Until the end of July, the Obama administration had been signaling that the mid-August visit of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, would be the occasion for the roll-out of a major U.S. initiative for brokering a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the weeks immediately preceding the visit, the White House scaled back expectations. On August 18, the two presidents conducted a joint press conference. At the moment in the proceedings when President Obama might have announced something substantive about the initiative, he instead treated us to the following:

George Mitchell has been back and forth repeatedly; he will be heading back out there next week. And my hope is that we are going to see not just movement from the Israelis, but also from the Palestinians around issues of incitement and security, from Arab states that show their willingness to engage Israel. If all sides are willing to move off of the rut that we’re in currently, then I think there is an extraordinary opportunity to make real progress.

This statement is a bland reiteration of the doctrine of collective responsibility that the administration formulated shortly after the inauguration: everybody, including the Arab states, has to pitch in to get the bus out of the ditch. In the intervening six or seven months, the president has been doing nothing in the Middle East if not energetically wedging planks under the wheels of the peace process. In addition to dispatching George Mitchell to the region numerous times, he himself delivered his famous speech from Cairo. President Mubarak described this as a “great, fantastic address,” which “removed all doubts about the United States and the Muslim world.” Many seasoned observers agree with Mubarak: American credibility has been restored. Be that as it may, the speech was intended to inaugurate an era of multilateral negotiation, which, however, has not materialized. In fact, the bus might even be more deeply mired than before all of this credibility building began.

With respect to the Israelis, the administration has been crystal clear about what is expected from them: they must freeze settlement building. For many weeks, Washington has been claiming that there is “progress” in the negotiations with the Netanyahu government over the freeze, but a mutually acceptable formula has so far eluded the two sides. This negotiation has already eaten up valuable time and slowed momentum. The administration, however, can console itself by saying that it always expected difficulty with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and an agreement will emerge sooner or later. Moreover, as President Obama recently told American Jewish leaders who met with him at the White House, putting some daylight between Washington and Jerusalem is in the interest of both parties, precisely because it bolsters U.S. credibility with the Arabs. One might disagree with the president on this particular point. Nevertheless, by the standards of his own terms of reference, prolonged disagreement with Israel is not an obvious indication of an imperiled regional strategy.

The same cannot be said with respect to the Arab response to the president’s overtures. U.S. credibility, if it truly has been enhanced, certainly has not generated the expected cooperation. In fact, the Arab states have treated the president to an extraordinary rejection of his basic conception. Until just a few weeks ago, the administration was still pressing Arab states to agree to some gestures toward Israel that might arm the president with something significant to announce during the Mubarak visit. It received a resounding “No” from the Saudis, Jordanians, Kuwaitis, and Egyptians—from, that is, the closest Arab allies of the United States.

It is not all that surprising that the Arab states did not feel obliged to get out and help George Mitchell push the peace process along. What is surprising, however, was the public nature of their rejection. They made no attempt to paper over differences in order to protect and strengthen the president’s supposed credibility. Instead, they openly undercut him. The Saudis led the way in announcing that the Obama doctrine of collective responsibility for peace was flawed at its core. While meeting with Secretary of State Clinton at the end of July, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told the press baldly that “incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and, we believe, will not lead to peace.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The president’s advisors told him that his Cairo address, especially combined with open pressure on the Israelis, would generate a wave of Arab cooperation.

Obviously, that expectation was unfounded. This stark fact begs the question: What changes in conception must the administration make in order to recover? Here’s one, modest recommendation: Drop the notion of brokering a comprehensive peace while reaching out to enemies and antagonists. This idea rests on the erroneous conception of a shared Arab interest in resolving the conflict with Israel. Anyone with a deep knowledge of Arab history knows that collective Arab interest is a shallow fiction propagated by a discredited ideology, pan-Arabism. Thirty years ago, Fouad Ajami announced the demise of this ideology in his famous Foreign Affairs article, “The End of Pan-Arabism.” Although it died in the Middle East itself, the ideology continues to influence the thinking of Western diplomats and intelligence officers, who insist on using it as the prism for viewing Arab state behavior with respect to Israel. They fail to realize that the more the Arabs talk about a common interest, the further it is from a reality. In our own political culture we are attuned to the fact that loud calls to patriotism and solidarity are designed to brand somebody else as disloyal and selfish. Similarly, we need to train our ears to recognize that calls to Arab solidarity are indicative of discord, not unity.

