Obama’s Israel Legacy in Light of UNSC Res. 2334

Has President Barack Obama finally revealed his true colors? Was he all along an Israel-hater, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to harm the Jewish state?

No. Despite Friday’s abstention at the UN, President Obama has been, and remains, a lover of Israel. But that doesn’t mean that he was right to decline to use the U.S.’s veto on UNSC Res. 2334.

Let’s first look at the whole body of his pro-Israel legacy, before examining this decision in particular (or skip down to the big picture of the Security Council if you’re only interested in those thoughts).

Words matter.

Here are just a few occasions when Barack Obama has been pitch-perfect in his words to Israel and the Jewish community:

• He demonstrated his complete grasp of the Zionist story as he addressed a Jerusalem room packed with adoring young Israelis in 2013, saying “For the Jewish people, the journey to the promise of the State of Israel wound through countless generations. It involved centuries of suffering and exile, prejudice and pogroms and even genocide. Through it all, the Jewish people sustained their unique identity and traditions, as well as a longing to return home. And while Jews achieved extraordinary success in many parts of the world, the dream of true freedom finally found its full expression in the Zionist idea — to be a free people in your homeland. That’s why I believe that Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition, but also in a simple and profound idea — the idea that people deserve to be free in a land of their own. (Applause.) Over the last 65 years, when Israel has been at its best, Israelis have demonstrated that responsibility does not end when you reach the promised land, it only begins. And so Israel has been a refuge for the diaspora — welcoming Jews from Europe, from the former Soviet Union, from Ethiopia, from North Africa. (Applause.) Israel has built a prosperous nation — through kibbutzeem that made the desert bloom, business that broadened the middle class, innovators who reached new frontiers, from the smallest microchip to the orbits of space. Israel has established a thriving democracy, with a spirited civil society and proud political parties, and a tireless free press, and a lively public debate -– “lively” may even be an understatement. (Applause.) And Israel has achieved all this even as it’s overcome relentless threats to its security — through the courage of the Israel Defense Forces, and the citizenry that is so resilient in the face of terror. This is the story of Israel. This is the work that has brought the dreams of so many generations to life. And every step of the way, Israel has built unbreakable bonds of friendship with my country, the United States of America.”
• He explicitly committed himself to supporting Israel when he said “It would be a moral failing on my part if we did not stand up firmly, steadfastly not just on behalf of Israel’s right to exist, but its right to thrive and prosper.”
• He championed the hope for a better, stronger, safer Israel embodied by Shimon Peres, as he eulogized the late president, saying “Shimon’s story, the story of Israel, the experience of the Jewish people, I believe it is universal. It’s the story of a people who, over so many centuries in the wilderness, never gave up on that basic human longing to return home. It’s the story of a people who suffered the boot of oppression and the shutting of the gas chamber’s door, and yet never gave up on a belief in goodness. And it’s the story of a man who was counted on, and then often counted out, again and again, and who never lost hope. Shimon Peres reminds us that the State of Israel, like the United States of America, was not built by cynics. We exist because people before us refused to be constrained by the past or the difficulties of the present. And Shimon Peres was never cynical. It is that faith, that optimism, that belief — even when all the evidence is to the contrary — that tomorrow can be better, that makes us not just honor Shimon Peres, but love him…Scripture tells us that before his death, Moses said, “I call upon heaven and earth to bear witness this day that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live.” Uvacharta Bachayim. Choose life. For Shimon, let us choose life, as he always did. Let us make his work our own. May God bless his memory. And may God bless this country, and this world, that he loved so dearly.”
• He perfectly encapsulated my feelings about the necessity of a two-state solution when he said “I have not yet heard, however, a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody has presented me a credible scenario.”
• And, season after season, Obama hit just the right note as he marked Jewish holidays, wishing his best — and offering humble words of Torah — to Jews in America and around the world. “Today in the White House, as you will soon do in your homes, we recall Hanukkah’s many lessons: How a small group can make a big difference. That’s the story of the Maccabees’ unlikely military victory, and of great moral movements around the globe and across time. How a little bit can go a long way, like the small measure of oil that outlasted every expectation. It reminds us that even when our resources seem limited, our faith can help us make the most of what little we have. The small State of Israel and the relatively small Jewish population of this country have punched far above their weight in their contributions to the world. So the Festival of Lights is also a reminder of how Isaiah saw the Jewish people, as a light unto the nations.”

