The pro- side, and specifically Levy, a former Israeli negotiator currently of the New America Foundation, was able to win, ironically, by downplaying the importance of Palestinian membership. “This is not a panacea,” Levy argued at one point (it would be pointless to deny that his English accent serves him extremely well when debating policy in front of an American audience). But it would do some good, he argued: it might halt settlement-building, at least in the long run (Miller pointed out that in the short run it would likely accelerate settlement-building); it would alter “the conceptual universe” (including that of “certain people in New Hampshire tonight”), showing the doubters that there truly is international commitment for a two-state solution. Levy called it “declarative diplomacy,” at once providing an ample rationale and shrinking its importance so that the onus was on the other side either to disagree and assert that it would be a big deal—which would have been a risky gambi given the consensus that the end-goal should be a two-state solution—or to argue that this initiative would simply do more small harm than small good, a task made more difficult by its very smallness.

Miller, a former U.S. negotiator, and Gold, a former adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, attempted the latter. “U.N. decision in the absence of a plan will not bring the Palestinians any closer to the sovereignty they deserve,” argued Miller. He noted that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a hero (in the West) for building real institutions (in the West Bank), “is against this proposition because he knows it will undermine the work he has done.” Miller added, “Recognition would conflate with sovereignty. That may not be legally correct, but that would be the mindset.” Gold pointed out, “You need diplomatic flexibility.” Here he feinted toward what, to my mind, was their side’s strongest argument: that U.N. membership, like borders, settlements, and the statuses of refugees and Jerusalem, is something best left to the negotiating table rather than given up for nothing.

And here we get to the aforementioned flared tempers. For negotiations work best between two sides that are in relatively equal positions to bargain, but, of course, this arguably does not accurately describe the Israelis and the Palestinians. Barghouthi compared them to two mice fighting over a piece of cheese, with the Palestinian mouse imprisoned behind bars and helpless as he watches the Israeli mouse get the whole wedge to himself. To which the rebuttal is that the mouse, trapped behind bars, has put itself on a level playing field—and an un-level moral one—by sending suicide bombers and rockets toward the Israeli mouse.

Levy and Barghouthi had answers for this, too. For Levy, once again, it’s about symbolism: Palestinian membership would be something akin to what literary theorists call a speech-act. It would force the Palestinians to get serious. “Palestine: you’re in the U.N., read the U.N. charter,” which calls for all nations to be “peace-loving,” Levy said. “Hamas, you want in? You read the U.N. charter too.” Barghouthi went a step further, noting that Hamas has recently called for renouncing violence and accepting the 1967 borders—and without noting that other elements of Hamas have done the exact opposite and that Hamas’s infamous charter remains unchanged. “That strains the bounds of credulity,” Miller retorted in the understated fashion that was his style. He was referring to Barghouthi’s claim that Hamas has reformed, but he may as well have been referring also to Levy’s claim that Palestinian membership would reform Hamas.

Gold here went for something like the jugular, asking Barghouthi if he was at a confab in Cairo late last month that included not only members of the ruling Fatah party and other relatively moderate ones like Barghouthi’s own, but also Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He had. If the debate were a larger one, this might have been the trump card, but Levy stepped in to note that U.N. recognition would confer legitimacy on the much broader and more representative Palestine Liberation Organization, and he was never pressed on the prospect that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would need to become PLO members for the thing to have any sort of legitimacy among the Palestinian people in the near to intermediate future, and so defused that particular bombshell. (He did make a rare error in all but comparing Hamas to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leaving Gold the easy in to accuse Levy of “moral equivalence,” which he did, over and over and over again, like your uncle at the Seder table).

By the end, all that seemed clear is what we probably knew before: continued Israeli intransigence over settlements and continued division among the Palestinians—with a large portion if not the majority supporting the unsupportable Hamas—means there won’t be peace in the Middle East any time soon. I thought Levy and Barghouthi (specifically Levy) out-argued Gold and Miller, though it was Miller I found myself most frequently nodding in agreement with. You can make the argument that conferring membership might help compensate for continued settlement-building, both symbolically and instrumentally (as it might give the Palestinians access to international courts). But you are entering too many unknowns—who the Palestinian leadership is, how Israel will respond, how other countries in the region will react—for my taste.

“If we do not have a Palestine, we are saying Kaddish for Israeli democracy,” Levy pleaded at one point. Of course, that was not necessarily germane to the motion. The motion, of course, is impossible: full membership would require passage in the Security Council, and the United States will veto any such motion. So instead Levy’s cri de coeur would have to be filed away in the audience-members’ worried minds.