No Arab states see any advantage to getting more deeply involved than they already are. Saudi Arabia, the most influential Arab state, has never been a major player in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and certainly does not want to start now. However, the demands of Arab politics forbid the Saudis from openly admitting as much. In order to demonstrate concern for the Palestinians, protect their leading status in the Arab system, and yet remain aloof they have formulated a position—the Arab Peace Initiative—that effectively states: “Once you guys get the bus out of the rut, we will pay for the gas.” They have stuck to this position for nearly a decade.

It’s about time we started building our strategies around the Saudis as they actually are rather than as we would wish them to be. For President Obama to have repeatedly and publicly called on the Saudi monarch to get behind the bus and push was to court embarrassment and failure at a moment when the president needs to build true credibility, which will be generated more by successful initiatives than by “great, fantastic” speeches.

When the president decided on his doctrine of collective responsibility, he was probably unaware that Cairo, despite enjoying good relations with Riyadh, has a limited interest in seeing the Saudis at the center of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. The Mubarak regime, precisely because it is the leading Arab interlocutor with Israel, enjoys a special status in the international system. Direct Saudi involvement would threaten the Egyptian role, thanks to the massive resources at the command of the Saudis, to say nothing of the preferential access that they enjoy both in Washington and in European capitals.

Fortunately for Mubarak, the Saudis don’t covet that role anyway. Consequently we have recently witnessed the rather odd spectacle of Cairo, which already has a peace agreement with Israel, standing together with Riyadh, which does not have one, in a staunch rejection of the American call for Arab peace overtures to Israel. Both regimes can dress up their self-interested positions as a shared commitment to Arab national solidarity and Palestinian rights. We shouldn’t be so naïve as to believe that a commitment to solidarity is the true engine of their shared policy. Moreover, if our closest Arab allies cannot work together in support the administration’s multilateral project, what can we expect from hostile states like Syria, who have bad relations with Israel, the United States, as well as with Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

By seeking a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict while simultaneously reaching out to the enemies of the United States, the Obama administration has invited an unflattering comparison with the Carter administration. It will be recalled that President Carter’s first foray into peacemaking was an initiative to re-convene the Geneva Conference, which the Soviet Union co-chaired, in an effort to bring all of the Arab states together in a process with Israel. That particular scheme ran afoul of Egyptian state interests. Sadat, who truly sought to end the conflict with Israel, was mortified by Carter’s initiative, which would have given the Soviet Union, and lesser Arab states, such as Syria, a formal position from which to hold Egyptian interests hostage.

Much to the chagrin of the Carter administration, Sadat stopped confiding in Washington and opened up a secret bilateral channel with Israel. When President Carter first got wind of the Egyptian gambit, he reacted with consternation. Egypt was refusing to read from the pan-Arab script written in Washington. To his credit, however, Carter came around and dealt with the Egypt that he had rather than the one that he had wanted. Ironically, it was Sadat’s rejection of Carter’s pan-Arabism that afforded the American president the opportunity to broker the Camp David Accords, his greatest foreign policy achievement.

President Carter blindly shook the tree until a plumb fell into his lap. The fact that it all worked out in the end is hardly a vindication of his strategic conception—especially when one remembers that Iran blew apart in the meantime. From that shock to his worldview, Carter never recovered. Developments in Iran are again threatening to shake up the region. Let us hope that President Obama will be quicker to read the Middle East as it actually is rather than the pan-Arab fiction that his advisors penned for him.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

Summer is upon us, and MESH has asked its members to recommend books for summer reading. (For more information on a book, or to place an order with Amazon through the MESH bookstore, click on the book title or cover.) And now that you have other reading, MESH takes our first vacation since we launched back in December 2007. Action will resume on August 10.

Daniel Byman :: Kill Khalid by Australian journalist Paul McGeough (New Press, 2009) offers a riveting account of the bungled Israeli assassination attempt against Khalid Mishal in Amman in 1997. McGeough also explores the rise of Hamas and the emergence of Mishal as one of its leaders. Kill Khalid is extremely readable and draws heavily on interviews of many of the key figures. McGeough also provides an interesting account of Hamas after its victory over Fatah in elections in 2006. I would have liked more on Hamas’ rise inside the West Bank and Gaza before 2006, and the focus on Mishal means that several other key players do not receive enough attention. But these criticisms are simply a desire to have an already long book be even longer. McGeough’s occasional sympathy for Hamas will annoy some readers, but it would be a shame if this turns them off the book completely, as he offers plenty of interesting stories and provocative thoughts about a group that is not well understood in the United States.

