For decades, no American president has successfully navigated the tenuous relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, each one failing to broker a long-term peace agreement between the two groups. Despite the daunting task of establishing Middle East peace, USA Today believes that President Obama has a secret weapon that no president has had before: Secretary of State John Kerry.
In a glowing review of his involvement, the July 30 USA Today hyped how Secretary Kerry is “running show in Mideast talks.” Reporter Aamer Madhani’s praise doesn’t stop there, Gushing that the secretary has notably “worked a bit of magic” in his efforts to create peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.
While Madhani does acknowledge in the first paragraph that “the odds of him [John Kerry] failing – as a long list of his predecessors have over the years – remains high” the headline of the article props Kerry up as a beacon of hope in the long-stalled peace process. The majority of the article does an effective job detailing the delicate balancing act in handling peace negotiations between the two parties, but places a bizarre amount of weight in the supposed impact Secretary Kerry will have on the most recent negotiations.
After emphasizing the “bit of magic” Kerry has supposedly worked in the sub-headline of the article, Madhani made sure to mention the magic towards the end of the article, arguing that because there is a strange quiet in Israel and the Palestinian territories right now, “Kerry also has worked some diplomatic magic to get to this point.”
For USA Today to claim that Secretary Kerry will have a potentially monumental impact on the peace talks seems to be premature given the rocky history between Israel and the Palestinians and the ongoing unwillingness and/or inability of the Palestinians to marginalize radical terrorist movements like Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. The unnecessary assertion that Kerry is using “a bit of magic” to get things done takes away from the complicated situation in the Middle East, and seems to be an unnecessary and partisan attempt to prop up an administration with no real foreign policy successes thus far.