Punting on Palestine

Editorial of The New York

We love that headline ‘Obama punts to Congress over repercussions for UN Palestine vote.’ It was linked on the Drudge Report within minutes of it going up on the Web site of the Hill newspaper, no doubt because it highlights the ironical impact of the vote in the United Nations conferring observer status on the state declared by the Palestinian Arabs. “The White House won’t seek to punish the Palestinian Authority for this week’s statehood vote at the United Nations,” reported the Hill’s Julian Pecquet, “but did not vow to veto pending legislative proposals to cut off U.S. aid in retaliation.”

In other words, power over American foreign policy is shifting in the wake of President Obama’s re-election to the Congress from an administration that has been lost in the Middle East almost from the day it acceded. It represents a chance to settle one of the most important feuds in the whole Middle East war, that between the legislative branch of the United States on the one hand and the executive branch on the other. In respect of Israel, we’ve had some notably fine presidents — Truman, Reagan, Bush ’43 — but on Jerusalem and a few other points, Congress has been the more far-sighted player.

The Senate is getting set to vote on what the Hill characterizes as “new restrictions” on the $600 million in annual American aid to the Palestinian Arabs. The aid is supposedly a payoff to the Palestinians to get them to come around to the American side of this whole showdown. In reality it is an incentive for them to do the opposite, a point that has been thrown into sharp relief by Mahmoud Abbas’s insistence on getting the declaration he’s just gained from the General Assembly. It would be shocking if the Congress let’s the thing pass without cutting off the money that underwrites the Palestinian racket.

No wonder the spokeswoman for the state department, Victoria Nuland, ducked the matter by saying, according to the Hill, that questions about repercussions of the United Nations action are “better directed at the Congress than at us.” The Hill quoted her as saying Friday that the State Department is “still trying to release $495 million in pending funds for fiscal year 2012 that were held up following the Palestinians’ failed effort last year to become a full member of the U.N.” It quoted her as saying the department would “also continue to try to support” a Palestinian Authority that needs “the international community’s support.”

The White House was even more blase. The Hill quotes a spokesman, Josh Earnest, as having “stopped short of issuing a veto threat against congressional efforts to block the aid.” The Hill says the spokesman said the administration “des not have any information to share,” as the Hill put it. It quoted Mr. Earnest as saying, “The reason for that is simply that our aid to the Palestinians is an important part of our relationship. And we believe that we can – the United States can and should play a constructive role in facilitating negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.”

The wishy-washiness of President Obama and Secretary Clinton is no doubt why the Senate is stepping into the breach. It’s not only the Republicans who are alarmed. It’s also Senators Schumer and Menendez. Meausres they are looking at in combination with such Republicans as Senators Graham and Barrasso include closing an office of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington. Senator Hatch, according to the Hill, is seeking to cut almost all of the aid to the PLO. Meantime, the outgoing chairmwoman of the House foreign affairs committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, has warned against any attempt by the administration “to gut U.S. law” and keep funding any U.N. agencies that admit a Palestinian Arab state.

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It is shaping up as quite a spectacle, particularly as federal courts wrestle with the question of how much power Congress has over the question the young American boy who was born in Jerusalem and wants a U.S. passport that lists his birthplace as Israel. Congress says the State Department must grant it. When the matter got to the Supreme Court, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, took the position that it was, essentially, none of Congress’s business. But this kind of tug-of-war between the executive branch is not one any administration is going to want to play over the issue of appropriations for foreign aid. The power of the purse, as opposed to the power of the passport, is just so clear under the Constitution as resting with the Congress. No wonder the White House is punting.