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Mark T. Clark :: Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez propose a provocative thesis in their book, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2007). They propose that, contrary to conventional historiography, the Soviets provoked the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt in order to destroy Israel’s nascent nuclear program. The conventional wisdom holds that while the Soviets may have carelessly provoked the war (by baselessly charging the Israelis with preparing for war against Syria and Egypt), they nonetheless acted to constrain their Arab clients once war began. Ginor and Remez demonstrate conclusively that this interpretation has more to do with holding to certain assumptions than in attending to all the details that have become available through careful research, interviews, some archival work, and unintended admissions by Soviet officials and participants in the war. The authors are continuing their research beyond the book and will present their latest findings at ASMEA’s annual conference in October 2009. But you will have to read this book first.

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Michael Doran :: My favorite recent book on the Middle East is not on the Middle East at all: Peter Rodman, Presidential Command (Knopf, 2009). Although it is a study of U.S. national security policy making, it is highly relevant to students of the Middle East, not least because it presents an original interpretation of Bush 43’s Middle East policies—one that is considerably at odds with the reigning narrative. Let me revise that last sentence: “an original and critical interpretation….” Rodman was no cheerleader. The entire book is rewarding, but, if nothing else, read the Bush 43 chapter—personally, I found it riveting. Fair warning: the book does have a dispassionate, academic quality that makes it less than ideal as fun, beach entertainment. It is, however, essential reading. Rodman, who was a member of MESH, died unexpectedly last year. He was a special man. In his honor, be sure to read the eulogy by Kissinger at the beginning.

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Adam Garfinkle :: Lawrence Rosen, a Princeton anthropologist (also a lawyer and an early MacArthur “genius” awardee), has a “big idea” in his newest book, Varieties of Muslim Experience (University of Chicago Press, 2008). The idea concerns the intensely personal, relational nature of what he calls Islamo-Arab society. The metaphor that holds it all together is that of the arabesque. Rosen tries to illustrate the workings of this big idea with regard to politics, law, science, terrorism, portraiture, how we understand Ibn Khaldun, and more.

Some of these applications have appeared in Rosen’s earlier work, and some of his attempts at interpreting the big idea are more persuasive (to me, anyway) than others. Still, despite the occasional repetition and the density of the some of the writing, this is worth a look. If you take a social anthropological approach to the Middle East as the beginning of wisdom, as I have done now for several decades, you will have more patience for Rosen’s kind of writing and way of thinking than if you have limited yourself to IR/poli-sci-fi kinds of writing. So this book is not for everyone, but it is stimulating. It provides new ways to support arguments some of us make on related but different grounds (about the fit between Arab political culture and political pluralism, for example). Above all, perhaps, it really does traffic in a big idea, which, for anthropologists these days, if not for other social scientists, is depressingly rare.

Ah, but will it hold your attention at the beach or at poolside? If you’re worried it might not, maybe bring along Tom Robbins’ new one, B is for Beer, just in case.

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Michael Horowitz :: Assaf Moghadam’s book, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of Suicide Attacks (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), is an excellent read. Moghadam is a leading expert in the study of Al Qaeda and suicide attacks and his expertise shines through. He discusses the rise and spread of suicide terrorism, and specifically looks at how the Salafi Jihad movement has spearheaded the spread of suicide terror tactics. Well-researched and argued, this book deserves a close read by all scholars interested in questions of terrorism, Al Qaeda, and the way globalization is influencing the trajectory of terrorist groups.

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Josef Joffe :: “Two states” between the Jordan and the Mediterranean are back en vogue, what with Obama demanding it, and Netanyahu grudgingly conceding it. Dividing up a beach towel, which this slice of 50 miles essentially amounts to, would be hard enough for two friends. It is, unless the Lord intervenes, impossible between two foes. There is only one alternative that is worse: a “one-state solution.” Benny Morris, in his book One State, Two States (Yale University Press, 2009), tells us why, in all the gloomy and bloody details—quotes, facts, and all.

The Israelis, who made the horrible mistake of settling “Judea” and “Samaria” post-1967, have finally come around to “two states” in principle. The Arabs have not, or as Morris puts it: The “Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, from inception and ever since, has consistently regarded Palestine as innately, completely, inalienably and legitimately ‘Arab’ and Muslim and has aspired to establish in it a sovereign state under its rule covering all of the country’s territory.” So, it’s not just Tulkarm, but Tel Aviv, too. There is no place here for the Jews, and that, as Morris adds, Arabs believe “in the deepest fibers of their being.” Could this ever change? It has—but that happened in another country which was once fiercely irredentist. Germans have yielded Alsace-Lorraine and those lands that are now Polish, Russian and Czech not just in writing, but also in their hearts. But then look at all the “intervening variables:” Cold War, nuclear weapons, European integration, population transfers numbering 9 million, and, above all, a liberal-democratic polity where Hitler once ruled. This is how you change a zero-sum into a non-zero sum game. Morris makes for melancholy summer reading, but he cuts skillfully through layers of wishful thinking and sloppy analysis to lay bare the core of the Hundred Years War. Germans and French have fought over Alsace-Lorraine a lot longer—since Louis XIV.