Actions matter.

Of course, a president who said all the right things, but took no actions to help Israel, wouldn’t be a very good friend to Israel (nor would s/he be a very good president; standing by our allies is a crucial element of U.S. foreign policy). Fortunately, the last eight years have seen a staunch supporter of Israel in the Oval Office:

• The headline has to be the recent Memorandum of Understanding that gives Israel $38 billion in defense spending over the next 10 years. That is the greatest amount of money ever committed to Israel by a U.S. president. I’m well-aware of the arguments that this isn’t as great a deal as it seems. Some say that it should have been even more (they should learn gratitude); some argue that it’s a let down because it sunsets that provision that used to allow Israel — alone among recipients of military funding — to spend some amount of the money domestically (while historically this made sense, to prop up a nascent defense industry, it’s no longer strictly necessary); some object to the agreement that Israel will not lobby Congress for additional aid (this, I’ll allow, is legitimately troubling). With this deal signed, President Obama is responsible for committing more money to Israel’s aid than any person in history. Sheldon Adelson can eat his shorts.
• The Iran deal was a flawed agreement, without a doubt. But where Iran was once riding its secret nuclear program toward a bomb at a breakneck pace, the program has been brought into the light and those ambitions have been curtailed, even if they haven’t yet been stopped dead. All of this without firing a single shot or endangering a single American or Israeli life. We don’t know for certain that this deal will keep Iran from ever going nuclear, but we know that it has bought the world time to better deal diplomatically with the Iranian nuclear threat
• Obama has also continued the proud U.S. tradition of ensuring Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region (most threatened, by the way, when Reagan sold AWACS surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia). He authorized billions of dollars for Iron Dome (largely spurned by President Bush), allowed the sale of the new F-35 (indeed, under Obama’s DoD, Israel is to be the second country, after the U.S., with an operational F-35 squadron. And while Bush refused to sell Israel bunker-busters, fearing that Israel would use them against an Iranian nuclear installation, President Obama authorized that sale.
• And by the way, it’s not nothing that President Obama has held a Passover seder each year in the White House. Unlike the White House Hanukkah party, which is an opportunity to give strokes to prominent American Jews, the seder is private, a Jewish practice introduced to Obama by his Jewish friends and embraced by his whole family as in line with their values.

A Bad Partner

Bill Clinton is perhaps the U.S. president most beloved by Israelis. And yet, when he had his first bilat with Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, he found the man so infuriating that he remarked to aides “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

So remember that if President Obama has ever seemed less-than-thrilled that Bibi has been the man at the other end of the U.S.-Israel relationship, he’s not the only lover of Israel to be under-enamored of Bibi. Indeed, it’s a testament to Obama’s commitment to Israel that even such personal acrimony didn’t dissuade him from standing by Israel.

UNSC Res. 2334

On to the matter at hand. I believe that it was a mistake for President Obama to instruct Samantha Power to abstain from UNSC Res. 2334. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

