What Happens on Spring Break

Having a rough semester? Providence weather got you down? Worried about job prospects, the dire state of your love life, your thesis advisor’s expectations (not to mention those of your parents)? Well, I’ve got good news for you: today you don’t have to worry about those things, because today is the first day of spring break. And as everyone knows, spring break is a time to just let go. Let go of your obligations, forget about your worries and your strife, sit on the beach and drink a pina colada. I mean, even Obama’s doing it.

Oh, you haven’t heard about Obama’s spring break plans? Man, your wild weekend at Ultra has nothing on what your president will be up to. He even got a two day jump on you! As of Wednesday, he’s living it up in Israel, and then after a crazy day or so in the West Bank, he’ll move on to Jordan for some well-deserved R&R (which is, as everyone knows, all there is to do in Amman). And if you thought #springbreak2013 and #caboproblems were the wittiest hashtags ever, think again – the President’s trip is so cool, it gets its own personal one (#ObamaInIsrael has been trending since yesterday).

Maybe I’m being a little hard on Obama. He’s really Sophomore Slumping, and he’s honestly got so much on his plate at the moment: that troublesome child in North Korea (decide for yourself whether I mean Dennis Rodman or Kim Jong-un), the first use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the ever-present threat of nuclear Iran, not to mention the complete stagnation in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. With all that weighing on him, no visit to Psych Services is going to make him feel better. What the President really needs is some vaca with his America’s best friend, Israel.

Don’t be ridiculous, you say – Obama is the President of the United States, and this is only his second official visit to the Middle East. Of course he is conducting important state business and attempting solutions to some of the region’s most pressing problems. But strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Paradoxically, it appears that though the President is indeed visiting Israel because of the various crises described above, he does not intend to produce any concrete solutions or policy recommendations while in the region. Rather, Obama wants to reassure the Israeli people of his commitment to the US-Israel relationship, and to their safety in the face of the aforementioned monsters under the bed (Iranian nukes, Syrian extremists, Dennis Rodman, etc).

In fact, to the naked eye, what Obama’s doing is a lot like ass-kissing. He’s never been seen as much of a Friend to Israel, neither by government officials (Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu supported Romney in the 2012 elections), nor by the people themselves, who were deeply suspicious of Obama’s motives for visiting. With a new government taking the reins in Israel (that includes many pro-settlement ministers, but for the first time, no ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups), perhaps Obama believed the time was ripe for some government-to-government bonding. Or maybe all the years of being guilt tripped by Republicans for his lukewarm commitment to the Strategic Partnership have finally gotten to him. Either way, it seems that Obama is focused more on sucking up to the Israelis than resolving any of the very real foreign policy issues that are currently facing his administration.

Take, for example, the most pressing foreign policy issue in Israel: the conflict with the Palestinians. According to White House correspondent Mark Landler, who covered the recent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, Obama will not propose a new compromise (the reason for this being the still-painful memory of his first term, in which his efforts to form a peace plan were quickly shut down by PM Netanyahu). His new strategy, as his speech yesterday to an audience of young Israelis at the Jerusalem Convention Center demonstrates, is to make a personal appeal to the people. At first glance, this strikes me as the easy way out. Obama is sick and tired of the stubborn Israeli government ministers, who aren’t going to support a meaningful compromise anyway, so he’s ostensibly “dealing with the Israel-Palestine issue” by making a speech. Yes, we know, he’s got enough charisma to fill a football stadium – he’s still just avoiding looking for a concrete solution to the issue.

But let’s look at the subtext here. The first significant thing about the way Obama approached the Israel-Palestine issue is that he chose to address a roomful of young, passionate Israelis rather than the Knesset (Israeli parliament), which is full of old geezers politicians. In his speech, he emphasized the common ground between the Israeli and Palestinian experiences, and asked his audience to demand change from their government. In pursuing this bottom-up strategy, Obama simultaneously avoided an unproductive exchange with Israeli officials and created a gap between them and their populace. And unproductive a meeting with the Knesset certainly would have been, given that a big part of the President’s speech was about the need to punish settlers in the occupied territories (a tough sell to a parliament composed largely of pro-settlement ministers).

On the surface, it doesn’t look like this trip will accomplish anything concrete. Obama’s diplomatic efforts (which included assuring Netanyahu of US support against Iran and a plea to Palestinians in Ramallah to negotiate without any preconditions) appear designed to pander to the Israeli people. But here we reach the heart of the matter – if we take for granted that no definite policy proposals will come out of this visit (as we should, given the near-hysterical insistence of US government officials that “seriously you guys, nothing of any actual value at all could ever happen on this trip in a million years”), there are still Obama’s intentions to consider. So he’s buttering up the Israelis – but why? In his fifth year as President, has he finally accepted the bromance between Congress and Israel (with AIPAC as a wingman – this is a great metaphor) and decided that bolstering the US-Israel relationship is essential to both his popularity rating and US security interests in the region? It seems, instead, that he is going over the head of Netanyahu (whom he’s never liked much anyway) and making a bold play for the hearts and minds of the Israeli people to aid in a future push for a just compromise between them and the Palestinians.

Though not much appears to be happening on this trip to Israel, Obama’s speech indicates that he may have something hidden up his sleeve for the future. In keeping with my (admittedly rather crass and trivializing) spring break metaphor, what Obama has done is the rough equivalent of not actually hooking up with that Sigma in Cabo, but planting a seed that will totally pay off during Spring Weekend. It seems that when it comes to Obama Gone Wild – Israel Edition, that age-old adage “what happens on spring break, stays on spring break” may need to be adjusted: “Though nothing obvious really happened in Israel, the subtle things that did will most definitely not stay in Israel.”