Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

Source URL (retrieved on Oct 17, 2012): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/romneys-sensible-stance-israel-palestine-7598

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Romney's Sensible Stance on Israel-Palestine

October 17, 2012

Leon Hadar [2]

While political pundits have been preoccupied with comments about the “47 percent” that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made during a May 17 fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida, the foreign-policy establishment has been focused on other remarks at the same event. These less-discussed sentiments seemed to reflect the candidate’s skepticism about the ability of Washington to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
In response to question by a donor about how to resolve the “Palestinian problem,” Romney asserted that “the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.” There is not much that the United States can do, so “you move things along the best way you can,” he proposed. “You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem.”
Comparing the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians to the clash between China and Taiwan, Romney argued that “we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.”
During his recent foreign-policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute, Romney seemed to realign his view on Israel-Palestine with the more traditional consensus in Washington, stressing his commitment to the notion of “a Democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel” and actually faulting President Barack Obama for failing to make progress on a two-state solution.
Some self-proclaimed foreign-policy realists who have ridiculed the neoconservative proposition that that the United States has the power and the obligation to remake the Middle East by promoting the so-called Freedom Agenda also have been critical of Romney’s Boca Raton Middle East manifesto. Many of them argue (not unlike liberal internationalists) that Washington can and ought to help make peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
But perhaps the time has come to face reality and recognize that Romney was right, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “is going to remain an unsolved problem” for a long time and that Washington cannot do much more than “moving things along the best you can.” Members of the reality-based community should admit that the U.S.-led “peace process” has accomplished little. And yet, like the Energizer Bunny, it keeps going and going and going.