“After six Israeli prime ministers and three U.S. presidents failed at the peace process,” Gold says, “you’d think people would stop and say, ‘Let’s think about this, maybe a reassessment is needed.’ ” Instead, he continues, the default reaction is to pick up the shattered relics of Oslo, an approach that tends to ignore the Second Intifada and what he has noted was a 500-percent increase in rocket attacks from Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. “In think-tank circles it’s said that we all know what the final settlement looks like,” he says. “But this is binding Israel to a legacy of failed negotiations. If you do that, no one would ever negotiate. What if Medvedev met with Obama and said, ‘Let’s pick up where Reagan left off at Reykjavik?’ ”

The sticking point is that Washington sees a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli agreement as a vital U.S. interest to ensure an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the White House has been willing to beat up on Netanyahu over settlements in Jerusalem even as Obama seems to be hemorrhaging Jewish political support—and fund-raising—with a midterm election only four months away.

While Gold no longer works for the Israeli government, in his post as president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs he is widely held in Israeli and U.S. circles alike to be close to Netanyahu and his senior staff. “Since I left government service,” says the 56-year-old former academic, “I have been obsessed with the need for Israel to articulate in the public discourse its security requirements in the West Bank.” Netanyahu asked Gold in 1997 to accompany him to the Map Room in the basement of the White House for an intimate meeting with President Bill Clinton and one other official in which the IDF’s concept of defensible borders was laid out to the United States.

While the Palestinians’ political demands are clear (a contiguous state, a capital in Jerusalem), the Israeli side, as Gold wrote in Tablet Magazine last week, “has been far more vague,” dwelling in abstractions like peace and security without clearly articulating what that entails. The project that Gold is now pushing in Washington is meant to fill that vacuum. “Israelis have taken lots of risks for peace,” says Gold. “They should not be in a diplomatic testing ground again.”

The book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace is a collection published this year under the auspices of the JCPA with essays about security and diplomacy by leading figures in Israel’s security establishment, like Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, former head of IDF intelligence, and Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan, former IDF deputy chief of staff and a former national security adviser to Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. The volume’s findings represent a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, and the fact that Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon—former IDF chief of staff and currently the vice prime minister—wrote the introduction is evidence that the ideas have won approval at the highest political levels.

The book pushes three common ideas, some likely to add to the friction between Washington and Jerusalem: First, Israel, must not withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines; second, Israel needs defensible borders; third, Israel must rely on itself to defend itself and not on foreign forces as proposed by U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones, who has talked openly about replacing the IDF with international forces in the West Bank.

The insistence that Israel must retain the ability to defend its own borders—a basic attribute of national sovereignty—is the least controversial element of Gold’s blueprint. The issue is not merely the inglorious record of U.N. peacekeeping forces—from Sinai to Bosnia and Lebanon—but also the fact that the international community rarely sends its blue helmets into the middle of a real shooting war, which is what the West Bank would become if an IDF withdrawal left Hamas and Fatah at each other’s throats and eager to gain credit for launching terror attacks on Israel.

The concept of defensible borders is closely tied to the drawing of 1949 armistice lines, commonly and incorrectly known as the 1967 borders. As Gold explains in his contribution to the volume, successive U.S. administrations since Lyndon Johnson’s have all recognized the danger in Israel withdrawing to those borders. George Shultz, one of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of State, explained that “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders,” and the Clinton Administration reaffirmed the Reagan White House’s concept of defensible borders. However, it was during Clinton’s Camp David negotiations that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned the idea of defensible borders in the hope of a radical breakthrough with Yasser Arafat. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada and peace nowhere in the offing, the George W. Bush Administration pledged not to hold the Israelis to the Clinton parameters and returned to the traditional U.S. position. “It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” reads an April 14, 2004 letter from Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Gold, who was not officially in the Sharon government, was nonetheless employed in a number of missions and prepared Sharon’s presentation to Bush on the significance of defensible borders during their first meeting, in 2001. Gold sat in the Roosevelt Room as Sharon entered the Oval Office with the index cards Gold had written. “Years later, when Sharon completed negotiations over the Bush letter in 2004,” says Gold, “he instructed his team in Washington to call me in Jerusalem to say we got defensible borders into the letter.”

Even as the Bush letter applied regardless of who sat in the White House (it won wide bipartisan approval in the House and Senate, with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel voting in favor), the Obama Administration has not yet clearly signaled if it intends to accept the commitments of its predecessor. Insofar as Israel sees the letter as “the foundation for the United States to accept new construction in the Jewish settlements that encircle Jerusalem,” it is yet another source of contention between Netanyahu and Obama.

Perhaps even more daunting is the prospect of any Israeli government having to explain to the Obama White House that many of the land swaps from Camp David are not plausible in the context of defensible borders. In other words, everyone in Washington who believes that they know what Israel’s vision of a final settlement looks like is in for a surprise. Israel will have to retain security control over the Jordan rift valley, which means not just the river bank but the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. It is important to remember that the West Bank overlooks Israel’s coastal plain and 70 percent of the country’s population. If the Hamas rockets fired from Gaza were launched from the West Bank on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it could bring Israel to its knees, disrupting the country’s economic and social life on a massive scale and shutting down Ben Gurion Airport. Moreover, Islamist militants from all around the region would attempt to transit through Jordan into the West Bank to launch attacks against the Zionist entity, destabilizing the Hashemite Kingdom.

