White House Faces Mideast Test

Daily News Article   —   Posted on September 22, 2011

(by Laura Meckler, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com) NEW YORK—President Barack Obama set out early in his presidency to repair a tattered U.S. relationship with the Muslim world and rekindle the Middle East peace process.

Two years later, he has achieved neither. Instead, the problems he hoped to solve have now cost him points with Israelis, Palestinians and American voters alike as a painful confrontation unfolds this week at the United Nations.

U.S. officials scrambled Tuesday to head off a showdown before the U.N. Security Council, where the Palestinians have said they will seek to gain membership within the U.N. The White House repeated its promise to veto the measure, but worked desperately to avoid the need to do so.

In an address on Wednesday to the U.N. General Assembly, where the vast majority of nations* support the Palestinian cause [*NOTE: 33% of the U.N.’s member states are Muslim countries], the president will explain why the U.S. supports creation of a Palestinian state, but through negotiations, not U.N. fiat [order].

For the U.S., which has promoted democracy movements throughout the region, it is an uncomfortable position. Much of [President] Obama’s U.N. address will celebrate the momentum for democracy that has built over the last year around the globe, including across the Arab world.

[The President] faces domestic as well as international pressure. His repeated efforts to push Israel for concessions failed to advance the peace process while antagonizing some Jewish voters at home and giving Republicans an opening for attack.

On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican presidential candidate, championed Israel, calling the Palestinians’ U.N. move an “ominous act of bad faith” and blamed Mr. Obama for bringing it about by pushing Israel too hard.  Gov. Perry asserted on Wednesday that President Obama’s “naive, arrogant, misguided and dangerous” foreign policy has brought Israel and the Palestinians to a crisis over Palestinian statehood.

Last week, polling found that Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy contributed to a Democratic loss in a special election for a vacant House seat in a heavily [Democratic and] Jewish district that includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

The Obama re-election campaign is worried enough about Jewish support that it has formed a high-level group of Jewish officials and backers to combat what they see as misperceptions about his record.

White House officials assert that the U.S. has been Israel’s strongest backer at the U.N., repeatedly vetoing anti-Israel resolutions and threatening another veto if Palestinians seek U.N. membership this week.

“This administration could not have been a stronger friend to Israel here,” said Ben Rhodes, deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications at the White House.

Still, the White House has said uncritical support for Israel won’t break the stalemate with the Palestinians, and the president has repeatedly and publicly urged the Israelis to make concessions.

In 2009, he called for a freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank, territory that Palestinians claim for their future state. This past spring, he said the two states’ final borders should be based roughly on the 1967 lines.

Israelis view both points as concessions that should be considered only during negotiations.

Mr. Obama’s approach appears to have won him little credit with the Palestinians either. In the face of deep U.S. opposition and a clear veto threat, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will ask the U.N. Security Council to recognize Palestine as a state.

In recent days, the U.S. has tried to get the parties to return to direct negotiations instead, without success.

Palestinians say Mr. Obama himself raised their expectations a year ago, when he delivered an optimistic speech to the U.N. General Assembly that there could be real progress. “We can say this time will be different,” Mr. Obama said then, nodding to decades of stalemate.

…Jon Alterman, an expert in the region at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, [says that] “The president’s actions have gotten him anger on all sides and gratitude on none. Israelis feel the president dislikes them. The Palestinians feel the president has gotten rolled by Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and has not been able to protect their interests.”

The Arab spring movement didn’t enhance the U.S. image in the region, either, Mr. Alterman added. Governments were disappointed that the U.S. didn’t stand by its allies, and the dissidents were angry that the U.S. didn’t do more to support political change.

In a 2009 speech in Cairo, Mr. Obama set out to create a “new beginning” in the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Key to that reset, he explained in the speech, was progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In the interim, opinions of the U.S. and confidence in Mr. Obama have fallen in many Muslim nations. In Jordan, 25% of people had a favorable view of the U.S. in 2009; in 2011, that had fallen to 13%, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. Ratings also fell in Lebanon, Egypt and Pakistan.

Mr. Rhodes, who wrote Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, acknowledges that U.S. standing in the Arab world has sagged.

“The principal challenge has been the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” he said “I think there’s no question that there is great frustration at the lack of progress.”

Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com.