Shattered Hopes
Josh Ruebner
Verso, 2013
Josh Ruebner is the national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and at one point also worked for Tikkun, coordinating our attempts to present members of Congress with a peace and reconciliation perspective on the Middle East. In assessing Obama’s failure to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, he cites not only Obama’s unwillingness to go to the mat with the Israel lobby over the issue of fully freezing Israeli settlements, and not only the scattershot, frenetic, lurching quality of Obama’s policy initiatives, but also the fact that Obama’s “approach relied solely on providing Israel with carrots” and never with “the proverbial stick.” He concludes that the more Israel deliberately frustrated and humiliated U.S. efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, the more rewards it was offered by the United States as a result. Ruebner’s book is a stinging indictment of the absurdity of the Obama administration’s failed peace process.
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