the greatest threat of all: Iran.
The Iranian Threat: When Myths Collide
Iran evokes the most dangerous clash between reality and fantasy. Obama has struck a devil's bargain with Netanyahu: if you'll negotiate with the Palestinians, I'll endorse your endless warnings about a purported Iranian program that might -- just might -- produce a tiny number of nuclear weapons at some unknown date in the imagined future.
The very existence of such an Iranian program is highly doubtful. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that it doesn't exist. Yet on his recent trip Obama plunged into the Israeli right's fantasy world, where Iran will, sooner than you think, be nuking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
To protect that fantasy world the president had to ignore the very existence of Dimona, the "research center" where Israel has produced anywhere from 100 to 300 nuclear weapons. As Jonathan Schell recently pointed out, Israel's goal is to maintain its long-standing monopoly as the only nuclear power in the greater Middle East. Its leaders have been threatening for years to attack Iran to keep that monopoly a sure thing into the distant future.
The American people seem perfectly ready to back them in this project. In the latest Gallup poll, 64% of Americans say that they sympathize with Israel and, chillingly, precisely the same percentage now tell Pew pollsters that they would support U.S. military action to prevent Iran from making nukes.
The U.S. Senate gets the message. Three-quarters of its members have signed on as co-sponsors of a formal Senate resolution (S.Res. 65) which solemnly warns of Iran's "threats against the existence of the State of Israel" and "urges" that, if Israel is "compelled to take military action in self-defense" against Iran, the U.S. should "provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence."
"Self-defense"? "Compelled"? "Israel's existence"? It all assumes the absurd notion that, even if Iran could manage to produce a few nukes, its leaders would choose to use them against a massively superior Israel, swiftly triggering Iran's national suicide.
That fantasy might provoke laughter in Tehran, but only if Iranian leaders could stop worrying for a moment about the very real threats being leveled at them. Unlike Obama, they've been looking directly at Dimona and its product for a long time.
In the world as seen from Tehran, and from most of the rest of the planet, it's Israel, not Iran, that poses a nuclear threat to the region. If someday there were a Mideast nuclear arms race, Israel would clearly be the country that set it off. And if Congress can sway the president, long before that the U.S. might well be caught up in an Israeli-Iranian war. When the myth of Israel's insecurity meets the myth of "the Iranian bomb," the result has the potential to be explosive indeed.
That's a very real and heavy price to pay for the fantasy that a president can walk the high wire, balancing everyone's demands perfectly, without the danger of simply falling into the abyss.
Barack Obama took a brave step out of that fantasy world when he told the Israeli people directly that their occupation of the West Bank is not only foolish but immoral. If he really wants to earn his Nobel Peace Prize, he'll have to demand an end to settlement expansion, visit Gaza and Dimona, and create a new narrative about Iran as well as Palestine filled with a much larger dose of reality. That story just might have a happy ending, the hope and change that the president has always promised us. The script he has followed so far has tragedy written all over it.
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