President-elect Biden will no doubt seek to return to some of the policies of President Obama when it comes to the Middle East, and to much else. But Haviv Rettig Gur notes that Obama, who came to office well-liked by Israelis and Middle Easterners in general, quickly squandered that good will—and sees some lessons in this for the former vice-president:
To show how profoundly he was not George W. Bush, [Obama] visited Istanbul and Cairo in his first visit to the region, but avoided Israel. He delivered a speech “to the Muslim world” from Cairo in the belief that what the Middle East was yearning for in 2009 was an American leader who sounded different.
Two years later, when the Arab Spring drove the region’s deeper undercurrents out into the open, the same Obama administration was caught flat-footed. Democrats . . . suddenly had to contend with the possibility that more was going on in the Middle East than was dreamed of in Washington think-tanks and on cable news programs.
[Obama also] pressured Israel into a settlement freeze in 2010 as a show of “good faith,” and never understood why the intense year-long pressure on Jerusalem did not bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table. His advisers did not realize that a Palestinian president could not be seen to be demanding fewer preconditions for negotiations than the Americans. By drawing from the Israelis an unprecedented settlement freeze before negotiations began, Obama pushed Mahmoud Abbas up a tree just when he thought he was bringing him down from one. The more Obama tilted toward the Palestinians, the further he pushed Palestinian politics away from a compromising center.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/bidens-mideast-challenge-avoid-obamas-very-first-policy-mistake/