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Mark N. Katz :: Former CIA analyst Emile Nakhleh lays out a strong case for how the United States not only should, but could improve relations with the Muslim world in A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World (Princeton University Press, 2008). In 162 pages, he points out that radical Islamism is a minority phenomenon within the Muslim world, and argues that the U.S. must recognize this in order to isolate it. The most interesting—and controversial—part of the book are his ten recommendations for guiding future American foreign policy toward the Muslim world. I assigned this book as a text for my “War on Terror” seminar earlier this summer, and it proved highly successful in engaging the interest of my students as well as provoking discussion and debate over his policy recommendations in particular. As my students showed, not everyone will agree with these. But Nakhleh’s book is an excellent starting point for how to reorient American foreign policy away from a narrow focus of how to defeat radical Islam to a more effective approach that seeks to discredit it.

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Walter Laqueur :: Christopher Caldwell is a columnist of the Financial Times. There have been several dozen books in various languages about the political, cultural, and social changes taking place in Europe (and about to occur in the years to come), but Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (Doubleday, 2009) is still useful, based on wide reading and shrewd observation. This levelheaded book has its weaknesses, it is far better informed about European reactions to Muslim immigration than on European Islam and the differences within Muslim communities and between various countries. But it still deserves to be read in view of the great resistance in Europe to accept the fact that important changes have taken place, and confusion over what to do about it.

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Michael Mandelbaum :: The subtitle of Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007)—a compelling, smoothly written history based on prodigious research—announces one of its themes: the connection between the world’s strongest country and the world’s most turbulent region is an old one. It dates back, in fact, to the earliest years of the republic: the war with the Barbary pirates in the latter part of the 18th century and the outset of the 19th counts as the first war waged by the independent United States. (The war was won, but only after years of setbacks—perhaps a portent for our own time.) For their chronic naivete about the Middle East, therefore, Americans have no good excuse.

The book’s title expresses another of its principal themes. The American encounter with the region has had three distinct although overlapping sources. Power, of course, is the principal moving force of international affairs, and as the United States has grown stronger over the decades its entanglement in the Middle East, as in other parts of the world, has deepened. Because Americans have always been religiously inclined people, the Holy Land has held a special attraction for them. The commitment of American Protestants to the return of the Jews to their ancestral homeland goes back, for example, to the 18th century. And Americans have consistently held beliefs about the region based on their own wishes and hopes rather than on the realities of the societies there. If one of the bases of recent American policy in the Middle East—the belief in Arab democracy—turns out to be a fantasy, it will have a long pedigree.

One other theme from this rich account deserves mention. For religious, self-interested, and altruistic reasons Americans have tried, for more than two hundred years, to do good in the land of the Bible, the pyramids, and the mosque. More often than is commonly realized, as Oren documents, they have succeeded. The low public standing of the United States among most Middle Easterners (Israelis conspicuously excepted) for the last six decades therefore provides powerful supporting evidence for the proposition that no good deed goes unpunished.

For those interested in these three themes, and in putting the occupation of Iraq, the confrontation with Iran, and the sputtering but apparently immortal Arab-Israeli peace process in their proper historical context, Power, Faith, and Fantasy is the book to read.

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Joshua Muravchik :: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press, 2007) is simply a great work of literature. How she does it, I cannot imagine since, as we learn in the book, English is apparently her sixth language, and they are disparate ones. Move over, Joseph Conrad. The prose is beautiful. The recounting of her childhood and coming of age in Somalia and other Third World venues is gripping. No less so, her flight to the West and her encounter with, and gradual assimilation of, its culture. Hirsi Ali is a significant political figure, but never mind the politics. This is a magnificent tale of human growth and triumph.

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Michael Reynolds :: Summer reading and Tolstoy are mutually exclusive, but I urge readers to make an exception for Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat (Dodo Press edition, 2009), and not because Tolstoy was an Orientalist (he studied Oriental languages at Kazan University). Hadji Murat is a short and fast-paced novel set in the Great Caucasus War which Russia waged against the Avars, Chechens, Lezgis, Circassians and other mountain peoples of the North Caucasus in the 19th century. Drawing on his own experiences fighting in the Caucasus, Tolstoy illustrates an empire at war with tribal peoples.

