Caroline Glick explains why the U.S. effort to restyle Durban II is doomed to fail:

First, since the stated purpose of the Durban II conference is to oversee the implementation of the first Durban conference’s decisions, and since those decisions include the anti-Israel assertion that Israel is a racist state, it is clear that the Durban II conference is inherently, and necessarily, anti-Israel.

The second reason that both the State Department and the White House must realize that they are powerless to affect the conference’s agenda is because that agenda was already set in previous planning sessions chaired by the likes of Libya, Cuba, Iran and Pakistan. And that agenda includes multiple assertions of the basic illegitimacy of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

All we have done, she argues, is bestow the patina of legitimacy to the planning conference and make it that much harder for our allies to boycott Durban II. She concludes:

Some might argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the White House. But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly deserved but required. It is the administration, not Israel that threw down the gauntlet. If Israel and its supporters refrain from vigorously criticizing this move, we guarantee its repetition.

But the question remains why we have engaged in this halfhearted attempt to refashion what cannot be refashioned. It is clear from Glick’s account and others‘ that our low-level representatives have done precious little to alter the agenda or tenor of the planned confab. So is this some elaborate bit of stagecraft to demonstrate that as hard as we tried (which was really not at all), we could not alter the outlines of Durban II ? If so, this is a dangerous and disingenuous game. It is hardly the model of transparency, good faith and engagement which the Obama administration has pronounced as the cornerstones of their foreign policy.

And if the U.S. government summons up the nerve to avoid Durban II, will the Obama team really have demonstrated their superior diplomatic skills — or simply given material to our opponents to claim that the U.S. carried out a charade in order to curry favor, albeit temporarily, with Israel’s enemies? This sort of deceptive, split-the-difference operating-style signals a lack of confidence in our our aims and portends further confusion about the intentions and policies of U.S. That, it seems, is what passes for the Obama foreign policy these days.