Return of Robert Malley

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That there is widespread anxiety over the Obama administration’s Middle East policies is hardly a secret. It is not the so-called “Israel Lobby” that is the ultimate authority for Washington’s stance in the region, it is presidents and their appointees who make policies. And under Obama, the U.S. has pushed policies that directly clash with the long-established positions of pro-Israel groups.

The not-so-powerful “Israel Lobby” has had no choice about swallowing the bitter pill of appointments that it regards with suspicion, most famously that of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. And it is similarly the case with the new appointment of Robert Malley, a former Middle East peace negotiator from the Clinton administration, as a senior director at the National Security Council, where he will manage relations with the Persian Gulf states.

Pro-Israel advocates distrust Malley because he broke with the consensus—shared by President Bill Clinton himself, among others—that the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit was the fault of the late PLO leader, Yasser Arafat. In an August 2001 article for The New York Review of Books, Malley and co-author Hussein Agha wrote sympathetically of Arafat’s conviction “that the Israelis were setting a trap” at Camp David.

“The Camp David proposals were viewed as inadequate: they were silent on the question of refugees, the land exchange was unbalanced, and both the Haram and much of Arab East Jerusalem were to remain under Israeli sovereignty,” they wrote. From the standpoint of Israel’s own security interests, those observations were uncomfortably aligned with the Palestinian refusal, exemplified by the insistence on the so-called “right of return,” to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—a refusal that persists in our own day.

Then there was Malley’s meeting in 2008 (when he worked for the International Crisis Group, a high-level NGO) with representatives of Hamas. At the time, that led to a break with the Obama presidential campaign, which Malley was informally advising. Though Hamas is blacklisted by the U.S. as a terrorist organization, Malley defended his interaction by saying, “If you want to have movement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority you’re going to have to find some way of neutralizing Hamas’s spoiling capacity, and that means, to some extent, engaging with it.”

Interestingly, Malley has also strongly criticized the man who now employs him, over the Middle East. “An administration that never tires of saying it cannot want peace more than the parties routinely belies that claim by the desperation it exhibits in pursuing that goal,” he wrote of Obama in 2011. “Today, there is little trust, no direct talks, no settlement freeze, and, one at times suspects, not much of a U.S. policy.” Nor does he apparently subscribe to the view that the primary requirement for peace in the region is a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whereas the Obama administration frequently gives the impression that this is in fact the case. “The recent focus on Arab-Israeli relations has helped foster the belief that Middle East diplomacy can be reduced to that single dimension,” Malley wrote in a 2001 book review for Foreign Affairs. “It cannot.”

If there was, in Malley’s words, “not much of a U.S. policy” in 2011, there is one now. Critics have called it “leading from behind.” Supporters term it “engagement.” Semantics aside, during the Obama years, the key strategic transformation in the region has been the strengthening of Iran. Hence, it is easy to understand why the idea of someone running Iran policy who is a keen advocate of engagement, and who believes that Iranian ally Hamas should not be isolated, is so disconcerting.

The nature of Malley’s new job, however, should reassure pro-Israel groups that they won’t be privately grappling with him at every turn. That role will fall to the Saudis, who are furious with Obama’s overtures to Iran. As this story unfolds, watch for the possibility that Malley, supposedly the bête noire of the “Israel Lobby,” will arouse the venom of the well-paid and influential Saudi lobbyists in Washington.

Ben Cohen is Shillman Analyst for JNS.org.