The novel’s namesake and central character is an Avar notable trapped between an Imperial Russian Army seeking to subdue the mountaineers and an Islamic resistance movement led by Imam Shamil, who grimly seeks to upend traditional mountaineer society in the name of religion. As a classic work of literature, Hadji Murat explores universal themes, including the dynamics that drive men to fight and sacrifice their lives. It reveals, among other things, the complexity of modern insurgencies, where bureaucracies clash with clan structures, trust is impossible, and religious, ethnic, and family ties all compete for the loyalties of individuals, with often fatal consequences.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: Amir Taheri, executive editor-in-chief of Iran’s Kayhan newspaper prior to the “Islamic revolution,” and now living in the West, is an unalloyed opponent of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution (Encounter Books, 2009), written for a popular audience in clear prose, doesn’t mince words in its rejection of the current regime. The Islamic Republic’s claims to Islamic purity are debunked; its insistence on world conquest exposed; and its brutality to its own people denounced. Taheri cites widespread internal clerical opposition to the regime, including quotes from ayatollahs that the Islamic Republic is “a conspiracy against God and believers,” and “the rule of the corrupt, by the corrupt, for the corrupt.” The entire sordid history of the Islamic Republic is recounted in detail and assessed. Taheri makes a strong case that the Iranian people deserve better. In sum, a lively read by a knowledgeable partisan.

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Raymond Tanter :: Alireza Jafarzadeh’s The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) charts a unique path among commentary on Iran by directly linking the Iranian regime’s ideology with its quest for nuclear weapons. Jafarzadeh’s knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program is expansive: In August 2002, as spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, he revealed the existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, where the Iranian regime had clandestinely built cavernous centrifuge enrichment halls. In The Iran Threat, Jafarzadeh examines the rise of President Ahmadinejad and the corresponding Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) control of Iran’s nuclear program. As the IRGC and its clerical ally Ayatollah Khamenei consolidate power following the fraudulent re-election of Ahmadinejad in June, it is worth revisiting Jafarzadeh’s incisive work on the Iranian president’s background and the ideology that underpins his domestic and international policies.

American presidents have been trying to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict since the days of Truman. Sooner or later, every one of them has learned a harsh lesson about the limits of American influence. There is no reason to believe that President Obama’s experience will be any different. In fact, his opening gambit in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking suggests that his own lesson may already be upon him.

In his Cairo speech, the President said that “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable,” and he called for a halt to Israeli settlements, which he deemed illegitimate. His advisers have repeatedly explained that this policy includes an end to so-called “natural growth,” meaning construction and population expansion within the boundaries of existing settlements. Obama’s ban on natural growth nullified an understanding that President Bush had reached with then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis agreed not to appropriate any new Palestinian territory; in return, the Bush administration gave the nod to natural growth within existing settlement blocs.

Out of a mix of motives, Obama reversed this policy. On a personal level, he finds settlements morally offensive. He likely considers them to be a long-term, demographic impediment to a two-state solution. Their continuous growth underscores the impotence of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, sapping him of legitimacy, and validating the hard-line arguments of Hamas. Previous presidents and secretaries of state have held similar views, but they expressed their concerns in a less dramatic manner. Obama chose to take an early, categorical, and public stance in order to launch a shot across the bow of Binyamin Netanyahu. In the 1990s, Netanyahu’s recalcitrance had been a thorn in the side of the Clinton administration. The former Clintonites advising Obama no doubt relished the idea of immediately knocking Netanyahu back on his heels so as to begin negotiations from a position of strength.

In addition, Obama also sought to make an impression on the Arab world. Taking an unyielding, principled stand would, he reasoned, restore the credibility of the United States. According to mainstream Democratic analysis, George W. Bush had abandoned the role of “honest broker” in the conflict. Moving too close to Israel, he lost the trust of the Arabs. Armed with copious polling data, Obama’s advisers argued that the Palestinian issue was the sine qua non for redressing the balance. Strike a powerful note on the settlement issue, they told the President, and the Arabs will gravitate toward you in response.

Neither the Israelis nor the Arabs, however, have reacted according to this script. Netanyahu fought back with unexpected subtlety. When he visited Washington in mid-May, the White House greeted him with a remarkable display of influence on Capitol Hill. It lined up key supporters of Israel to deliver a consistent and stern warning to the new prime minister: “Do you really want to fight over settlements with one of the most popular American presidents in living memory?” Netanyahu was certainly shaken by this power play, but hardly coerced. In a step that the White House did not foresee, he quickly ran to capture the moral high ground in Israeli politics.

