Dozens of people cheered candidate Barack Obama outside the Western Wall in Jerusalem as the senator from Illinois, donning a white skullcap, pledged to make an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal one of his highest priorities if he won the 2008 presidential election just four months ahead. Earlier that day, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Obama promised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he would “not waste a minute in brokering Middle East peace” when he is president.
Flash forward three years and President Obama is struggling even to bring the top players in the Arab-Israeli conflict to the negotiating table as he intervenes personally in the talks.
“It’s more vital than ever that both Israelis and Palestinians find a way to get back to the table and begin negotiating a process whereby they can create two states that are living side by side in peace and security,” Obama said following a meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan on Tuesday.
Obama is trying to generate a sense of urgency around the peace talks — stalled for the past eight months — as a wave of political uprisings sweeps across the Middle East and North Africa, threatening to destabilize the region.
“The United States has an enormous stake in this,” Obama said. “We will continue to partner to try to encourage an equitable and just solution to a problem that has been nagging the region for many, many years.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict spans many decades, over which many U.S. presidents have attempted to broker a deal between the two sides.
President Clinton was confident that he would end the decades-old disagreement when he gathered the two sides at Camp David in 2000. No deal was made, and Clinton assigned Sen. George J. Mitchell, D-Maine, to tackle the issue. President George W. Bush took a less hands-on approach.
Obama campaigned on Israeli security and peace talks in 2008, then tried — and failed — to restart the peace talks in September 2010.
Obama’s mission for peace took another blow this week when Mitchell, his envoy to the Middle East, resigned after more than two years of fruitless negotiations.
Obama will take matters into his own hands on Thursday, when he is expected to detail a new strategy for the region in a speech at the State Department.
Whether the speech sparks discourse between Israel and the Palestinians depends on Obama’s willingness to take sides, analysts say.
“People of the region have listened to countless presidential speeches, declarations and promises on the peace talks,” said Emad Shahin, a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. “What they are looking for now is action.”
He said the competing sides are closer than ever to reaching an agreement on a two-state solution — a proposal drafted in 2007 that would create an independent Palestine.
But on the details of the proposal, such as Israeli settlements, “President Obama must come out and say exactly where he stands” if he hopes to achieve a final compromise, Shahin said.
Critics have suggested that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unlikely to be resolved any time soon and suggested Obama focus on the threats posed by the upheaval across so many Middle East and North African nations.
