When 14 members of the United Nations Security Council voted in 2011 for a resolution condemning the expansion of Israeli settlements as illegal, the Obama administration exercised the United States’s veto power to block its passage. Opposition to settlements beyond Israel’s borders established in 1967 has been longstanding U.S. policy, and then-U.N. ambassador Susan Rice confirmed in a statement that the administration rejected “in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.”
But, Rice continued, “Every potential action must be measured against one overriding standard: will it move the parties closer to negotiations and an agreement? Unfortunately, this draft resolution risks hardening the positions of both sides. It could encourage the parties to stay out of negotiations and, if and when they did resume, to return to the Security Council whenever they reach an impasse.” The decision to veto the resolution reflected another longstanding American position: defending Israel against those international bodies like the United Nations that seek to punish or destroy the Jewish state every chance they get.
But that was 2011, and this is 2016. When the Security Council faced a vote on a similar resolution on Friday, 14 member nations voted for it, but the current American ambassador, Samantha Power, abstained.
In a hastily convened conference call Friday afternoon, deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes said, “The fact that this is happening toward the end of eight years indicates that this is not our preferred course of action.”
Rhodes told reporters the decision not to veto the resolution was a result of failure by both Israel and the Palestinians to reach a two-state solution. But it was clear from Rhodes’s comments which party the Obama White House blames more. It was the “acceleration” of Israeli settlement building, Rhodes said, that was “eroding the foundations for a two-state solution.” The Obama administration, he said was “compelled” to not veto the resolution because of “choices made over years by the Israeli government” of Benjamin Netanyahu to encourage settlement expansion. Asked about Israel’s strong condemnation of the resolution and the United States’s complicit assent, Rhodes took a scolding tone. “The Israeli government wants the discussion to be about anything other than the settlement activity,” he said. The Netanyahu government had failed to take advantage of opportunities for a two-state solution over Obama’s eight-year term.
Perhaps sensing the need for balance, Rhodes quickly added: “The Palestinians have missed plenty of opportunities under this administration as well.”
What has changed in the last five years that has prompted the Obama administration to change course? This resolution, Rhodes argued, was “more balanced” in its treatment of both Israel and the Palestinians. But the primary reason he offered was that Israeli settlement activity has supposedly exploded—a sign to the Obama administration that despite “exhaustive” efforts, Israel is less committed to a two-state solution than ever. But why abstain now?
“Where’s the evidence that not doing this is slowing the settlement activity?” Rhodes said. “The notion that vetoing this resolution would have somehow slowed the settlement activity I think flies in the face of any piece of evidence that anybody can see.”
So the standard Susan Rice expressed in 2011—”Will it move the parties closer to negotiations and an agreement?”—appears to have been modified in the waning days of the Obama administration to: “Will it sufficiently condemn Israel?”
