A Permanent Resolution of the Middle East Stalemate

Some are seeing Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel as Israel's man in the Obama administration. It is true that Emmanuel's ties to Israel are strong, his father having been an Israeli's physician and Zionist. But it seems to me that Obama's interest is in achieving a permanent settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem, which is going to take a tough, tough set of negotiations and enormous pressure on the Israelies to accomplish. I would suggest that you've got to have someone like Emmanuel (and even Clinton) to get this done. It's the only way to get the Israelies to make the concessions and pullback that will be needed to establish a viable Palestinian State, while also ensuring a viable and secure State of Israel.

Ehud Olmert, the recently resigned Israeli Prime Minister, came out with some quite radical statements recently along these lines:

At the moment, I'd like to do some soul-searching on behalf of the nation of Israel.... In a few years, my grandchildren will ask what their grandfather did, what kind of country we have bequeathed them. I said it five years ago, in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, and I'll say it to you today: we have a window of opportunity—a short amount of time before we enter an extremely dangerous situation—in which to take a historic step in our relations with the Palestinians and a historic step in our relations with the Syrians. In both instances, the decision we have to make is the decision we've spent forty years refusing to look at with our eyes open.

We must make these decisions, and yet we are not prepared to say to ourselves, "Yes, this is what we must do." We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage [of territory elsewhere]—without this, there will be no peace.

We need to make a decision. This decision is difficult, awful, a decision that contradicts our natural instincts, our deepest yearnings, our collective memories, and the prayers of the nation of Israel for the past two thousand years.

Obama knows what he is doing. I could of course be wrong in this, but I'm willing to bet I'm not. We could soon see peace in Israel/Palestine for the first time in 60 years.