Unexpected as the recent round of diplomatic turmoil in the Middle East, caused by Israel’s recent actions in Jerusalem may have seemed even to the United States, they cannot be said to be entirely surprising. The decision of Netanyahu’s government to carry out another round of house construction in East Jerusalem will certainly have surprised the Americans by its timing, coinciding as it did with Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel, designed to fine-tune the start of a new round of talks between Israel and the Palestinians. The American claim to have been surprised by the Israeli move has been generally accepted by world opinion, but many will feel that the event can be said to show a serious deficiency in American intelligence in Israel itself.

Israel is an open, and some might even say a noisily fractious democracy in which much decision making, being of a coalitional nature, is carried out virtually in the open. In that context it might be thought that American diplomats in the country might have picked up some indication of what was being planned, even if this was taking place, as the Israelis have alleged, at lower levels of decision-making than the national level. For we in the Caribbean well know that in our own open societies decisions-in-the-making are, more often than not, picked up by the diplomatic representatives stationed here. So as a first step, surely, President Obama needs to call for a review of his Israeli Embassy’s current practice, with an emphasis on a breakdown in their efficiency that resulted in embarrassment to the second-highest authority in the US, Vice President Biden, an individual known to have had a certain sympathy for Israel.

American policy makers will have been well aware that with the breakdown of the last Israel Labour Party-dominated government in that country led by Ehud Barak, and the establishment of the Likud Ehud Olmert and then Binyamin Netanyahu governments, that Israel’s posture towards the Palestinians was bound to harden. And so, similarly, would their diplomacy towards those wishing them to pursue more positive positions on the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state encompassing areas presently under Israel’s control. The position of Netanyahu has been well known, and the fact that he was necessarily establishing an administration to the right of the Israeli political spectrum, in part depending on hardline elements including recent Russian immigrants, would hardly have led one to expect that he would easily yield to diplomatic stances favoured by the United States or by the so-called moderate Arabs. The Americans might have felt that with Barak and a Labour group in the Netanyahu Cabinet that some influence could be exerted through him.  But this is Netanyahu’s second stint as Prime Minister, and certainly he would want a more prolonged tenure than his previous one. Concessions against the “righter” wing in his Cabinet (this being already a rightwing-dominant coalition administration) would hardly be on the cards just one year after his second assumption of office.

On the American side, it is well to remember that although he gave his now famously brilliant speech in Cairo soon after he himself assumed office as President, Obama, to some observers, went out of his way during the election campaign, to assure the Israelis of his friendship and sympathy. He was, of course at the time, combating Hillary Clinton who had established a pro-Israeli campaign position. This has been  felt to be  required of all aspirants to the Presidency, given the strength of the pro-Israeli elements in the US itself, as well as a general perception that the American public is more sympathetic to the Israeli cause as against that of the Palestinians.   And in a sense, American initiatives towards the Arab world and the Palestinian National Authority’s ruling faction under its President Mahmoud Abbas, have indeed seemed to have borne fruit to the extent that Mr Abbas has felt that he could proceed without worrying about the feelings of the Hamas faction. But at the same time, the Israeli settlements decision seems to have been deliberately timed to upset Hamas and the more radical elements and, in the play of Palestinian politics, to have constrained the willingness of the Palestine government to deal with Netanyahu and this government.

It would appear that President Obama’s present diplomacy however, is patterned on the diplomacy undertaken by President Jimmy Carter which led to a rapprochement between the Egyptian government under Sadat and the Israeli government under Begin who had once been deemed, as a former leader of the Israel Irgun movement, to be to the right of the right, so to speak. No doubt Obama has felt that gradually Netanyahu could be brought to a position of inducing the more radical elements of his own fragile coalition to move towards the centre in the required diplomatic process, and to not oppose, if they could not publicly accept, the solution now advocated by the Americans on the basis of agreement between themselves and the Egyptians and Saudi Arabians in particular. But the objective of these radical elements in Netanyahu’s coalition is really to go a step further. That is, at best  only  to agree to a solution that simultaneously isolates the Hamas faction and establishes a Palestinian state weak enough to be under Israel’s effective control. President Sadat paid the ultimate price for the agreement with Jimmy Carter, so obviously the current Palestine leadership is likely to be cautious  about any solution that looks like less than acceptable to general Arabic opinion. It is well to remember that later, one, Yasser Arafat walked away from what President Clinton thought was a realistic solution to this Palestine-Israel issue.

But Netanyahu does not have the prestige of a Begin, and has not felt able to bend to American pressure exerted in the White House itself, even under circumstances of the extreme displeasure of the American President. Some reports suggest that the President has diplomatically humiliated the Prime Minister, but perhaps in Israel, and even in the Arab Middle East, the position might be perceived as the reverse. In any case there will inevitably be a period of cooling off before the President restarts his initiative towards the Israelis. He will also have been forewarned of certain domestic consequences of his so doing, as the mid-term Congressional elections approach, by the hardline posture adopted by the Republican leadership, including his recent opponent Senator John McCain on the issue.

In the wider world, even including governments in the Middle East not as sympathetic to Americans, the failure of Obama’s initiative will most likely be seen as a disappointment. This is because current American diplomacy towards the Middle East region as a whole is being undertaken within parameters that include issues and concerns beyond the Palestine issue. It is felt by some of these governments that the Israelis wish to propagate acceptance of the view that the key emerging issue in the Middle East is not that of the fate of the Palestinians, but the threat of Iran’s development of a nuclear capability. Acceptance of this position would involve the Americans seeing a solution to the Iranian issue as a prerequisite to a final settlement of the Palestine issue. But the Americans presently see such an assertion as leading to an alienation of the states in the Middle East, with whom it is presently in concert in its present initiatives.

We can hardly expect much further movement on the Palestine issue until the Congressional elections are over, and if they are reasonably in favour of the Democrats. The realities of democratic politics and, more than that, of coalition government, in Israel, and the de facto coalition politics of the American system will make sure of this. But in the meantime, President Obama  will continue to play what we can call the diplomatic politics of displeasure, to persuade Prime Minister Netanyahu to come closer to the US position than he and his coalition are at present.