Much Ado About Malley

The Democrats are racing to deal with the problem of Robert Malley. He was a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs of President Clinton. The Washington Post has described him as an adviser to Senator Obama. The Obama campaign has said he provides advice, but is not an adviser. Mr. Malley, in any event, is a problem because he has been an advocate for engagement with Hamas and defender of Yasser Arafat even in the post-Oslo period. And he is bidding for a job in a Democratic administration again.

To protect him, five foreign policy aides in the Clinton administration wrote last week a letter deriding what they characterize as "a series of vicious, personal attacks" against Mr. Malley. The authors are a former national security adviser, Samuel Berger; two former ambassadors to Israel, Martin Indyk and Daniel Kurtzer; and the two leading architects of the failed Oslo process, Dennis Ross and his former deputy, Aaron Miller. They are all on record as standing with Mr. Malley.

Mr. Malley called for embracing Hamas when it won in January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections in which violence was used to intimidate voters and in which no free press was operating. In the weeks before the Annapolis summit, Mr. Malley was a leading force behind an open letter urging international outreach to Hamas — even though isolating Hamas was a prime goal of President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert in opening final status talks with the vanquished Fatah government.

A junior staffer during the Oslo II negotiations, Mr. Malley offered, in the New York Review of Books, the first revisionist history of the failed parley. In Mr. Malley's view, Arafat was not really the cause for the failure. Mr. Malley reckoned Arafat was understandably suspicious of American and Jewish motives and felt unduly pressured. The terror Arafat launched in the wake of the failed negotiations was more a "tragedy of errors."

At the time, Mr. Ross penned the response to Mr. Malley's revisionism. He wrote that Mr. Malley had omitted key facts, such as that Secretary of State Albright made a phone call in September urging Arafat to contain the violence or that Arafat himself rejected Jewish claims to the remains of the Second Temple. Yet today Mr. Ross and the four other Clinton administration aides say that, despite some differences, Mr. Malley shares their view "that the US should not and will not do anything to undermine Israel's safety or the special relationship between our two nations."

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What is going on here? Why are five members of the Democratic brain trust suddenly rushing to Mr. Malley's defense? The answer, we submit, holds a clue to where the Democrats want to take us should they accede to the presidency. For, at bottom, what Mr. Malley is suggesting is that terrorism can be stopped by addressing the grievances of the terrorists. After September 11, 2001, Senator Clinton called the education policy of the Palestinian Authority "child abuse." In the current campaign, Mr. Obama too has sought to take a tougher stance. He wrote a letter to Ambassador Khalilzad at the United Nations urging a harder line in respect of Gaza. They know that the Malley line is not one shared by most of the voters, even in their own party. So why are their party's specialists, who would fill the top ranks of a Democratic administration's foreign policy apparatus, rushing to Mr. Malley's defense?