Roger Cohen: Baker’s Ghost in Cairo
[Roger Cohen is a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, author, and a columnist for The New York Times and its related publication International Herald Tribune.]
I hope President Obama has been reading James Baker in preparation for his speech Thursday to the Muslim world. It was in the time of the former secretary of state, two decades ago, that the United States last had a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here’s what Baker told the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee — the pro-Israel lobby — on May 22, 1989: “For Israel, now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel.”
He continued: “Israeli interests in the West Bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation; stop settlement activity.”
Those words make startling but depressing reading: Little has changed in 20 years. After Bush 41 and Baker, we got Clinton’s love affair with Yitzhak Rabin (“I had come to love him as I had rarely loved another man”); the disintegration of Oslo after Rabin’s tragic assassination; and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy of Bush 43.
Balance — the credential no honest broker can forsake — vanished from American diplomacy.
I don’t believe that’s been good for Israel. The Jewish state needs to be challenged by its inseparable ally if it is to achieve the security it craves.
Obama is speaking on a significant date. June 4 is the day before the outbreak of the 1967 war that led to the 42-year occupation of the West Bank. U.N. Resolution 242, invoked by Baker, called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It has, with the exception of Gaza, been ignored...
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I hope President Obama has been reading James Baker in preparation for his speech Thursday to the Muslim world. It was in the time of the former secretary of state, two decades ago, that the United States last had a balanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Here’s what Baker told the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee — the pro-Israel lobby — on May 22, 1989: “For Israel, now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel.”
He continued: “Israeli interests in the West Bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation; stop settlement activity.”
Those words make startling but depressing reading: Little has changed in 20 years. After Bush 41 and Baker, we got Clinton’s love affair with Yitzhak Rabin (“I had come to love him as I had rarely loved another man”); the disintegration of Oslo after Rabin’s tragic assassination; and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy of Bush 43.
Balance — the credential no honest broker can forsake — vanished from American diplomacy.
I don’t believe that’s been good for Israel. The Jewish state needs to be challenged by its inseparable ally if it is to achieve the security it craves.
Obama is speaking on a significant date. June 4 is the day before the outbreak of the 1967 war that led to the 42-year occupation of the West Bank. U.N. Resolution 242, invoked by Baker, called for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It has, with the exception of Gaza, been ignored...