Source: Israel Matzav
In June 2004, President Bush wrote a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which he promised“Third... In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949... It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”We all know that upon taking office, one of the first actions President Obama took was to disavow that letter, which had been the basis upon which Prime Minister Sharon expelled more than 10,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza, and which had been endorsed by a large majority in Congress.
Recently, it has been reported that President Obama promised the 'Palestinians' that he endorses a 'Palestinian' state based on the borders between Jordan and Israel before the 1967 Six Day War. Clearly, that commitment is inconsistent with President Bush's 2004 commitment to Prime Minister Sharon. Can Israel sue Obama for violating Bush's commitment? Malvina Halberstam, formerly Counselor on International Law in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser, strongly implies that the answer is - theoretically - yes.
Although the US Constitution only provides for treaties ratified by the president with the advice and consent of two thirds of the Senate, executive agreements have been used since the beginning of the United States, and most agreements between the US and other countries today are by executive agreement rather than by treaty.I'm afraid that Obama has done the damage already. All we can do is hope and pray that the bumbling, incompetent chief executive doesn't make things worse.
In two cases decided over 70 years ago, the US Supreme Court held that executive agreements are constitutional, and that, like treaties, they supersede inconsistent state law. Those cases involved an exchange of letters between president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Maxim Litvinov, the people’s commissar for foreign affairs of the Soviet Union, in which the US agreed to recognize the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union assigned its claims against US nationals to the US.
More recently, the Supreme Court held constitutional an executive agreement in which Iran agreed to free US embassy personnel it had taken hostage and the US agreed to dissolve a freeze on Iranian assets and nullify attachments against such assets, including those based on judgments by US courts. The Supreme Court has even ruled that the term treaty in a statute applied to executive agreements as well.
While there is, of course, no way Israel, or any other country, can compel the US to honor its treaty commitments, the US has generally done so. If Obama fails to honor agreements made by his predecessor, it would not only tarnish the US reputation internationally, it would seriously impair America’s ability to negotiate future agreements, as other states would wonder whether any US commitments they received in return for concessions would be honored.