“The concepts in this book are very close to last Knesset speech of Rabin, given thirty days before he was assassinated,” says Gold. The rhetorical point is clear enough: For all the nostalgia in the United States for a visionary statesman like Rabin, a warrior and also a man of peace, he also articulated most clearly Israel’s need for defensible borders and said nothing about land swaps. If those ideas have been lost in the last 20 years, the Israelis are also to blame. “A lot of Israel’s biggest mistakes is that Israeli diplomats put forward plans and pushed it back to the military,” says Gold. “For instance, Oslo began with two academics, and later representatives of the Foreign Ministry came in. When it became official, that’s when the army came in, at the end. I strongly believe we have to reverse the sequence—to lay out Israel’s security needs and then come out with diplomatic process to protect them.”

There is no going back to Oslo, no matter what the Obama Administration believes or hopes. Perhaps the only thing saving Netanyahu from having to fight with a U.S. president and thereby unnerve the Israeli electorate is the incompetence of the White House. Had Obama not pushed Netanyahu so hard on settlements, twice, he wouldn’t have pushed Mahmoud Abbas into a corner where it was impossible for the Palestinian president to be less intransigent than the United States, thus freezing the diplomatic process.

The paradox of the U.S. president’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause and lack of sympathy for Israeli territorial and security claims is that he has managed to fulfill the dreams of hard-liners on both sides and turn back the clock 20 years to before the ill-fated Oslo process even began. For the first time in two decades, the Palestinians and Israelis are not in direct negotiations. A final Palestinian-Israeli agreement couldn’t be further away, which means that Netanyahu can smile for the cameras and shake the president’s hand and breathe easily, now that he doesn’t have to explain that a peace deal, if it happens, won’t look like what everyone in Washington thinks it will.

Wexler, who arrived late, stood by himself through the hourlong presentation, leaning against a wall near the back of the room with his soft black leather Dell briefcase between his feet. At 49, he was at least a decade younger than most of the other men in attendance, though he sports similarly silvered hair, and he kept his hand pensively over his chin for much of the talk. Dayan expressed his opposition to the current U.S. effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations using 1967 borders as the basis for a future Palestinian state. During the question-and-answer session, Wexler raised his hand and asked, pointedly, “General Dayan, how could it be in any respect a smart strategy to treat in this fashion your most important ally?” Dayan looked surprised. “Rabbi Wexler,” he began, before someone at the front corrected him. “I’m not challenging the White House or the so-important friendship with the United States,” Dayan said. “I’m challenging how important borders are.”

Wexler may have been unfamiliar to the general, but others in the room knew exactly who he was. In his six months as president of Abraham’s Center for Middle East Peace, Wexler has adopted an unofficial role as ambassador to the organized American Jewish community. As a congressman, he managed to retain support from both J Street, the dovish two-year-old Israel lobby, and the more conservative AIPAC, which commended him earlier this year as “one of the stalwart leaders of the American-Israel alliance in Congress.” After last week’s luncheon, hosted by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Wexler stayed behind for a quiet tête-à-tête with the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, who served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s first premiership a decade ago, and who addressed the lunch gathering along with Dayan.

In March 2007, Wexler endorsed Barack Obama, breaking not just with other Jewish Democrats in South Florida but with his own long history as an early and fervent supporter of the Clintons, starting in 1992. Today, he is frequently mentioned as a potential ambassador to Israel—a position currently filled by James Cunningham, a career diplomat who went to Tel Aviv in the waning days of the George W. Bush Administration. “It’s a position he could have at the snap of his fingers,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who served under President Bill Clinton as a special envoy for Holocaust-era claims and is a special State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton on Holocaust issues. “He could do a world of good for the administration, because at the end of the day [the Israelis] have to have trust in the American administration, and there is no one better placed than Bob to make that argument.”

The visit to New York followed a high-profile dinner Wexler and Abraham hosted at Washington’s Newseum for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during his visit to Washington in early June. The guest list included the billionaire publisher Mort Zuckerman and Lee Rosenberg, an Obama supporter who is currently the president of AIPAC, along with political heavyweights like Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, and Stephen Hadley, who held the job under George W. Bush, and his former deputy, Elliott Abrams, who oversaw Middle Eastern affairs under Bush. The center Wexler runs is “a meeting spot where people from all segments of the community can come together and hear reasonable points of view,” said J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami, who was also at the event.

Publicly, Wexler is probably best known for his 2006 appearance on Comedy Central’s satire show The Colbert Report, on which Stephen Colbert coaxed him into repeating the sentence: “I enjoy cocaine because it’s fun to do.” Wexler spent a dozen years representing Boca Raton, one of the most Jewish and most reliably Democratic districts in the House of Representatives. As a member of the influential Foreign Affairs committee, he was particularly active in establishing a congressional caucus on U.S.-Turkish relations and went out of his way to travel to places like Saudi Arabia and Syria, where, according to an account in Wexler’s autobiography, Fire-Breathing Liberal, President Bashar al-Assad gave him messages to carry to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Serving in government is an extraordinary honor, whether it’s in Congress or in any other capacity, but there are other ways to participate in a meaningful way as well,” Wexler said in an interview in late June. We were in his Washington office, on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the colonnaded Navy Memorial plaza along Pennsylvania Ave., where he keeps the bronze plaque from the entrance to his old House office leaning against the windowsill. Framed photographs of him posing with various leaders—Netanyahu, Sharon, Obama, King Abdullah—compete for space with framed newspaper clippings from his Florida political career.

