Barrack Obama’s speech on the Middle East lasted for 40 minutes, but did it say anything new? Not exactly, although it did reinstate an old rule that had been abandoned. Two years after the American president’s much-ballyhooed speech in Cairo promised a new relationship with the Muslim world, not much has changed in American policy -- but a great deal has changed in the Arab world.

Obama angered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by calling for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement consisting of two states “with permanent borders based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps (of territory)”. It was a return to what was the long-standing American position until former U.S. president George W. Bush changed it in 2004. Netanyahu’s office immediately issued a furious response.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004 … Among other things, those commitments relate to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines, which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines.”
By “Judea and Samaria” Netanyahu meant the West Bank, i.e. 90 percent of the land that the Palestinians still retain after the 1948 war. The West Bank has been occupied by the Israeli army since the 1967 war, and Israel has built so many ‘settlements’ on it that almost 20 percent of the population of the West Bank is now Jewish.
Bush said in 2004 that the settlements could stay, even though that made the concept of a Palestinian state completely infeasible. (The settlements control more than a third of the land in the West Bank.) But U.S. policy on the issue is now back to what it was before Bush.
Some settlements might be allowed to stay, but only if the Palestinian state were compensated with land of equivalent value by Israel. (That’s what the “mutually agreed swaps” referred to.) Moreover, the “1967 lines” mean that the United States will not back Israel’s insistence that its army remains in the Jordan valley, along the border between the promised Palestinian state and Jordan.
Netanyahu’s coalition government would instantly collapse if he agreed to any of this, so he wouldn’t agree even if Obama twisted his arm very hard. In any case, there was no hint in the speech that Obama was going to bring serious pressure on Israel to change its position.
So there has been a rhetorical return to long-standing U.S. policy after the Bush aberration, but no evidence that Obama will push the ‘peace process’ forward. As far as the democratic revolutions of the ‘Arab Spring’ are concerned, he gave them warm verbal support -- but only so long as they don’t damage American interests. There was, for example, not a single mention of Saudi Arabia in his speech.
And for all of Obama’s rhetoric about how wonderful the revolutions are, it was clear that he had little idea how big the transformation in the Middle East actually is. Particularly with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the future will not be like the past.
Gwynne Dyer’s latest book, Climate Wars, is distributed in most of the world by Oneworld.