Obama Makes His Case for Israel To Resume Peace Efforts
President Barack Obama appealed directly to the Israeli people to recognize that settlements in occupied territory hurt peace prospects, Akiva Eldar reports.
For their far gentler criticism of Israel’s occupation policy than that expressed by President Barack Obama, the former heads of the Shin Bet security service who starred in the [Oscar nominated] documentary The Gatekeepers were castigated by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren. If, instead of making his historic speech before young Israelis at the Jerusalem Conference Center, Obama had chosen to speak at the Knesset about the settlements damaging peace prospects and the forgiving attitude adopted by the Israeli establishment toward settlers who violate the law, one can easily imagine the volume of jeers he would have encountered from the Likud and the HaBayit HaYehudi party.
Minister Limor Livnat would have certainly been hard-pressed to conceal her expression of loathing at the sound of the words, “neither occupation nor expulsion are the answer.” And just imagine how the Minister of Housing, the settler Uri Ariel, would have reacted to the words of an “American gentile” in the Israeli Knesset, that “given the demographics west of the Jordan River (Obama did no use the terms Judea and Samaria, A.E.), the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.”
One may assume that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not pleased to hear Obama quote former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who said before the pullout from Gaza that one cannot maintain a Jewish and democratic state and at the same time rule over the entire Land of Israel. Netanyahu undoubtedly did not appreciate Obama’s decision to quote left-wing author David Grossman, who lost his son in the second Lebanon war and said that “a peace of no choice … must be approached with the same determination as one approaches a war of no choice.”
Had he spoken in the Knesset, Obama could not have afforded an appeal to the Israeli public above the heads of his hosts, the Knesset members, urging the citizens to demand that their political leaders take the necessary risks involved in making peace and telling them that their “voices must be louder than the extremists who would drown them out”. Some of the representatives of those extremists would have been sitting in the audience, at the table reserved for government ministers.
