Shattered Hopes

July 22, 2013
Ruebner, a leader of the coalition U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, charges the Obama administration with playing “a crucial role... in sinking the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.” Throughout the book, the author makes the idiosyncratic argument that the president is a natural ally of the Palestinians, but that he has thrown them under the bus for personal gain; he is “willing to sublimate his likely true feelings on this issue in order to advance his political career.” Unfortunately, the book often reads like an awkward attempt at psychoanalysis couched in shrill, thinly reasoned polemic. Ruebner assigns complex emotions and motivations to Obama, even as he stridently insists that the president’s actions are unreasonable and reprehensible. At the same time, he stakes out a maximalist position for himself, asserting that no Israeli concessions can ever be good enough for the Palestinians, and any Israeli concerns are inherently suspect. He argues that Obama’s attempt to revive the Oslo “peace process” (scare quotes and all) is “shameful,” as is the president’s obeisance to Israel’s “supposed” security needs. The author places the blame for the 9/11 attacks on American policy toward Israel, and, while magnanimously allowing that “deliberately attacking civilians is never justifiable under international law,” he excoriates Obama for insisting that the Palestinians can achieve peace only through nonviolent means.

August 1, 2013
An official of a pro-Palestinian lobbying group finds the administration of President Barack Obama to be, like all administrations of the past 65 years, egregiously unfair to Palestinian interests. Ruebner, advocacy director of a group called the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, presents an extensive litany of complaints against the Jewish state and its American ally, fully garnished with sententious terminology like "genocide," "apartheid" and "ethnic cleansing." Certainly, in the fractious history of the Middle East, fault may be assigned to both Israel and the various factions representing the Palestinian people. The cause of secure peace surely cannot be served by jeremiads like this, sincere and earnest as they might be, that ignore this certainty. West Bank settlements are a serious concern but so are suicide bombers and rockets deployed by Hamas and Hezbollah, entities sworn to "obliterate" their neighbor. Ruebner finds something nefarious in Israel's use of the Iron Dome system, designed to intercept missiles launched against civilians. The notorious Goldstone Report on the Gaza conflict was quite critical of Israel, and the author uses 16 pages to analyze the report yet neglects to mention that the author, Goldstone himself, soon disavowed his own findings, confessing that his commission did not possess all the facts. Similarly, readers of this narrative of Palestinian victimhood will not find the whole story. If the peace process is to survive, it must overcome unremitting bias. Constant threats to destroy the Jewish state won't relieve the plight of the Palestinian population longing for nationhood and neither will unadulterated propaganda. Beyond the reduction or elimination of American support for its ally, Ruebner offers no solutions for peace in the region. A flawed fulmination that reports only virtue on one side and all guilt on the other.

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