David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, discusses his article “Obama’s Middle East: Rhetoric and Reality;” the degenerating US Middle East policy from Obama’s Cairo speech to George Mitchell’s resignation and the end of the “peace process;” and how Obama’s too-clever-by-half speechmaking takes the place of authoritative policy declarations – based on his belief that words can be substituted for actions.
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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is David Bromwich and he teaches literature at Yale.
He is the Sterling Professor of Literature at Yale.
He's written on politics and culture for the New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books and other magazines.
He's the editor of Edmund Burke's Selected Writings on Empire, Liberty and Reform and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of On Liberty.
And he's got this new piece in the New York Review of Books called Obama's Middle East, Rhetoric and Reality.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you?
Fine, Scott.
Good to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And this is a very interesting piece.
It's about, well, Obama's big mouth and all the things he likes to say when he's waxing philosophical.
And then you sort of do this weird thing where you compare and contrast that with the reality of his policy, which is not the kind of thing we really see in media very much, David.
So thanks for that.
I was wondering, this Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so complicated.
I was wondering if you could try to give us, I guess, start with what he claimed that he wanted to do here and then really fill us in on the facts of the case, maybe work in the recent resignation of George Mitchell, for example, and then maybe we can get in the second segment more to what it all really means.
Okay, well, I'll just try to sketch the recent history of President Obama's attempt at engagement with the Israel-Palestine question and his attempt to help get Israeli consent to begin the existence of a Palestinian state.
That was a goal of his coming into the presidency, apparently.
And he had friends who were close to the sort of liberal secular side of the Palestinian cause, like Rashid Khalidi at University of Chicago, people he later pretty well pushed to the side and discounted in his official role as president.
But Obama's background is of some sympathy with the Palestinian cause, as well as very steady contact with Jewish Americans in Chicago, who were his early backers and supporters and, you know, a regular understanding of, you know, his own sympathy with Israel, which goes a long way back too.
So it really starts with the much heralded, much celebrated Cairo speech that he made in June 2009, at the university there in Cairo.
That was a speech about the whole situation of the Middle East and the coming of reforms that would change the face of the Arab world.
In a way, he predicted the sort of events we've been seeing in the last three or four months, which people are now calling the Arab Spring, but it did not take a great gift of prophecy to predict it.
Countries in question have a very large proportion of young people.
The young people are influenced by Western manners and to some extent by Western ideas of freedom, and they are dissatisfied with the autocracies, the despotic and authoritarian governments that are mainly in control in that part of the world.
So Obama, you know, registered in Cairo, two years ago, his sympathy with the liberalizing reformist cause in the Arab world.
He did not, unlike Bush, he did not suggest that use of arms by the US was a good way of showing that sympathy, but he didn't rule that out, I think, at the time either.
One of the biggest elements of his speech was a call for a settlement freeze by Israel, that they would not build or add to settlements they were then building in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.
This came to nothing in the end, because Obama did not have a plan for a sanction or penalty against Israel if it should refuse to freeze its settlements, and there were a series of sort of insults to his plea for an end to the settlements, when, you know, just at important moments of American policy making and publicity for this, the mayor of Jerusalem or some other important Israeli personage associated with the interior ministry or whatever, would announce, you know, 500 or 1000 new settlement blocks being approved.
The whole government is involved in this, including the former Labor member of the right-wing coalition, Barack, who has now formed his own party.
He's defected from the Labor party.
So, the settlement building went on, the Palestinians became disaffected, negotiations failed to emerge, and in this large-scale speech, again, a large ambitious effort to define what's going on in the Middle East that Obama gave on Thursday, May 19th, he again spoke about the importance of peace between Israel and the Palestinian factions who want to form a state.
He did not emphasize settlements this time, but he said that any Palestinian state would be based on the 1967 borders of Israel with mutually agreed land swaps going one way or another to compensate wherever those borders had become irregular now.
This seemed a very minor element in a sort of sweeping address by Obama, which didn't otherwise have a lot of detail, but the reaction from the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was explosive.
It turned out that he called Hillary Clinton just before the speech and told her that Obama better remove those words about 1967.
He let his anger be clear in a statement issued in Jerusalem right after the speech, saying that the 1967 borders were indefensible, and on May 20th, the day after, when he met with Obama, he made his displeasure clear.
So, you know, there's said to be yet another crisis between Israel and the United States, but it's not really much of a crisis.
The United States has not pledged to re-engage in negotiations.
Obama, since the resignation of his main negotiator, George Mitchell, on May 13th, seems to have lost interest in that, but somehow to be trying to push Israel to make a settlement now before the Arab Spring gets even further out of hand and threatens both Israeli and American interests.
Well, now, and about George Mitchell, he's a former senator.
