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Israel's insolence to Obama may rebound on it

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Reprinted from The National

Barack Obama meets with Mahmoud Abbas
Barack Obama meets with Mahmoud Abbas
(Image by (From Wikimedia) White House, Author: White House)
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For 20 years, the White House stood guard over the peace process, reserving for itself the role of stewarding Israel and the Palestinians to a resolution of their conflict. Like some Godfather, the US expected unquestioning loyalty.

But Washington's primacy in the relationship with both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships is unravelling at astonishing speed.

The crisis has been building for six years. Barack Obama arrived at the White House just as Israel elected one of the most right wing governments in its history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. At their first meeting Mr Obama reportedly told his Israeli counterpart "not one more brick." With a settlement-building freeze Washington could revive the long-stalled Oslo peace process.

Mr Netanyahu soon defied the president, and has been doing so ever since. The latest humiliation -- the final straw, according to White House officials -- was Mr Netanyahu's success in engineering an invitation to address the US Congress next month.

By all accounts, the Israeli prime minister hopes to undermine a key plank of Mr Obama's foreign policy -- negotiating a deal with Iran on its nuclear program -- by persuading Congress to stiffen sanctions against Tehran. That risks a crisis.

But Mr Netanyahu is not alone in testing the limits of Mr Obama's power. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has also recently chosen to bypass the White House. After years of waiting, he has pinned his hopes on new international sponsors to help him achieve his goal of statehood.

Ignoring White House injunctions, he has pressed ahead with resolutions at the United Nations and has now deployed his doomsday weapon: joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Israelis are calling this a "diplomatic intifada" and urging the US to cut its $400 million annual aid to the Palestinian Authority.

As with any mafia boss, Mr Obama is in trouble if he can no longer inspire fear, let alone respect. But the problem is of his own making. For six years, Mr Netanyahu "spat in our face," as one White House official memorably observed while referring to his latest attempt to humiliate Mr Obama, but paid no discernible price.

Conversely, Mr Abbas has done everything that the Obama administration asked of him, and has precisely nothing to show for his efforts.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships believe that they have core -- even existential -- interests that the White House is now an obstacle to realising.

Mr Abbas's disobedience is born of necessity. Aware that the US will never act as honest broker in the peace process, he has been forced to turn to other international forums, in the hope of forcing Israel to concede a small Palestinian state.

Mr Netanyahu's move, meanwhile, is based on the risky calculation that he can manoeuvre the US into a confrontation with Iran to maintain Israel's regional domination. In doing so, he has made two dubious assumptions.

The first is that he can wait out Mr Obama, who has little more than a year and a half left in office. Mr Netanyahu is betting on a hardline Republican successor who will follow his lead against Tehran.

He may well be disappointed. Even assuming that a Republican wins the 2016 US presidential election, any hawkish campaign rhetoric on Iran will be fiercely tested by the limitations of office. The next US president will face the same cold political realities as Mr Obama.

Second, Mr Netanyahu believes he can use the US Congress to stymie any threat of an agreement between Washington and Tehran. His working assumption is that the Congress is "Israeli-occupied territory," as a US observer once called it. Certainly, Israel has enormous sway in Congress, but Mr Netanyahu is already getting a lesson in the limits of his influence. For, leading Democrats, it seems, are choosing to side with Mr Obama and it is thought that many may boycott Mr Netanyahu's speech.

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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: (more...)
 

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