• What good does this do? I am deeply mistrustful of the extremes in Israeli and Palestinians societies, and I think all outside actions should be held up to the test of how these extremes will respond. For example, despite my opposition to Israel’s ongoing settlement enterprise, I am opposed to the movement to boycott Israel. Boycotting Israel sends a message to Palestinian intransigents that they can keep up their rejectionism and eventually expect the world to hand them everything they want, no concessions necessary. It also presents the Israeli right with confirmation that the world is against them and that Israel need be ever-wary — precisely opposite the posture Israelis must be encouraged to adopt in order to feel secure enough to make concessions for peace. For similar reasons, 2334 fails the sniff test.
• The timing was wrong. Here’s the caveat to that rule. Had President Obama pulled this move with years, not days, left in his presidency, it could have been a bold move — not a parting shot, but a shot across the bow intended to jolt Israel out of its complacency with the status quo and convince the Palestinians that they have an honest broker in the U.S. I would still have been uncomfortable with the decision, but interested to see where Obama was going. Instead, with this coming as the Obama presidency expires, it feels like the dismantling of NSEERS and the Arctic drilling ban — a last-ditch attempt to pen in President-elect Trump’s policies on issues of great importance to President Obama.
• So much for Bibi’s new friends. Bibi has trumpeted the friendship of Vladimir Putin. Putin, of course, didn’t just abstain from 2334, he voted for it. As did Egypt, one of the countries the Prime Minister regularly touts as a surprisingly close friend of Israel. Poor Senegal (a rotating member of the UNSC) had been part of Netanyahu’s ongoing African charm offensive, and their Foreign Minister was planning a trip to Israel, which Israel has now cancelled. Israel cares deeply what other countries think about it, but Netanyahu has chosen not to appoint a Foreign Minister to work full-time on Israel’s foreign relations, keeping the title for himself (In addition to serving as PM and FM, Bibi is also the Minister of Communications, the Minister of Regional Cooperation, and the Minister of the Economy). As former PM Ehud Barak pointed out in a tweet, this kind of diplomatic failure might ordinarily result in the sacking of the FM — doubtless not in the cards here.
• This is not the radical departure from U.S. policy it’s being made out to be. Despite what many have claimed, President Obama was not breaking a long-standing tradition by choosing not to veto this anti-settlement resolution. First, as Ambassador Power made clear on Friday, it has been the policy of (Republican and Democratic) U.S. administrations spanning nearly five decades that Israel must cease its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In allowing a resolution calling for precisely that, Obama was being consistent with U.S. policy on Israeli settlements.
• Was it a departure from U.S. opposition to the UN’s rampant bias against Israel? Obama himself condemned this bias way back in 2009, in his very first address to the opening of the UN General Assembly, saying “nations within this body do the Palestinians no favors when they choose vitriolic attacks against Israel over constructive willingness to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and its right to exist in peace and security.” (Obama’s UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, has similarly spoken out against the body’s shameful bias against Israel.) Since then, Obama had allowed exactly zero resolutions critical of Israel to pass in the Security Council (the General Assembly, and the Human Rights Council, where the U.S. does not have veto power, have passed many anti-Israel resolutions in those years). Until Friday, President Obama had a sterling record of shooting down all criticism of Israel in the Security Council, a claim that cannot be made by any of Obama’s predecessors, dating back to 1967. So while the forum is an undoubtedly bad one — a point Power made in her comments after abstaining — the U.S. has never had a policy of serving as Israel’s perpetual shield from all criticism.

• The resolution doesn’t carry much weight. Though the Security Council has the authority, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, to pass resolutions that are binding and enforceable (including by military force), this resolution was passed under Chapter VI, making it binding, but not enforceable. The toothlessness of this resolution (not that I’d prefer a toothier one — the country that must be brought to heel by military force is just to the north of the Jewish state) only proves the point of those who say the UN is obsessed with symbolic punishments of Israel, even at risk of self-harm. The body may will see its funding slashed by the U.S. Congress, making it harder for it to do its many good works around the world.

So an Obama presidency that opened with an (ill-conceived) demand for a complete freeze of Israeli settlement construction (granted, grudgingly and briefly, by Netanyahu), ends with the U.S. choosing not to block an international rebuke of that same settlement construction. For all the shock evinced by many, this decision was telegraphed eight years ago. Netanyahu had eight years to slow, to stop, to reverse settlement construction in the West Bank, to create the conditions for a Palestinian state to emerge. He chose political expediency instead, embracing the politically safe status quo, rather than pushing his people toward compromise.

So on Friday President Obama, a man known for keeping clinically cool, lashed out. With the two-state solution seeming further away than ever before, (and doubtless smarting from the frustrating knowledge that he was unable to do anything to save the Israel he admires from what he sees as its impending doom), Obama devoted one of his last days in office to what amounts to a stern dressing-down of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

And now it’s somebody else’s problem.

Oy.