It was their first meeting with the new president, and the dozen or so Jewish leaders picked to attend had made an agreement among themselves: No arguing — either with each other or their host.
The pledge would be hard to keep.
Evolution of a president
This is the third in an occasional series of stories assessing President Obama's first term — his record, governing methods and political beliefs.
Behind the failed 'grand bargain'
PART 1 | Last summer's attempted debt deal reflected the pitfalls of Obama's grand ambitions and set the tone for a more partisan path.
Obama's uneasy alliance with the left
Part 2 | The president often bristles at would-be supporters' tactics, many of which he used as a community organizer.
Five weeks earlier, President Obama had traveled to Cairo to ask for a “new beginning” between his government and an Islamic world angry about the United States’ wars in two Muslim nations and its perceived favoritism toward Israel. Now, he was calling in these influential Jewish leaders to explain his thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As they gathered in the Roosevelt Room that afternoon, July 13, 2009, there was mounting concern about Obama.
In a very public way, the president had been asking Israel’s government to stop building Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, hoping that political sacrifice by the Israeli leadership would bring the Palestinians to the peace table. In Cairo, he had even called Israel’s continuing construction on land that Palestinians view as their future state “illegitimate.”
According to three people who were at the meeting, and to notes recounted by one of them, Obama sought to reassure the skeptical attendees, telling them, “Don’t think we don’t understand the nuances of the current issues. We do.”
But it was his response a few minutes later that came to define his administration’s relationship with Israel — and the reason many in the room that day, and even more outside of it, believe that his attempts to bring the two sides together failed in his first term.
“If you want Israel to take risks, then its leaders must know that the United States is right next to them,” Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the president.
Obama politely but firmly disagreed.
“Look at the past eight years,” he said, referring to the George W. Bush administration’s relationship with Israel. “During those eight years, there was no space between us and Israel, and what did we get from that? When there is no daylight, Israel just sits on the sidelines, and that erodes our credibility with the Arab states.”
Obama’s Muslim middle name, former anti-Zionist pastor in Chicago and past friendships with prominent Palestinians had shadowed his presidential campaign. He wanted to restore the United States’ reputation as a credible mediator. To do so, he believed that he needed to regain Arab trust — and talk tough to Israel, publicly and privately.
This was the change that Obama had promised — a new approach to old problems. But the stunned silence of Jewish leaders around the table that day suggested the political peril he would face along the way.
“We believed from that point that we were in for problems,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who attended the meeting. “And we were right.”
The way Obama managed the Israeli-Palestinian issue exhibited many of the hallmarks that have defined his first term. It began with a bid for historic change. But it foundered ultimately on his political and tactical misjudgments, on a lack of trusted relationships and on an outdated view of a conflict that many of his closest advisers imparted to him. And those advisers — veterans of the Middle East peace issue — clashed among themselves over tactics and turf.
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