Shortly after Obama’s address from Cairo, Netanyahu delivered a speech of his own. In it, he tacked to the political center, presenting himself to the Israeli public as the representative of a mainstream consensus on national security. Approximately two-thirds of all Israelis support the position that their prime minister staked out. On the specific issue of settlements, Netanyahu reaffirmed the basic lines of the Bush-Sharon agreement: natural growth, yes; settlement expansion, no. “We have no intention to build new settlements or set aside land for new settlements,” he said. “But there is a need to have people live normal lives and let mothers and fathers raise their children like everyone in the world.” The warm reaction to the speech in Israel gave Netanyahu renewed political capital. He now turned to his critics in Washington with a warning of his own: “Do you really want to fight with three quarters of the Israeli public over the building of kindergartens?”

Obama is now on the horns of a dilemma. If he backs down on natural growth, he lays himself open to Arab claims that he is a hypocrite. On the other hand, if he sticks to his guns, he will become Israel’s senior city planner, rejecting building permits for a school one day, and a new home addition the next. The president can certainly win the fight over building permits, but he must already be asking himself whether it is really worth the prize. Victory will eat up at least a year of precious time, and it will not have a strategic impact.

If Obama found Netanyahu difficult to coerce, he failed to charm the Israeli Left. Israeli pundits have noted the conspicuous absence of a pro-Obama coalition on the Israeli political scene—this, despite the fact that the Israeli Left detests the settlements as much as or more than Obama himself. Many Israelis simply do not understand how the country’s security dilemmas fit into Obama’s larger scheme. With respect to the issue of gravest concern, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Obama’s strategy remains worryingly opaque. And with respect to the Palestinian question, many Israelis are skeptical about the power of any American president to overcome the Hamas-Fatah split, and to create conditions on the Palestinian side that will achieve a two-state solution capable of guaranteeing Israeli security. In a context fraught with uncertainty, Obama is inviting the Israeli Left to join with him in a fight against Netanyahu in order to achieve… well, what precisely?

In addition to the vagueness of his goals, Obama’s body language has dealt the Israeli Left a weak hand. The Cairo speech cast Israel as a bit player in a U.S.-Muslim drama. The President, stressing his Muslim ancestry, did not take the time to fly to Jerusalem, where he might have reasoned with the Israeli public about the value to it of abandoning the Bush-Sharon agreement. Instead, his advisers denied flatly (and falsely) that such an agreement had ever existed. As a consequence of this disingenuousness, many Israelis fear that the administration aims to buy goodwill from the Muslim world by distancing itself from Israel, and they wonder whether settlements are not simply the first of many concessions that will be demanded. With such doubts swirling in the air, it is difficult for the Israeli Left to trumpet the Obama agenda.

The White House has sacrificed some credibility on the Israeli side, but it surely must have recouped its losses by garnering Arab goodwill. Think again. Today, the peace process is on hold until the settlement question is resolved. Mahmoud Abbas has refused to sit down with Netanyahu in direct negotiations, insisting instead that the Israelis must first implement the total settlement freeze that Obama himself has demanded. This is a wise tactic. Were Abbas to negotiate with the Israelis today, they would simply demand reciprocal concessions. The Americans, however, have already made a public commitment on settlements, so why not pocket it, and hold Washington to its word?

Meanwhile, Washington has simultaneously been attempting to mobilize the Arab states—particularly the Saudis. President Obama and Secretary Clinton have exhorted King Abdullah to take public steps toward normalizing relations with Israel. So far, this effort has registered no successes. The president’s interest in involving the Saudis arises from his realization that the Hamas-Fatah split means that Abbas does not have the power to deliver on an agreement that would guarantee the legitimate security concerns of the Israelis. Hamas controls Gaza, and it will not submit to Abbas’ authority, especially with respect to the key issue of abandoning terrorism.

Hamas is the elephant in the room of the peace process. Washington seeks Saudi Arabia’s help in weakening it. Riyadh could become the linchpin in an Arab support network around Abbas, in order to help shift the balance of power against Hamas. In addition, Obama hopes to offset Israeli skepticism by energizing a normalization process with the Arab states—one that will run parallel to the Palestinian-Israeli track. The Israelis complain to Washington that it has singled them out for censure while making no corresponding demands on the Arab side. “If we are to freeze settlements,” they ask, “what will the other side provide in return?” Washington looks to Riyadh to help formulate a response.

