Thoughts from Charles Krauthammer:

Obama didn’t just move the goal posts on borders. He also did so on the so-called right of return. Flooding Israel with millions of Arabs would destroy the world’s only Jewish state while creating a 23rd Arab state and a second Palestinian state — not exactly what we mean when we speak of a “two-state solution.” That’s why it has been the policy of the United States to adamantly oppose this “right.”

Yet in his State Department speech, Obama refused to simply restate this position — and refused again in a supposedly corrective speech three days later. Instead, he told Israel it must negotiate the right of return with the Palestinians after having given every inch of territory. Bargaining with what, pray tell?

The Kumbaya president.

[Update mid morning]

What Jeffrey Goldberg gets wrong:

Does Goldberg really believe that if there were no settlements, and if they were suddenly abandoned, that Mahmoud Abbas would suddenly recognize Israel and be ready to make peace? He knows well that since 1948 and Israel’s creation, the Arab nations and the Palestinian leadership — then commanded by the Nazi supporter the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — have vowed never to accept any Jewish state anywhere in Palestine. To them, all of Israel was an illegal settlement by colonialist-imperialist occupiers.

Has Goldberg read any of the penetrating columns by Sol Stern, who regularly has shown how Israel has offered to make peace, only to find Palestinian rejection facing them? (Stern’s most recent one can be read here.) As Stern writes, it is not the settlers who are the impediment to peace, but the false “Nakba narrative” propounded by the PA leaders, especially Abbas. Stern points out: “No one living under Palestinian rule dares publicly question this lie. No historian dares offer his people a balanced account of the 1948 war, of who attacked whom, and of the reasons for the flight of the refugees. As long as this remains the case, the ‘right of return,’ far more than any question of borders, will remain the principal roadblock to successful peace negotiations.”

Some truths are too hard to face for some people.

Thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:

As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spot”: the position that angers everyone and pleases none. He moved close enough to the Israelis to infuriate the Palestinians while keeping the Israelis at too great a distance to earn their trust. One can argue (correctly in my view) that US policy must at some level distance itself from the agendas of both parties to help bring peace. But that has to be done carefully, and to make it work one first needs to win their trust. Obama lost the trust of the Israelis early in the administration and never earned it back; he lost the Palestinians when he was unable to deliver Israeli concessions he led them to expect.

The President is now wandering across Europe seeking to mend fences with allies (Britain, France, Poland) he had earlier neglected and/or offended; at home, his authority and credibility have been holed below the waterline. Everyone who followed the events of the last week knows that the President has lost control of the American-Israeli relationship and that he has no near-term prospects of rescuing the peace process. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the US Congress have all rejected his leadership. Peace processes are generally good things even if they seldom bring peace; one hopes the President can find a way to relaunch American diplomacy on this issue but for now he seems to have reached a dead end — and to have allowed himself to be fatally tagged as too pro-Israel to win the affection of the Europeans and Arabs, and too pro-Palestinian to be trusted either by Israel or by many of the Americans who support it.

He was never up to the job. Of course, there was never any reason for a sane person to think he would be.

[Update a few minutes later]

Annals of the Arab Spring:

The Camp David Accords of 1978 ended any Egyptian claim to the Gaza strip. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 still had to involve the Egyptians, because if the Egyptians did not help keep weapons out of Gaza, and instead encouraged terrorist resistance to Israel, Israeli security would be mortally threatened — and the two countries would start drifting back toward the logic of confrontation that existed between them in the 1950s and 1960s. Israel had originally insisted on controlling the Egypt-Gaza border after the unilateral withdrawal, but caved in to the Egyptians’ assurances that they would control it effectively.

The Obama administration should have been keenly sensitive to this, and should have conditioned all U.S. aid on Egypt’s upholding agreements and undertakings made with respect to Gaza in connection with the Israeli withdrawal.

But it wasn’t, and it didn’t. As Mead says, we may not be far from the next intifada, or even the next war.

[Update later morning]

Obama continues to make things worse in the Middle East:

Democrats are loath to admit the president doesn’t know what he is doing, so they are left trying to convince themselves and others that this is a fuss about nothing. The most honest defense I heard from a pro-Israel Democratic staffer was to acknowledge that Obama had made mincemeat out of the “peace process” but to remind me that talks aren’t going anywhere anyway. In essence, “no harm, no foul” and look at all the hardware and military support we’ve given Israel!

The problem with this formulation is three-fold. First, Obama has staked so much of his personal credibility on the peace process that failure (well, more failure) will cement the perception that the president has no influence in the region. Second, there is a very real dilemma: the pending action by the United Nations. It’s far from clear that taking away bargaining leverage from Israel is going to impress the parties, get the Palestinians (which ones? Mahmoud Abbas?) to the table, or persuade the Europeans, who seem bent on throwing Israel to the wolves. If anything, rifts between the United States and Israel tend to encourage Israel’s enemies. And finally, the president underestimated the degree to which fellow Democrats would rebuke him.

Plus, bonus commentary from Alan Dershowitz, who is also pretty appalled.

Meryl Yourish live blogged it.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Ron Radosh:

So the question is, as I conclude, whether or not the president means it, whether or not he will backpedal in the other direction, and whether he will seek to mend matters with Prime Minister Netanyahu, rather than push him in directions Israel does not want to go. We now have evidence that in a few short days, the pressure moved the President away from the contentious trap he set before meeting PM Netanyahu. Will he now change again facing pressure from the “realists,” the anti-Israel left-wing, and the Arab nations—including those of the Arab Spring that are turning out to be vigorous enemies of Israel. Time, as usual, will tell.

All of his statements come with expiration dates.

I didn’t hear the press conference today, but I’m hearing from a number of sources that Bibi took the president to school.

Well, he badly needs it. I’m afraid, though, that on issues like this, he’s a slow learner.

Muslim moms kill daughters for marrying Hindus. Well, obviously, they had it coming.