He was the guy that brokered the peace deal in Northern Ireland that's held for years now, right?
Very little violence there for a decade or something, and this was a big deal that Obama appointed him, and this was going to be, you know, those neocons can go stew over at Commentary Magazine.
We're actually going to get something done here, and then what happened to this guy?
He just got completely hung out to dry?
Yes, I believe you're right.
The appointment of Mitchell showed the daring side of Obama's international politics, but the cautious or timid side, which is usually balanced against it in all his actions, came out with his giving Dennis Ross, who's been called the incarnation of the Israel lobby, an office in the White House and bringing Dennis Ross in on all negotiations with Israel.
It's very possible lots of details about what the Obama administration was up to were leaked by Ross to Israel.
He's that close to them, and, you know, it is said that both Hillary Clinton and Obama were closer in orientation to Mitchell, but they felt cramped or cabined or trapped by the fact that Ross was given a virtual veto within their plan of negotiation.
So, yeah, he had what you might call an imaginative and a free-minded person in charge of the Middle Eastern shuttle diplomacy, but meanwhile, he had this brakes named Dennis Ross, and in the end, Mitchell resigned.
Well, why would he put Dennis Ross there, then?
I mean, everybody knows this about Dennis Ross.
His aide, Robert Malley, wrote a thing for the New York Review of Books saying, hey, this is how me and Dennis Ross scotched the Camp David agreement in 2000.
I'm not sure you're right about Malley.
That would be worth checking on.
Malley...
Well, I'm overstating his case a little bit, but it's in there.
Malley's a participant in that, but he doesn't see eye to eye with Dennis Ross.
He's far more critical of the Likud stance, but in any case, I think it was self-protectiveness, which is, you know, a constant fact about Obama's political character that inhibits any political courage he might show.
Well, I'm sorry.
We're going to have to hold right there, David, and go out to this break.
It's David Bromwich from Yale University, New York Review of Books.
He's also got a great archive at the Huffington Post, and we're talking Israel policy.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with David Bromwich from Yale University and the New York Review of Books, many other places online.
We're talking about Israel policy, and I'm sorry, we're interrupted by the break there, but I guess what I was wondering was about, I guess if I could state it another way, you have this president come in.
He's got a ton of political capital for his first hundred days and all this.
He makes a huge deal about how we're serious this time.
I'm serious, and we're actually going to get this done.
He then hires Dennis Ross to help implement the thing.
That's just one example of stating these vast goals and then implementing it in a way where it can't be implemented.
I mean, telling Netanyahu, stop expanding the settlements, and with no threat of what might happen if you don't, well, what of course happened?
Even while they declared there was a freeze, there was no freeze.
They were still building settlements, and they're announcing new settlements right now during this controversy just to say, forget you guys to us.
I just wonder, it seems like, I mean, would you measure it the same way?
It just made a really bad investment of their political capital here.
It seems like if he had laid down the lot of Netanyahu and said, get out of the West Bank and lift the siege on the Gaza Strip, we're going to have a Palestinian state, then he could have got peace in the Middle East by re-election time in 2012.
Instead, all he's done is make everybody angry and do nothing but fail.
Yeah, you state it strongly, and I wouldn't say it that sharply.
That is, I don't think he could have locked in re-election 2012 by something he did about Israel that was done in a cleverer way.
But to say it plain, his Middle East policy, and in specific, because he has emphasized it, his policy toward Israel has been incoherent.
That is literally incoherent.
It does not hang together.
It has a superstructure of very fine-sounding and somewhat daring reformist intentions.
And I say daring, because even to speak these, earns Obama a lot of bad press from the fanatics for the Likud in Israel and in America.
On the other hand, if the superstructure is these noble and reformist intentions, the basis is very conventional conduct towards Israel.
So he was reaffirming the basis of the old conventional relationships when he took Dennis Ross, who was going to be an appointment in his administration anyway.
Ross began in some upper floor of the State Department.
But you know, Obama was advised, put him inside the White House to reassure Israel.
And I think that turned out to be a crucial move.
And if you ask me, given his intention to reform relations between Israel and the Palestinians, it was a mistake.
But he stuck with it.
Why did he do it?
He didn't want to cross the Israel lobby.
And he didn't want to seem hostile towards Israel, which can pull a lot of strings in America.
So I mean, that's what's going on in it.
And yet there is this purpose somewhere in him, still going, connected with the fortunes of the U.S. too.
He thinks it's not in America's interest to be seen as thwarting a Palestinian independence.
It's not in America's interest to be such a perfect backer of everything the expansionist Israeli right-wing coalition wants to do.
So he's caught in the middle, and it came out in the middle of his own confused, confused intentions and execution.
And it came out in the speech on Thursday.