The Saudis, however, have only limited incentive to help Obama with this problem. They and their public do not regard an Israeli moratorium on settlement growth as a concession; it is, rather, a moral imperative and a Palestinian right. Washington is asking them to reward the Israelis dramatically for returning what is, in their view, stolen property.

But Obama’s problem with the Saudis runs deeper than the settlement question. There is a larger, strategic question at play. It’s worth asking whether Riyadh can really offset Hamas in a meaningful way, and whether, in its own view, it stands to gain from diving headlong into the midst of an intractable dispute that has persisted for more than sixty years. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tar baby. No sober Arab leader could relish the idea of taking responsibility for developments in such an unpredictable and unmanageable arena—particularly now, when peace is hardly in the offing. Quite understandably, the Saudis much prefer to occupy the politically safe position of Arab umpire: they sit on the sidelines and critique the Americans. They quietly help out here and there to keep the game from falling apart, but they don’t want to be players.

The President’s advisers promised him that taking a principled stand on settlements would generate goodwill in the Arab world. There is no doubt that the Cairo speech struck a chord with many Arabs. But goodwill of that sort is not a strategic commodity. Even a popular honest broker cannot reshape the iron interests of the parties on the ground, none of whom see much benefit in taking risks to achieve a goal that they do not really believe in. Many Western diplomats tell themselves that peace is nearly at hand, but the parties on the ground—Arab and Jewish alike—are highly skeptical. And for good reason. The power of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria, supported by Iran, looms in the background. It is highly unlikely that, in the next four years, a major breakthrough will take place. In order to maintain good relations with Washington, the leaders in the region will certainly play along with the Obama administration. But the name of their game is not “Peacemaking” but, rather, “Shift the Blame.” Its object is to take positions that paint one’s rivals as the real obstructionists in the eyes of Washington.

The central strategic challenge for the United States in the Middle East is diminishing the power of the Iranian-led alliance. The peace process is not as effective a tool for addressing this challenge as the administration believes, because the disarray of Fatah and the power of Hamas (not to mention the other rejectionists in the region) will not allow significant, forward movement. Everyone in the region knows this, though few will say so openly. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates are today focused on one key question: Is Washington going to go the distance with the Iranians, and thwart their nuclear program? Obama’s Cairo speech did not provide an answer. It bought a modicum of goodwill from Arab publics on the settlement question, but it did not address the crucial strategic question that is keeping Middle Eastern leaders awake at night.

The American engine is revving loudly, but the administration cannot put the car in gear, because significant obstacles block the way. President Obama will soon realize, if he hasn’t already, that the map that his advisers handed him does not match the terrain of the region. He can take some consolation in the fact that every president before him has reached a similar point in the road. Some of them, like Eisenhower, developed new maps as they went along. Others, like Carter, never did. Their place in history has, in part, been determined by their ability to chart a new course.

Israel America Academic Exchange (IAAE) is a new organization that sponsors educational missions to Israel for American scholars in the fields of political science, international relations, international law, international economic development, modern history, and Middle East studies. By special arrangement, participants in the inaugural mission (June 22-29) have been invited to guest-post their impressions and assessments. Bruce Jentleson is professor of public policy and political science at Duke University. He is also a member of MESH.

From Bruce Jentleson

Central to our discussions was the debate over force and diplomacy as Israeli strategies, so I’ll focus on that for this post.

Is it the case that the lessons of the last 10-15 years are that force has worked, both as compellence and deterrence, and diplomacy has not? This was the dominant argument we heard from Israeli speakers. While the speaker selection was short of representative, I know from other interactions and reading that this perspective has become more prevalent. It also is a view our American group debated among ourselves.

Four main parts to the argument:

1. The Gaza war was intended to impose substantial costs on Hamas and to deter further attacks on Israel. It achieved both; e.g., attacks from Gaza are down since the war.
2. The same regarding Hezbollah and the 2006 Lebanon war: Look at the northern front and how quiet Hezbollah has been, and how weakened the recent elections showed it to be in Lebanese politics.
3. Oslo didn’t work; Camp David 2000 was another instance of the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity; unilateral withdrawals, both Barak in Lebanon and Sharon in Gaza, gave land but didn’t bring pace; plus the recent stories swirling about Olmert ostensibly offering even concessions on Jerusalem. Arafat was an essentialist; his successors may have more will but lack capacity; Hamas is ideological.
4. The status quo is not great for Israel, but it’s tolerable. Risk aversion, both security and politics, says keep relying on military power. Be sufficiently willing to negotiate to check off that box for the United States and the international community but not much more. Don’t antagonize the political coalition on which your power (read Netanyahu’s) depends.