Wexler, who was in shirtsleeves, favors blue ties that match his eyes and tends to rap his fingertips on tabletops when he is particularly emphatic about a point he’s making. He refused to say whether he had been offered the ambassadorship, formally or informally. (The White House declined to comment for this story.) But Wexler has publicly, and repeatedly, said his decision to leave Congress was motivated in part by financial concerns—he has three teenage children—and acquaintances speculate that his hesitance about returning to government service, even as an ambassador, stems from the same pressures. (Members of Congress are paid $174,000 annually; Wexler declined to disclose his current salary, which is not reflected in the Center’s most recent financial filings.) Over the years, Wexler explained, “Danny would joke with me and ask when I was going to leave Congress and get a real job.” The jibe turned into a real prospect after Obama’s election invigorated Abraham about the prospects for reaching a peace agreement—an irony, he added, since Abraham, a longtime supporter of the Clintons, had initially been sharply critical of his decision to back Obama. Now he shuttles around on extra-diplomatic excursions—Israel and the West Bank, Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan—aboard Abraham’s private jet.

Abraham, an 85-year-old World War II veteran, founded the Center for Middle East Peace in 1989, with Wayne Owens, a Democratic congressman from Utah who had served on the foreign affairs and intelligence committees, at its helm. Together, the pair met with Yasser Arafat in 1989, in Tunisia, then an extraordinary step, and went on to cultivate relationships with leaders across the Middle East. “They would come see us and the national security adviser and occasionally the president to brief us on meetings they’d had with various Israeli and Arab leaders and give us ideas,” said Robert Malley, who served on the staff of the National Security Council and as a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs in the Clinton Administration. He recalled that Abraham had called the White House from Israel with both Ehud Barak and Arafat on the line after the failure of negotiations at Camp David. Of Abraham’s center, Malley said, “It’s not going to change history, but in his position you can’t hope to do more than that—he has access and he can bring people together.”

Owens died unexpectedly in December 2002 after having a heart attack on the beach in Tel Aviv during a trip with Abraham, who subsequently wound down the center’s $14 million operation. Owens was deeply beloved in official Washington, but as a Mormon, he never had Wexler’s entree into the official world of American Jewry. Wexler, a Queens native who grew up in South Florida, where his father owned a deli, made his first trip to Israel on his honeymoon, after his wife, Laurie, said she didn’t like the idea of marrying someone who hadn’t been to the Jewish state. He was elected to Congress in 1996 after six years in the Florida State Senate and was drafted onto the Foreign Affairs committee by Lee Hamilton, a veteran Democratic congressman from Indiana who subsequently served on the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. “He was a natural,” says Hamilton, who is currently president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “He’s always been very close to the Jewish community and a very strong advocate for the Democratic Party, and I think he’s played a hugely important role in bridging the gaps that sometimes arise between the two.”

Now Wexler’s task is not just to maintain open channels among the Americans, Israelis, and Arabs—it’s to continue applying additional glue to the relationship between the Obama Administration and the American Jewish community. “My understanding with Danny was that I had only one red line, or only one rule, and that is that we would work in coordination and consistent with the Obama Administration,” Wexler said. “I believe the course that President Obama is pursuing is compelling in terms of what is in the best interests of the state of Israel.” He echoed recent administration talking points about the closeness of the U.S.-Israeli military and intelligence relationships and added another example to counter claims of anything like a rift between Washington and Jerusalem: phone calls made by George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, to voting countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this spring encouraging them to accept Israel as a member.

None of that, though, speaks to the fundamental anxiety increasingly pervasive in some Jewish quarters about where the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is heading. Last week, Wexler met with Ehud Barak during the Israeli defense minister’s visit to Washington; he has extended an invitation to host a gathering for Netanyahu when the prime minister is scheduled to be in town next week. But, like everyone, Wexler is looking ahead to the expiration of the settlement-construction freeze in September, and like everyone, he can’t predict whether or not the current proximity talks will lead to a resumption of direct, Camp David-style negotiations. “The plan is to create the dynamic in which the Israelis and the Palestinians can engage in direct negotiations. That’s the plan. It’s tedious, it’s painful, and for every two steps forward there’s one step back, but that’s the plan,” Wexler told me. He deflected the question of whether he anticipated a grand proposal from the Obama Administration, in the event that the proximity talks fail to progress. “I don’t think it makes any sense to foreshadow what might happen four months from now, or five months from now, should there not be direct negotiations,” he said. “Because I am confident and hopeful there will be.”

