How long will it take before the administration’s Middle East team gets its act together? After seeing 10 months of diplomatic missteps, our patience is beginning to wear thin.
In that period, we have seen one-sided demands on Israel, most concerning Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Then, this week, we saw some awkward backpedaling on the part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
One could even accuse her of saying one thing while standing with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem, and something else to the Arab world over subsequent days.
Not long ago, the administration appeared to throw down the gauntlet, demanding a halt to all settlement activity, even to so-called natural growth.
All this did was stir up trouble.
Israel was not willing to immediately accede to this demand. The Palestinians, for whom settlements had never been a make-or-break issue, all of a sudden cared more about settlements than anything else. And now the Palestinian Authority says a building freeze is a precondition to peace talks.
As our story on page 14 explains, Clinton created further confusion when she appeared to moderate the U.S. position on settlements. During a just-concluded Middle East swing, she offered strong support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s compromise of limiting, but not halting, settlement construction, calling it “unprecedented.”
But days later in Cairo, she questioned the “legitimacy” of settlements, said U.S. policy toward settlements “had not changed” and added that settlement construction should be halted “forever.” Yet she still called Netanyahu’s proposal “positive movement forward.”
Such mixed signals worry regional leaders, and anger the Palestinians who, having tasted U.S. sympathy for the first time, must be loathe to return to what they saw as a lack of U.S. evenhandedness.
Given the long, torturous history of the Middle East peace process, there is no excuse for these mistakes. Too much is at stake. Just this week, off the coast of Cyprus, Israeli navy commandos seized a tanker carrying tons of armaments bound for Hezbollah.
While we are relieved these particular weapons will never threaten Israeli lives, a military spokesman called the seized cache a “drop in the ocean.”
That’s how dangerous the region is for Israel. As such, Obama administration officials must get their policies straight. And while they are at it, let’s hope they remember that Israel remains our truest ally in the Middle East.