An alternative analysis:

• Gaza: The evidence is more mixed and uncertain than claimed. On the one hand we were told of how few rockets had been launched, on the other of how there’d been a recent uptick. At minimum, six months is hardly enough of an empirical base on which to attribute durable deterrence success. The criteria for durability is not some out-there notion of the long-term, but it also can’t be so short term as to need to be “serviced” again with anything close to a comparable operation in the next year or two. Moreover, gains made need to be part of a net assessment that also takes into account costs incurred and gains made by the other side. One can see a strategic logic for Hamas by which the price it paid had value as (a) diversionary war, detracting attention from problems of its governance and re-igniting the enemy on which to increase its appeal (so lowering a negative source and increasing a positive one), and (b) playing into Israeli politics in ways that strengthen the Right, which in turn makes for strained relations w/the United States. The net assessment may still come out positive, but less dichotomously.
• 2006 Lebanon War: We do have three years of data, and it is a fact that the northern border has been quieter than in many years. That goes in the plus column, as does the demonstrated capacity to impose costs. But in the negative column: the Israeli military’s failure to prevail in this nonconventional warfare as a deterrence-weakening message; the failure to bring captured soldiers home alive; the political disarray that helped doom the Olmert government; and the further loss of international legitimacy as an instrumental and not just normative matter. Moreover, the causal link to Hezbollah’s June 2009 election performance is questionable. Hezbollah came out of the war strengthened. But it then overplayed its hand by unleashing its militias into Lebanese politics in 2007-08. Then as intervening variables in the run-up to the election, Saudi money for the coalition and, I’d at least postulate, the Obama effect made it more politically legitimate to at least not be anti-American.
• Lessons of Oslo, other diplomacy: George Kennan made the distinction between flaws of execution and flaws in the concept. The former means that the policy could have worked but was done poorly; the latter that it was inherently flawed. Oslo, et al., did have elements of the latter, but also plenty of the former, and on all sides (United States, Israel, Palestinians, others). It didn’t work—but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have worked. What would have happened if Rabin was not assassinated, given his domestic credibility and that he was having at least a degree of success in dealing with Arafat? And if the 1996 election, which Netanyahu won by less than 1 percent amidst the spoilers who got going on both sides, had come out differently? If the Clinton administration had been less accommodating and firmer against both sides playing both sides of the street? In the end, Arafat was the major problem, a Gromyko-like Mr. Nyet. He was never going to be a Mandela, but the essentialist analysis is too straight-line and dismissive of decision points and interactive dynamics along the way. As to Hamas, while it’s shown plenty of essentialism, it’s not clear that even this is fixed; see, e.g., the analysis of Khaled Meshal’s recent speech by Brig. Gen. (ret) Shlomo Brom.
• Deteriorating status quo: The domestic opportunity costs to Israel from the status quo were more graphic to me than ever before. See the economic analysis by Professor Dan Ben-David, Tel Aviv University and head of the Taub Center for Social Policy Research. Walk around and see and feel the rising societal power of the ultra-Orthodox, abetted by continuation of the Palestinian conflict both directly through the political utility of the enemy and indirectly as a distraction from the nation focusing on the threats to its balance of secularism and Jewish identity.
• Shifting regional strategic dynamics? While much is too soon to tell, there are signs that the strategic dynamics in the region may be shifting. Anti-fundamentalism is pushing back on many fronts in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The U.S.-Syria relationship has some traction. Perhaps Iran will come out of the current crisis more flexible. The Saudis and Arab League may be ready to make their peace initiative more than a piece of paper. Don’t know for sure, but the alignment of forces may potentially be more favorable than in a long time.
• Palestinians as a credible peace partner and viable state: This may not be the world’s hardest case for state-building, but it’s up there. Among the many challenges their leadership faces is better synching their maximalist positions on terms of a peace and their more limited capacities as yet to function as a viable state. This is tricky politically as well as in substantive policy terms. It likely will require various roles for various third parties. Plenty of work to be done here: the PA-Hamas talks being run by Egypt, security forces, the economy, lawlessness, spoilers. Not to be underestimated.

I’m still not ready to bet the next mortgage payment (non-subprime) on peace and security in the Middle East. But nothing we saw or heard has been sufficient to counter the Churchillian sense of a peace process still being the worst strategy except for all the others.

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