The Battle for Middle East Peace Features Barack Obama vs. Benjamin Netanyahu

    It’s not only that America under Barack Obama has come to realize that the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict constitutes one of the principal incubators for Islamism. It’s also that the United States – in order to convince the Iranians to cement a mutual compromise – needs to show the Iranians that a subsidence of that conflict is underway, that the US is taking things in hand, and that consequently anti-Americanism will regress in the Middle East and Iran accordingly will no longer be able to count on the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas to assure Iran’s own regional influence.

    Today, the "two-state solution" is one of the necessary paths to an agreement with Iran, this big deal without which the Americans will neither be able to exit the Iraqi and Afghan wasps’ nests nor get the Islamic Republic to renounce its nuclear ambitions. The creation of a Palestinian state has become such a strategic issue for Washington that even George Bush finally understood that the last year of his term. But what about the "Jewish lobby" will say all those, whether Anti-Semitic or not, who imagine that Israel controls the United States?

    The answer, first of all, is that Jewish-American organizations and the pro-Israel lobby (which are not the same thing) are no more influential than any other Washington lobby once there’s divergence between Israeli and American interests. That was quite obviously the case in 1956 and in 1991. We’ve seen it in the United States’ unshakable refusal to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Secondly, American Judaism is anything but monolithic.

    Like all American minorities, a majority of American Jews are Democrats. Close to 80 percent of them voted for Barack Obama. Seventy-two percent approve of his approach to the Middle East conflict, and, according to the same poll published by J Street, an organization that has established itself in the last year as a "pro-Israel and pro-peace movement" leader, seventy-six percent of American Jews support the idea of a settlement that revives the main lines of the Clinton plan, including a Palestinian state and a shared Jerusalem.

    While Barack Obama applies himself to changing the state of affairs between the United States and Islam, he is not making any break at all with American Judaism, which has learned, along with the rest of the country, not to see every Muslim as a terrorist. Eight years have passed since September 11, but it remains true that Washington no more rules the roost in Jerusalem than does Jerusalem in Washington.

    Heading the most right-wing government Israel has ever known, Benjamin Netanyahu is not suddenly going to convert to pacificism. However, apart from the fact that the Israeli army and economy are very dependent on the United States, he will have trouble resisting Barack Obama’s offensive. The latter is not limiting himself to pressuring the former. In a parallel process, the American president is integrating his diplomacy with the Saudi peace plan, a proposal for recognition of Israel by all the Arab League countries in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. Barack Obama wants to add an overall Israeli-Arab peace to the scales, vis-à-vis Netanyahu as much as the Iranians.