That optimism is a hallmark of the style Abraham and Owens established two decades ago, during the hopeful era of the Oslo accords. “They had more fire and determination than anyone else on the block,” Malley said. “And Wexler shares this attitude of, ‘We have a vision, it makes sense.’ ” Obama’s election revived Abraham’s resolve to fight for the establishment of a two-state deal, Wexler said. “I think he felt that coming off the eight years of the Bush Administration, because of the Intifada and because of the two wars, the opportunity for negotiating a settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and an end to conflict was so remote, that the next two or three years were the best last opportunity for a two-state solution.”

Wexler said that Abbas, at the Newseum dinner, warned about the increasingly vocal campaign among Palestinians against continuing to pursue the two-state model. “People need to understand that while the two-state solution may seem difficult to attain—it’s riddled with uncertainty, it’s riddled with risks and painful compromises—but the alternative is not paradise. It’s not some golden status quo,” Wexler went on. “The alternative is the one-state solution, and the one-state solution will amount to a state that is no longer Jewish. And I for one am not for that.”

We asked where the White House had succeeded or failed. We looked for the premises on which the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president based his regional policy. And we wanted to know what the future looks like for the United States and the Middle East—on questions from the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Iranian nuclear program, from U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the region’s rising powers, like Turkey and Qatar.

Here’s the first batch. Read more—including Jacob Weisberg and Martin Kramer—tomorrow.

‘A Diminished America’
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration:

The Obama Administration appears to have three basic premises about the Middle East. The first is that the key issue in the entire Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is that it is a territorial conflict that can be resolved in essence by Israeli concessions. The third is that the central function of the United States is to serve as the PLO’s lawyer to broker those concessions so that an agreement can be signed. I think these premises are all wrong.

The main struggle in the region is partly ideological, between moderate, pro-Western groups and Islamist and jihadi groups, and partly it is a contest for power in the region by Iran, in its effort to diminish American influence. The administration’s view is playing into Iran’s hands.

Regarding Iran, the administration has held together the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. security council—United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—plus Germany) solidly against the Islamic Republic, but the price has been a long delay in getting sanctions, as well as the weakening of sanctions to satisfy the Chinese and Russians.

Now the next issue of some concern is Turkey. The Erdogan government’s first major step outside of the U.S. alliance was during the Bush Administration, when it wouldn’t let Washington use Turkey as a launching ground for U.S. troops entering Iraq in 2003. The question is, to what extent is Turkey moving into a perceived vacuum of diminished U.S. power? Or, does Turkish policy reflect internal developments; namely, is the country genuinely becoming more Islamist? If it’s correct that the country is becoming more Islamist, then any U.S. administration would be dealing with the same Turkish problems. But if the answer is rather that Turkey sees an opportunity to assert leadership alongside a rising Iran and a diminished America, the problem is a reflection of Obama policy in the region.

‘Tactical Missteps’
Robert Malley is the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group:

The Obama Administration came into office with the overriding desire to turn the page on a number of Bush Administration policies that, in its view, had eroded U.S. credibility and thus America’s ability to promote its interests. Hence the effort to revive the peace process, reach out to Arab public opinion, and engage with so-called rogue states. Almost two years on, it is fair to describe the outcome as mixed.

The image, if not necessarily the credibility, of the United States undoubtedly has improved, which is not insignificant. But results have lagged far behind. Several reasons suggest themselves. To begin, and this is beyond this or any administration’s control, the region has become less susceptible to outside suasion or pressure than was initially thought—or that had been the case in the past. This reflects both long-term structural changes in the regional and global balance of power but also the more short-term fallout from the Bush years.

Second, there have been several tactical missteps, from the early focus on a full Israeli settlement freeze and Arab moves toward normalization with Israel to the overly cautious approach toward Syria. These are not irreversible, but they have led to a feeling of stagnation, of lost time, from which the administration has yet to fully recover.

Third, the administration appears to be extremely president-centric, which is not a bad thing in itself but leads to an impression of drift unless and until he puts his personal stamp on a given policy. We witnessed this clearly on the domestic front with the evolving dynamics of the health-care debate. We see it, too, on the question of the peace process. The president will need to show his hand and make it clear to his team where he wants to go, and at what political price, for clarity to emerge and a sense of direction to take hold.

Finally, and this is both the most interesting and in some respects troubling aspect, the administration—for all its attempts to disentangle itself from the past—remains wedded to a particular way of perceiving the region, namely as divided between militants beholden to Iran (who must be weakened) and moderates close to the United States (who we must bolster). This paradigm assumes the existence of “axes” that are not quite as coherent as believed, overlooks the degree to which some countries operate in the grey “in between,” and thus misses important opportunities to influence regional actors.

This is the more serious of the various issues. For it suggests that we are fighting the last war, guided by an obsolete model. So much has changed since 2000, the last time Democrats were in power. Because of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because of what has happened in Iran, because of our long disregard of the peace process, the United States no longer has the authority or legitimacy it once had to shape events. Our traditional Arab allies are running out of steam. New, more dynamic states and movements are gaining in influence. And faith and even interest in the peace process is fading. All of this matters because it determines what we can do, how, and with whom.

‘Asymmetry’
Dore Gold heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999:

Clearly the Obama Administration came to office with very different conceptions about the Middle East than many Israeli governments. This administration stressed the Palestinian issue as the key to regional stability while Israel was increasingly focusing on Iran as the main source of Middle Eastern conflict that had to be addressed first. The Israelis came to the peace process with the keen sense that five prime ministers prior to Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to reach a final-status peace agreement and were unable to do so, and therefore it was necessary to reassess how peacemaking might be conducted differently. In Washington more broadly there had been a tendency to accept the received legacy of Camp David and Taba without the same reservations that you would find in Israel.

That also pointed to a more fundamental problem that existed between the United States and Israel, which went beyond who was president of the United States. The Israelis had undertaken two major peace initiatives vis-à-vis the Palestinians that led to a serious undermining of state security. First, during the Oslo years, Israel absorbed a wave of suicide bombing attacks, leaving more than 1,000 Israelis dead, which had emanated from areas under Palestinian jurisdiction, where Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah militants had a safe haven. Second, while Israel had hoped that the 2005 Gaza withdrawal would address in part Palestinian political grievances, the pullback resulted in a 500 percent increase in rocket attacks on Israel from 2005 to 2006. Therefore, Israelis became far more security-oriented as they looked to any peace initiatives in the future, and in fact the Israeli body politic moved to the right.

In the United States, after the debate over the Iraq war, the American discourse on foreign affairs stressed diplomacy as a panacea for the world’s problems, unshackled by Bush-era security concerns. Even engagement with adversaries, like Syria and Iran, became part of the new approach to global affairs. In short, both countries were moving in opposite directions in 2009.

Finally, for the last decade and a half, while Palestinian leaders had been very specific about their political demands—a viable contiguous Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital—the Israeli side, unfortunately, has been far more vague about its diplomatic goals, preferring a more abstract concept like peace, or peace and security, which are in and of themselves worthy goals but have nothing of the specificity of the Palestinian side, resulting in an asymmetry that made the American discourse on Middle East peace far more attuned to what the Palestinians needed than to Israel’s concerns.

‘Of Comparatively Little Importance’
Andrew Exum is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security:

The Obama Administration’s efforts in the Middle East have centered around the same three I’s that would most concern any U.S. administration: Israel, Iran, and Iraq. The United States has an interest in a secure Israel, a non-nuclear Iran, and a democratic Iraq at peace with itself and its neighbors.

In Israel, the Obama Administration has badly managed relations with the ruling coalition in Jerusalem, but it is hardly to blame for the right-wing composition of that government, which would have certainly clashed with the previous administration as well. U.S. and Israeli policymakers simply have different opinions about what will secure Israel in the long term: Israeli policymakers worry almost exclusively about Iran and its proxies, while the United States and its allies also press for the establishment of permanent borders and a Palestinian state as well as the dismantlement of most Israeli settlements.

With respect to Iran, the Obama Administration has successfully passed tough U.N. sanctions against the regime, but few believe these sanctions will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Nothing short of large-scale U.S.-led military action—the second-order consequences of which would be horrific—is likely to seriously retard the program’s development.

Iraq, ironically, and thanks in part to a 2007 surge of troops that then-Sen. Obama opposed, is the lone U.S. success story in the Middle East. But it is a fragile success. U.S. military commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, fret that an Israeli or U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities would endanger Iraq’s democratic peace and U.S. troops both there and in Afghanistan.

I tend to believe the actions of local actors are more significant than those of U.S. policymakers. And experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has taught me that U.S. military force alone cannot decisively protect most U.S. interests. I also believe U.S. interests in the Middle East should be prioritized against one another within the region and also against U.S. interests elsewhere. In President George W. Bush’s second term in office, for example, the United States assumed greater risk in Afghanistan—diverting troops and other resources—in order to succeed in Iraq. Under Obama, the reverse is true. The president has been remarkably clear and consistent in terms of U.S. policy, strategic goals, and commitment of resources to Afghanistan. One senses, in fact, that when compared to Afghanistan, the Arabic-speaking Middle East is of comparatively little importance for this president.

As in Afghanistan, though, the Obama Administration inherited a difficult environment in the Middle East. It has made mistakes, but the difficulties it has encountered would have likely confounded a McCain Administration as well. Not that this will be of any comfort should U.S. policies in either the Middle East or Central Asia fail.

This is the first in a two-part series. Go on to part two.

Goldstone argued that Israel was entitled, under international law, to defend its citizens against Hamas rocket fire, Ynet reports. But, he said, “the strategy adopted by the Defense Ministry”—which involved attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure—“is against international law…. Why did they have to bomb the mosque? Why did they have to bomb the American school? Why did they have to attack the [United Nations] compound?” Gold countered that civilians and their infrastructure were not intentionally targeted; rather, he said, because Hamas infiltrates the civilian population, attacks on that population were not disproportionate. “There’s no question there was enormous damage in Gaza,” he said, according to the Globe. “But why doesn’t Hamas appear as a responsible party for what happened? Who booby-trapped the buildings in Gaza? Who launched an eight-year war against Israel?”

The crowd was respectful, clapping for both debaters, the Globe said, and laughter broke out when Goldstone recalled the nightmares he had before entering Gaza to conduct the report, in which “Hamas would kidnap me, and the Israelis would rejoice.”

Goldstone Defends U.N. Report on Gaza [Boston Globe]
Goldstone: I Was Afraid of Being Abducted in Gaza [Ynet]

Oren and Gold were rivals in that case, but the small world of Israeli politics has a long history of old friends competing with one another. Indeed, the two are friends and colleagues who—as went unmentioned in press coverage of their May competition—found their commitment to Zionism and Israel at the same and time place, as undergraduates and then grad students at Columbia University in the 1970s. They were part of a group of activist Jewish students who thrived in an atmosphere of urgency and fervor alien to college campuses today, and their story provides a glimpse into a generation of American Jews who decided to make aliyah and an idealistic Jewish world—centered around a Jewish commune at just off Columbia’s campus called Beit Ephraim—long past.

Last month, Oren was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly; he told the international press that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks there were “classic anti-Semitism.” Thirty-five years ago, at the 1974 General Assembly, Yassir Arafat made his first speech to the United Nations. The Palestinian leader was received like a celebrity, to raucous applause. And, by all accounts, it was his speech that moved Oren and his circle to action.

Eric Sokoloff, then a Columbia undergrad and prominent campus Zionist, started organizing opposition to Arafat even before the speech, founding a group called Student Mobilization for Israel to unite like-minded college students across the city. SMI was dedicated to pro-Israel political activism and education, staging rallies and demonstrations to present what Sokoloff described to me as “a more accurate portrayal of the issues” than Arafat would.

Sokoloff would later make aliyah, change his first name to Yitzchak, work for the Isreali Ministry of Defense, and teach political science at Hebrew University. But back in 1974, he and SMI began publishing the Middle East Observer, a leaflet featuring news and opinion by Columbia students. As the paper exploded in popularity, it helping SMI establish a national network of student activists. “Soon after we started the paper, we were printing 50,000 copies a week and shipping them across the United States,” Sokoloff recalled.

He worked with SMI, and on the Middle East Observer, with Jeffrey Fine, another Columbia undergrad who is today a lawyer and leader of the modern Orthodox community in Dallas, canvassed Manhattan preaching to their often-offended fellow Jews that service in the Israeli army was a moral obligation for all Jews (though Fine himelf never ended up moving to Israel).

SMI held court at Beit Ephraim, which Fine described to me as a “countercultural hub” for the Columbia Jewish community. Also known as “the Bayit,” it had been founded in 1972 with the financial assistance of the author Herman Wouk, a Columbia alumnus. “The establishment Jewish institutions were not particularly attractive to us,” Gold told me. “So a number of us got together and formed the Bayit as an alternative.”

Steven M. Cohen, one of the Columbia students who helped found the Bayit and now a prominent sociologist, told me that the Bayit, which in its early days actively recruited campus Jewish leaders, sought to “cull Jewish activists from various walks of life, people sometimes ideologically opposed to each other, and see if they could live together.” Amid what Cohen described as a “swirl of self-motivated Jewish activity” at Columbia—from left- and right-wing Zionist organizations to advocates for Soviet Jews to various religious groups—the Bayit selected students like Sokoloff and Fine to create and maintain a dynamic atmosphere of young Jews who fiercely celebrated their Jewish identities.

Oren—who changed his name from Bornstein when he made aliyah, though he retained it as his middle name, in deference to his father—and Gold met for the first time at the Bayit, at a guest lecture by an Israeli author. They soon connected with Sokoloff, Fine, Cohen and others at the Bayit’s weekly Shabbat dinners and educational seminars. Eventually, they both moved in. They were joined by a remarkable cast of future Jewish luminaries who frequented the Bayit in the mid-1970s. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic lived there there, as did Rabbi Joseph Teluskhin, the Jewish author. J.J. Goldberg, a former editor-in-chief of the Forward, lived at a different Jewish collective, but he spent time at the Bayit. So did the nationally syndicated conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager.

Oren and Gold were particularly committed to their Zionism, the other former students said. One Friday night, Fine recalled, Gold discoursed on the potential difficulties of reaching a two-state solution with Palestinians. “We would sit there thinking, what is this guy talking about?” Fine said. “Back then, the PLO was seen as the root of all evil, and here’s Dore postulating all sorts of scenarios, 20 years in advance.” On another occasion, Fine remembered, he was studying Arab nationalism and commented to Oren that he’d encountered a great deal of scholarship in German. “If you want to become an expert in Middle East studies, you probably have to learn German,” Fine recalled saying. Oren pondered him for a moment, then agreed. “Six weeks later,” Fine said, “Oren came back, fluent in German. He was a wunderkind.”

Members of the Bayit and the activist Jewish community shared a sense of kol yisrael arevim zeh la zeh, all of the Nation of Israel are responsible for one another, reveling in each other’s diverse yet strong expressions of Jewish identity. In some cases, Fine recalled, this exuberant Jewish pride bordered on the ridiculous: “Some guys would wear kippot and then march into a trayf Chinese place and chomp on their pork,” he said. “They identified by external symbols.”

These students channeled the prevailing culture of youth protest and ideological zeal into Jewish causes. SMI’s cadre of activists, Sokoloff said, “never took no for an answer” and weren’t afraid “to be angry when necessary” in fighting for Jewish causes. But even among that crowd, Oren, Gold, Sokoloff, and Fine sensed a particular calling above all: Zionism. Columbia’s Middle East and Jewish studies departments allowed the four friends to couple their devoted activism on behalf of Israel with equally dedicated scholarship.

At the time, Israel’s most prominent global representative, the Cambridge-educated diplomat Abba Eban, recently replaced as Israel’s foreign minister, was teaching a weekly seminar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. (Gold took the class; Fine audited it.) The four friends also studied under J.C. Hurewitz, then director of SIPA’s Middle East Institute, who was among the pioneers of Middle East studies in the 1930s. They learned Zionism from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, author of The Zionist Idea, a crucial compendium of Zionism’s intellectual history. Zbigniew Brzezinski instructed several of them in international affairs, while David Sidorsky interrupted his moral philosophy classes to expound upon the Hebrew meaning of the word “men.”

Yet they also refused to sequester themselves in a Jewish cocoon, the students said, seeking out classes on Arab nationalism and learning the Arabic language. They thrived on a campus that hosted Edward Said, already a prominent Palestinian activist, as well as Charles Issawi, a former member of Egypt’s finance ministry who specialized in Arab economics. The Middle East studies classrooms at Columbia were not the dens of controversy and ideological warfare they’ve become more recently. Gold recalled Arab professors such as Issawi encouraging him more than any other faculty members to pursue Middle East studies. Fine remembered taking a course on Arab nationalism in which the professor instructed his Arab-dominated classroom to engage with Fine rather than spout polemics. “Here you have an opportunity to talk to a Zionist, and he wants to learn about your faith and your nationality,” Fine recalled the professor saying. “Take advantage of it.”

Though professors encouraged dialogue, meaningful engagement between Arab and Muslim students and their Jewish peers hardly seemed a foregone conclusion. Though the many Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqis in his classes had their own divisions, Fine said, “they certainly united to hate Israel.” Twenty years prior to the start of Oslo peace process, said Sokoloff, “PLO supporters didn’t mince their words: they believed in the destruction of Israel, as did the rest of the hard left on campus.”

But Sokoloff and Cohen both described debates with those students as arguments with “worthy adversaries.” In an academic environment “largely untainted by polemics,” said Sokoloff, “Dore and I sat shiva for our Arabic friends.” Arabs and Jews “understood each other’s passions and respected them,” he said. As a leading Zionist activist on campus, Cohen sat on panels with Edward Said and hosted Middle East negotiations between Arab and Jewish scholars in Columbia dormitories.

After Columbia, Gold, Oren, and Sokoloff each fulfilled their pledge to make aliyah. They all served in elite army units and fully integrated into Israeli society. Sokoloff founded and runs Keshet, a educational touring agency, and works with the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to bring thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish visitors to Israel each year. Gold has spent twenty years in the Israeli diplomatic corps, facilitating secret meetings between Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Hussein in the early 1990s and engaging in high-level diplomacy with the Clinton Administration as one of Netanyahu’s chief policy advisers.

Jerusalem Post columnist Shmuel Rosner noted that Gold and Oren’s success in Israeli government is incidental, not a sign of American immigrants establishing a larger role in the country but only of the two men’s relationship with Netanyahu. “You see the exception now rather than the rule,” Rosner told me, with a prime minister who uniquely relies upon “Anglo-Saxon advisers” in his inner circle. American immigrants, Rosner said, “remain too small in number, too diverse, and unmotivated” to form an interest bloc achieve true political visibility among Israelis—unlike, say, the politically powerful Russian émigré community.

“My generation of American immigrants came of age with the Second Intifada, when a group of us spontaneously, as individuals, realized we have something essential to contribute to Israel: the opportunity to explain Israel to an American audience in ‘American,’” said the writer Yossi Klein Halevi, a Shalem Center fellow and Oren’s close friend. Oren’s appointment represents “the coming of age of American immigrants” not as a communal political force, he argued, but as a loose movement of public diplomats acting as “counterweights against the demonization of Israel.”

Gold told me in an interview that he and his fellow Columbia Zionists had decided back in Morningside Heights not to “develop careers just for income and needs, but to do something socially and politically meaningful.” That’s what they’re doing. Columbia in the 1970s, Sokoloff said, encouraged altruistic careers. “Israel,” he said, “was our altruism.”

Jordan Hirsch, an intern at Tablet Magazine, is a senior at Columbia University.