What was surprising for those of us who followed it was that, you know, after that, he came back to speak at AIPAC on Friday.
And instead of backing down, which has been Obama's characteristic pattern, I misspoke.
What I really meant was, he actually reiterated the statement about 1967, said it has been the policy of all previous administrations, and he was trying to exert pressure on Israel as only a friend can do and so on.
So it's a very curious posture, but it does not involve a commitment to lead negotiations in any way.
I think that Obama has effectively abandoned that, at least until the 2012 elections, unless somebody else starts it.
Well, and I don't know all the specifics.
I'm hoping you do a little bit better.
But isn't it the case that in the first speech, he built in all these caveats about, you know, you don't have to work with Hamas, which, after all, is in control of the Gaza Strip?
He did not.
Actually, he did not.
Scott, he did not say that.
And that was an interesting omission.
Many people around him, including Dennis Ross and Netanyahu from a distance, would have wanted him to say, don't work with Hamas.
There's now the Palestinian unity government, Fatah and Hamas, have reconciled, making it harder for the United States to hold Israel's hand and say, you must negotiate with this unity government, since Israel categorically rejects negotiations with Hamas.
In the speech, Obama said, Hamas must give up its path of terror and so on.
But he did not speak categorically against the unity government, as Israel wanted him to.
He spoke, you know, rather generally and broadly against the idea of the U.N. recognition of Israel as a state, something that...
Palestine.
Excuse me, right, of Palestine as a state.
That's coming up in September.
And the Israelis are dreading that very much.
And Obama essentially indicated that the U.S. will not go along with that movement at the U.N.
But no, he didn't say all the things that the Israelis wanted to hear that would have been comforting.
And then he spoke the word 1967, which is understood as part of the whole understanding of what it means to negotiate about the West Bank.
But the word 1967 had been spoken less often than the word occupation and the word occupation less often than the euphemism disputed territories or disputed lands.
So he was going all the way into the explicit sort of thing that diplomats talk about, saying, as he said, publicly what we say privately anyway.
And again, this is I mean, this was a this was a step out into an exposed place.
Um, but there seems to be no action likely to follow it.
And it's it's it's this combination of apparent daring and then no, no evident place for follow through that that bewilders many of us about Obama, because it's not Machiavellian.
He does not gain points by saying the things and then do nothing.
He displeases his enemies as well as his friends by saying these risky things and then doing nothing.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm trying to remember who's great Tom Dispatch piece it was that chronicled, you know, Honduras and Hamid Karzai and Nouriel Maliki and, and, and I forget, 10 or 15 different examples of Obama laying down the law to whoever and then going, Oh, well, okay, never mind.
I'm afraid that's true.
And I think it has to do with a very deep mental quirk.
My way of putting it is that his words in his mind are actions.
Other people need to perform actions.
But for him, his words are the actions.
And once he said them, he's done what he was put here to do.
Now, that's a very weird way to think about words.
And it's a strange thing to have to deal with in a president who actually has some power of action.
Yeah.
Well, and especially it must seem strange to a professor of literature who's got a bit of understanding about the difference between words and a reality.
No, it yep.
It's much smarter than George W. Bush, really, when you put it that way.
You know, I'm not even going to handle that because they're so different.
And the problem they present to us as as leaders in international policy are so different.
I think Obama knows the stakes better than Bush does and has a better grasp of what's going on.
Bush had a coherent, but horrible policy.
We got to stop him.
Yeah, no, it is he he does not use authority in the way that would be necessary to change the direction of the policies.
Absolutely not.
Yeah.
Now, OK, so it seems to me that really nothing short of completely just somehow laying down the law to Netanyahu could possibly lead to a Palestinian state that really Netanyahu knows that he can get away with anything at this point.
Well, look at the earlier phase of the Cairo speech.
What could Obama have done?
It could have been made clear implicitly that if Israel defied the wish of the U.S. for a settlement freeze, the U.S. would not do things such as veto the U.N. resolution that condemned the occupation that happened in February of this year.
And we did them the kindness, if that's the word, of vetoing that resolution.
We could have just said, we're not going to stand up for you in these ways if you so act against our interests.
So that wouldn't be anything dramatic like withholding promised, you know, weapons, shipments or foreign aid.
But it would be saying you show yourself alongside us and we'll show ourselves alongside you.
But Obama has not wanted to do even that.
And of course, this characterizes his policy generally.
I mean, he did not penalize people who opposed him on health care either.
He doesn't work with sanctions or with loss of favor as a way of using his power.
All right.
Well, it's a good place to leave it.
We're out of time.
I'd love to talk more sometime, but we'll leave it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, certainly we will.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's David Bromwich.
He teaches literature at Yale, wrote a book all about Edmund Burke, who writes for The Huffington Post and New York Review Books.
