by John R. Miller
President Obama's speech in Cairo has been praised, and rightly so, for its effort to reach out to the Muslim world. But amidst the idealistic exhortations to practice democracy, further women's rights, practice religious freedom and of course avoid violence and take responsibility, there continues to sit--almost incongruously--only one very specific prescription for action, and it is directed at only one country--Israel.
"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israel settlements" the President proclaimed to loud applause. Commentators have assumed that the President was asking Israel to not extend existing settlements in the disputed West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the following sentence does refer to "this construction". But the President in his applause line did not talk about merely discontinuing the settling process; he puts himself on record against the continuation of "settlements", which appears to mean the settlements that are already there.
This indeed is a prescription, all right, but if the words mean what they seem to mean--and we must assume every word in this speech was carefully vetted--the President's speech marks a new direction for the United States' policy regarding Israel. There is a big difference between telling Israel that it should stop allowing new settlers to take up residence on the West Bank and East Jerusalem and telling Israel to evict the nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers already there. No U.S. President has ventured this way before. When President Clinton urged a comprehensive settlement on PLO leader Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Barak, he asked that additional settlements be stopped but asked that the bulk of existing Israeli settlements remain with Israel offering in exchange pieces of Israeli territory.
President Obama's departure from traditional U.S. policy plays well in the Arab world but it will not enhance peace in the Middle East nor is it in keeping with the "universal ideals" the President proclaimed. No Israeli government can follow the President's advice, no matter how much pressure Obama exerts. To evict 500,000 settlers would set off a war within Israel that would leave Israel looking less like a modern state and more like the Palestinian territory riven by conflicts between Hamas and Fatah. And as for the "universal ideals" that the President urged his listeners to follow, what "universal ideal" says that people should be evicted from living somewhere based on race, religion or national origin? True, such anti-Semitic policies were pushed by Czars in Russia and by Hitler in Nazi Germany, but no modern democratic government has or does so. President Obama would not suggest such a rule in the United States. Certainly Israel does not suggest that Arab settlements in what the U.S. recognizes as Israeli land should be discontinued. PLO laws today prescribe death to Arabs who sell land to Jews, a policy that presumably would continue in a Palestinian state where Israeli settlements had been removed. One trusts the President does not support this method of discontinuing Jewish settlements.
Every U.S. President fervently desires to appeal to the Muslim world, but the President should beware of embracing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will neither end the conflict nor be consistent with either universal or American ideals.
John R. Miller
Former United States Ambassador at Large on Modern Slavery
Visiting Scholar, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute
