From the start, the war in Iraq seemed like a gruesome satire of that bitter satire, Wag the Dog: a war invented out of fabrications. When my wife saw a front-page pic this morning of Iraqis holding up a shoe in support of the journalist who hurled his footwear at George W. Bush, she immediately reminded me of “Good Old Shoe,” the song invented in the movie to keep up the patriotic diversion from the president’s tzatzkele tzures.

OK, I will acknowledge that the journalist involved is an ex-Baathist, and that journalists are supposed to use words, not shoes. So we are not to make a hero of him. But did he know that his act of performance art was a parody of a parody?

I have a new article up at the LA Times explaining Olmert’s legacy: broken promises, more settlements.:

…At last Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Olmert chose to end his term with the same message with which he began it two years ago. “The Whole Land of Israel is done with,” he said, referring to the dream of permanent Israeli rule over the West Bank. “There’s no such thing.”

For most of Olmert’s life, the Whole Land was his dream. His father served as a Knesset member for a hard-line nationalist party, and Olmert followed him into the business. But five years ago, he stunned the nation by switching sides. To remain a democracy and a Jewish state, he said, Israel had to stop ruling over the disenfranchised Palestinians of the occupied territories. Otherwise, he said, Palestinians would give up on a two-state solution and instead demand the right to vote in Israel — and Jews would become a minority of the electorate in their own country. To avoid that danger, Israel would have to give up most of the West Bank.

In 2006, as head of the new, centrist Kadima party, Olmert was elected on that promise. Addressing parliament as he took office as prime minister, he stressed that his program was “partitioning the land” with the Palestinians. And he pointed out the key obstacle to pulling back: “Continued scattered settlement throughout Judea and Samaria … endangers the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.”

Twenty-eight months later, however, Olmert’s plan has gone almost nowhere. He is engaged in an anemic negotiating process with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Meanwhile, settlements “scattered throughout … Judea and Samaria” keep growing. Official Israeli statistics show 290,000 Israelis living in the West Bank today, an increase of 30,000 in two years… Why has he worked so hard against himself?

Read the full article here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.

Yossi Sarid entered Israel’s parliament 34 years ago as one of two young, rising stars. The other was Ehud Olmert. Today, Olmert is prime minister, but the operative word here is “today.” Last week, the police recommended to prosecutors that Olmert be indicted for bribery, money laundering, and other forms of corruption too numerous for anyone outside the fraud squad to keep track of…

Sarid, on the other hand, resigned from the Knesset two years ago after a long, principled, and impassioned career… “I felt more than a small measure of apathy, if not to say despair, with the political system,” he told me last week, in the deep melodious voice that can still make a phone conversation hint at a stump speech. “I felt … that the system no longer mobilized the resources of my soul.”

The melancholy last acts of the two careers point to the malaise of Israeli politics. The system itself appears virtually bankrupt, lacking the basic asset of public trust and no longer offering a clear choice between competing ideas.

Read the whole article here, and return to South Jerusalem to comment.

Sometime before November, traffic in Jerusalem will be tied up by Barack Obama’s visit. My new article in The American Prospect explains what Obama should do while he’s here to prepare for the presidency, and why he won’t do any of that:

…In Jerusalem, Obama has another task — shoring up support among voters who question his pro-Israel credentials. This is hardly the Jewish vote as a whole. Rather, it is the subset that falsely conflates “pro-Israel” with supporting the hawkish side of the Israeli political spectrum. Trying to satisfy those voters while demonstrating a fresh, diplomacy-based foreign policy increases the chances of a slip-up…

Besides those constraints are the practical ones. Protocol forces a visiting political figure to spend his time with top officials, providing a terribly restrictive view of a country. Even if Obama wanted to emulate the legendary Arab ruler Harun al-Rashid, who slipped away from his palace dressed as a commoner to learn what was really happening, the Secret Service and its Israeli counterparts would keep him a prisoner of security arrangements. The pilgrimage that would really help Obama to understand what he needs to do as president consists of the inexpedient, the unlikely and the impossible…

Read the full article here.

The contacts through Turkey reportedly began in February 2007. If so, the Olmert government may have been persuaded to act (or embarrassed into acting) by the reports published the previous month about Foreign Minister director-general Alon Liel’s back-channel negotations with Syria. The “non-paper ” – or unsigned framework agreement reached by Liel and unofficial Syrian negotiator Ibrahim (Abe) Suleiman is important reading, because it gives a sense of how an Israel-Syria deal is likely to look. One creative feature: in order to keep the Golan demilitarized and to prevent competition over Jordan River water, the Golan would be turned into a giant park after Israeli withdrawal – with free access for Israelis.

Liel has stressed – in a press briefing in January 2007, and since – that a critical part of any deal is a switch in Syrian orientation from pro-Iran to pro-West. That would necessarily mean dropping support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria’s secular regime wants the reorientation in order to maintain its independence, Alon reports. For Israel, such a deal would mean much more than removing the direct military threat from Syria. With Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, Iran’s power in our area would be sigificantly reduced.

But the deal requires a third party: Washington. Syria won’t and can’t risk dropping Iran without a new patron; otherwise it will be totally isolated in the region. And Bush’s Washington isn’t interested. Since the Liel-Suleiman talks were publicized, experts here have said that the main obstacle is the U.S.

In a fairly devastating report on the adminstration’s nonexistent role in Mideast peace efforts, the Washington Post says today :

For years, the Bush administration has resisted overtures from Jerusalem and Damascus to participate in revived peace efforts over the Golan Heights…

At his Senate confirmation hearing on May 1, James B. Cunningham, the ambassador-designate to Israel, said expanding peace talks to include Syria would be difficult. “We have taken the position that it is not very useful right now for us to be talking to Syria,” he said. As a result, over the past year Turkey has taken the initiative to launch shuttle diplomacy, a role once reserved for U.S. secretaries of state.

The administration, it seems, has now dropped its absolute veto. But it isn’t happy. Rozen reports :

The Bush administration, which knew the talks were taking place, even as the president was making his controversial remarks, offered reluctant support. “It is our hope that discussions between Israel and Syria will cover all the relevant issues,” a State Department official, speaking on background, told Mother Jones.

The operative word there is “reluctant.”

One administration objection to talking peace with Syria is that it would undercut the pro-Western government in Lebanon, and thereby hurt Washington’s efforts to promote democracy in the region. As I wrote recently in The American Prospect, the Bush policy has actually hurt the Siniora government by strengthening Hezbollah. Hezbollah knows that Syria could leave it high and dry; Washington doesn’t.

It’s true that the Siniora government has lobbied against an Israeli-Syrian deal. Instead, it wants the U.S. to protect it from Hezbollah. This is a clue to what Bush doesn’t get about our neighbor to the north. Lebanon provides a preview for those who’d like to turn Israel and the territories into a binational state. Instead of the state looking for foreign patrons against outside enemies, each community within it – or each faction within each community – looks for a foreign patron, usually hoping that the outside power will do its fighting for it. Syria is always a player, but it regularly switches clients. Back in 1982, Israel was seduced by Bashir Gemayel into thinking it could control Lebanon by backing his Christian faction. The results were disastrous. Siniora would like the US to make the same mistake, but Bush has no troops available. Perhaps he even understands why it would be a bad idea.

The only way to weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon, therefore, is to get Syria to cut it loose. But Bush is ready, at most, to stand aside and let Israel and Syria negotiate. The Bush doctrine, essentially, is “no negotiations, no recognition, no peace .” So the chances of cutting a deal before next January are poor. What happens after that depends – not exclusively, but significantly – on who’s in the White House. Obama believes in negotiating . The McCain Doctrine is the Bush Doctrine, shop-worn, failed and relabelled.

Dan Kurtzer, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and an Orthodox Jew, is in Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary celebrations. This morning my wife heard him being interviewed on Israeli Radio, in Hebrew, about the U.S. election. Kurtzer explained that he’s backing Barack Obama.

This was not exactly a revelation. Kurtzer has explained his reasons for backing Obama at length . Here’s some key snippets:

…we have had eight years of disaster with respect to our foreign policy, and I have to share with you as an analyst, we have had eight years that have [compromised] the security of the state of Israel.
An administration that has ignored the search for peace in the Middle East to a point where you have chaos in the Palestinian Authority, and you have a sham process called the Annapolis process, in which our Secretary of State, whom I admire personally, travels to region and announces when she gets there that she is bringing no new ideas.
You have an administration that hasn’t engaged in the peace process, and so inherited a bad situation in 2001 and is leaving it in a worse situation in 2008. And you have an administration that has gotten us engaged in a war in Iraq that has not only cost American lives… but it’s now being called the $3 trillion war…And I would share with you that the cost to the security of Israel is incalculable.
I was in Israel [as Ambassador] when this was being contemplated and when it started… Now, you’ve heard the nonsense which is out there which suggests that Israel or the Jewish community or the Israel lobby pushed this war on the administration. And I can tell you it is nonsense, because there was not one Israeli official and not one Israeli academic who suggested that this war was going to end well. They all warned against exactly the problems we have experienced since this war started…

Knowing this, Kurtzer said, he considered which candidate was likely to improve Israel’s situation. The answer was Obama, and the reason is very simple:

We have one candidate who is prepared to do diplomacy. Only one candidate…
We have had eight years of no diplomacy, and you have two candidates out there who tell us they don’t want to talk to our enemies…
There is one candidate who believes in diplomacy and his name is Barack Obama.

There’s nothing complicated about what Kurtzer is saying. Strangely, though, some Jews seem to be having doubts. Marc Ambinder cites Gallup’s tracking polls , showing that currently 61% of Jews would vote for Obama, 32% for McCain. This looks like a blow-out, but it’s actually a considerably poorer showing than a Democratic presidential candidate normally gets among Jews. (Note that the percentages are based on aggregate of tracking polls for the entire month of April – presumably because the number of Jews polled on any given day is too small for any sample. So the numbers are out of date; they’re from a long period; and they’re from a time when Obama was taking a lot of blows. Caveat lector.) Those figures, in turn, lead to articles such as this one in the New Republic, suggesting that a poor showing among Jews could cost Obama Florida.

I assume the swing voters among Jews aren’t leaning toward McCain because of his deep knowledge of the economy, or because they can count on him to appoint justices who will protect the separation of church and state. Presumably, at least one strong reason is the suspicion fomented by rightwing mass-emailers that Obama is somehow bad for Israel. The stuff recycles; a political reporter reports that Obama has a Jewish problem; the media herd grabs the story; the less-informed believe the next crank email they get because – hey – didn’t you hear that Obama has a Jewish problem?

Kurtzer has it right. In four easy steps, here’s why Obama is the best candidate for Israel:

1) As the ambassador says, the Bush administration has been a disaster for Israel. The war in Iraq has empowered Iran. It has pushed a wave of refugees into Jordan, endangering the stability of Israel’s neighbor and strategic ally. The Bush administration has managed to miss every diplomatic opportunity for renewing the peace process with the Palestinians. When Bush came to power, the Second Intifada was still in its early stages. Bush turned his back on any negotiations that could have slowed or reversed the escalation. He missed the chance when Arafat died. As detailed in a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last year, and more recently in a Vanity Fair investigative article , the Bush administration’s actions led directly to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. The administration’s veto on Syrian-Israeli negotiations has blocked Damascus from making a deal in which it would switch allegiances from Iran to the West, and end support for Hezbollah. The outcome is the current crisis in Lebanon, which could soon fall entirely under Iranian control.

“There is a major gap between the perception that Bush has been good for Israel and the reality of Israel’s terrible circumstances,” former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told me back in 2004, with immense diplomatic understatement. Since then, the gap between rhetoric and reality has gotten much wider . (Indyk, I have to note , has been supporting Team Clinton, showing loyalty to his original political patron but not the best foreign-policy judgment.)

2) John McCain promises another four years of Bush’s mistakes. McCain’s understanding of the Mideast is so weak that he doesn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite. McCain wants to continue Bush’s failed policies in Iraq. McCain actively sought the endorsement of John Hagee, whose policy on Israel is based on eager expectation of apocalypse, bloody battles on Israeli soil and the conversion of the Jews. As I’ve noted before , Hagee has expressed uncommon sympathy, in writing, for Yigal Amir, the terrorist who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in order to prevent peace. If Hagee’s constituency is the one that McCain wants to satisfy, he will avoid any diplomatic involvement in the Middle East. Israelis will pay the price in ongoing conflict and in rising Iranian influence.

3) Since Hillary Clinton says she’s still in the race, I have to point out that she is running on a Mideast policy that is more hawkish than Bill’s positions, and more hawkish than the Israeli government.

The most forgiving explanation I’ve heard is that she is pandering to those Jewish voters who don’t realize that Israel’s centrist leaders have reevaluated the country’s strategic needs – or that she is still caught in the post-9/11 mindset that a Democratic has to be even more bellicose than a Republican to show she’s not soft. The less forgiving explanation is that she really is hawkish, as demonstrated in her disastrous vote for the war in Iraq.

4) The one candidate who speaks in clear terms of taking a new approach to the Mideast is Obama. This is what scares the small coterie of American Jewish rightists who would eagerly fight to the last Israeli. If you care about Israel, you should hit “delete” when you get their emails.

Obama is the one candidate who had the sense to oppose the war in Iraq. He’s the one candidate whose statement on Israel expresses support for a two-state solution, which is the country’s path to peaceful future and is today the consensus position in Israel. He’s the one proposing a clear break from the disastrous Bush policies, and a turn to trying diplomacy.

Ah, say the cynics, but why believe that diplomacy could work? As Haim wrote in his recent post on the Geneva process,

…in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the devil is not in the details. The devil is the conflict of narratives.

That is, the two sides have such a different account of history, of what is at stake today, and of the meaning of symbolic events and landmarks, that they seem unable to negotiate. They don’t even agree on what went wrong in previous talks (as I explain in this article from the American Prospect).

But narrative isn’t fixed. The past isn’t dead; it’s constantly rewritten. The meaning of symbols can shift – to exacerbate conflict or make compromise possible. A few rare leaders understand this, and work to recast the stories and the symbols. In his speech on race, Obama showed that he is capable of aiming for that. If he can apply that skill to the Mideast tangle, there’s a chance he can move diplomacy forward. He’s certainly the only candidate who seems to be considering how to do so. Dan Kurtzer is right.

In an analysis published through the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv U, Zisser describes that the most likely reason for Assad to reveal Olmert’s commitment, which was delivered via Turkey:

…the Syrians may have wanted to test Olmert’s seriousness, to check whether the message delivered to them was reliable, and whether Olmert would be capable of weathering the inevitable criticism from portions of the Israeli public. The fact that the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office declined to deny the news of the commitment has been understood as a tacit confirmation of its veracity.

The peacemaker here is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of Israel’s closest ally in the region. The obstacle is the leader of the United States:

…achieving real progress in the Israeli-Syrian peace process will require active American participation. So far, the US has not reacted officially to the latest Olmert-Bashar exchange. However, it concurrently revealed information regarding the Israeli attack in northern Syria in September 2007 against a nuclear facility under construction with North Korean assistance. To be sure, the revelation was not designed as a response to the incipient resumption of Syrian- Israeli negotiations. Nevertheless, it served as another reminder of the low point that Syrian-American relations have reached in recent years, and the lack of any readiness in the Bush administration to change its attitude towards Syria.

I should stress that the single most significant improvement in Israeli security was arguably the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, which elimnated the possibility of a strong Arab coalition going to war against Israel. It also completed Egypt’s switch from a pro-Soviet to a pro-Western orientation. Some "pro-Israel" activists in the U.S. have never forgiven Jimmy Carter for his role in that achievement.

Now we have at least a glimmering of an opportunity to remove Syria from the threats against us, and cut it loose from the Teheran-Hizballah alliance. But the roadblock on the path to peace is a large white structure on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. At least until the tenant changes.