Page 1 of 2 Home truths call for tough love on Israel
By Tony Karon
Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Barack Obama administration in an open
confrontation with the Israeli government, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman -
who represents the interests of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party
on Capitol Hill as faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry
- called for a halt. "Let's cut the family fighting, the family feud," he said.
"It's unnecessary; it's destructive of our shared national interest. It's time
to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the US and Israel. It just
doesn't serve anybody's interests but our enemies."
The idea that the US and Israel are "family" with identical national interests
is a convenient fiction that Lieberman and his fellow Israel partisans have
worked relentlessly to promote - and enforce
- in Washington over the past two decades. If the bonds are indeed familial,
however, last week's showdown between Washington and the Netanyahu government
may be counted as one of those feuds in which truths are uttered in the heat of
the moment that call into question the fundamental terms of the relationship.
Such truths are never easily swept under the rug once the dispute is settled.
The immediate rupture precludes a simple return to the status quo ante;
instead, a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship somehow ends up on
the agenda.
Sure, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are now working
feverishly to find a formula that will allow them to move on from a contretemps
that began when the Israelis ambushed Vice President Joe Biden, announcing
plans to build 1,600 new housing units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem.
He was in Israel to promote the Obama administration's failing efforts to
rehabilitate negotiations toward a two-state peace agreement, a goal regularly
spurned by Israel's continued construction on land occupied in 1967.
Once again, as when Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze from the
Netanyahu government in 2009, the Israelis will fend off any demand that they
completely reverse their latest construction plans. Instead, they will offer to
continue their settlement activity on a "don't-ask-don't-tell" basis,
professing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to placate the
Americans, even as they systematically erode its prospects on the ground.
There is, as former secretary of state James Baker has noted, no shortage of
chutzpah in this Israeli government. "United States taxpayers are giving Israel
roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every
Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of
Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own
government," Baker said in a recent interview. "Given that fact, it is not
unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect US policy on
settlements."
The general joins the fray
Sooner or later, the present imbroglio is likely to be fudged over, but make no
mistake, it opened Washington up to a renewed discussion of the conventional
wisdom of unconditional support for Israel. It also brought into the public
arena the way US administrations over the past two decades have enabled that
country's ever-expanding occupation regime and whether such a policy is
compatible with US national interests in the Middle East.
In 2006, the realist foreign policy thinkers John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt
provoked a firestorm of ridicule and ad hominem abuse for suggesting in
their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, that the goals
pursued by the two sides were, in fact, far from identical and often at odds -
and that partisans motivated by Israel's interests lobbied aggressively to skew
US foreign policy in their favor. Israel partisans also heaped derision on the
suggestion by the Iraq Study Group commissioned by president George W Bush that
the US would not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East without first
settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Response to the reiteration, last week, of the idea that Israel's behavior
might be jeopardizing US interests has been strikingly muted by comparison.
That's because it came from General David Petraeus, commander of US Central
Command (Centcom), which oversees America's two wars of the moment. He is the
most celebrated US military officer of his generation, and a favorite of those
most ferocious of Israel partisans, the neo-conservatives.
Petraeus told senators last Wednesday: "The enduring hostilities between Israel
and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance
our interests in [Centcom's] AOR [Area of Responsibility]." He added, "The
conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism
for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and
depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens
the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and
other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also
gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbollah
and Hamas." He also stressed that "progress toward resolving the political
disputes in the Levant, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major
concern for Centcom."
Normally, any linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a wave of
anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is pooh-poohed by neo-cons and other
Israel partisans. Typically, they will derisively suggest that those who argue
for the linkage made by Petraeus are naive in their belief that al-Qaeda would
give up its jihad if only Israel and the Palestinians made peace. That, by the
way, is a straw-man argument of the first order: The US has done plenty on its
own to antagonize the Muslim world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
would not in itself resolve that antagonism. The point is simply that a fair
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary, if not sufficient,
condition for repairing relations between the US and the citizenry of many
Muslim countries.
Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who has made a profession of
trying to negate the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of (or
hostility to) Israel, gamely ventured that "Gen Petraeus has simply erred in
linking the challenges faced by the US and coalition forces in the region to a
solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the
absence of peace and the perceived US favoritism for Israel." His conclusion:
"This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive."
You can, in fact, hear the pain in Foxman's admission that "it is that much
more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and
hero". That Petraeus chose to make his concerns public at the height of a
public showdown between Israel and the US, and to do so on Capitol Hill, where
legislators seemed uncertain how to respond, signaled the seriousness of the
uniformed military in pressing the issue.
Longtime Washington military and intelligence affairs analyst Mark Perry caught
the special significance of this at Foreign Policy's website: "There are
important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA [National Rifle
Association], the American Medical Association, the lawyers - and the Israel
lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the US military." He
noted as well that, in a January Centcom briefing of Joint Chiefs of Staff
chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, Petraeus had evidently suggested the
Palestinian territories - over which Israel continues to exercise sovereign
military control - be included under Centcom's area of responsibility, a
prospect that would make Israel's leadership apoplectic.
It's not that, as far as we know, Petraeus harbors any particular animus, or
affection, for the Jewish state. It's that, in his institutional role as the
commander of hundreds of thousands of US troops stationed across what
Washington strategists like to call the "arc of instability", he is concerned
about aggravating hostility towards America.
The idea that Washington needs to rein in Israeli expansionism and force a
political solution to its conflict with the Palestinians is hardly novel for
America's unsentimental men in uniform. Former secretary of state Colin Powell
and former US Mideast envoy General Anthony Zinni, both of whom had their
formative experiences of the region in the course of massive US military
deployments there, were on the same page as Petraeus is today.
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton is the US officer responsible for creating and
training the Palestinian Authority security force that has cracked down on West
Bank militants and restrained them from attacking Israel over the past few
years. He was no less blunt than Petraeus in a speech in Washington last year.
He emphasized the premise on which the force was built, and withstood charges
from within its own community that it was simply a gendarmerie for Israel: its
soldiers believed themselves to be the nucleus of the army of a future
Palestinian state. The loyalty of his men, he warned, should not be taken for
granted: "There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you're
creating a state, when you're not."
Biden, too, was quoted in the Israeli press as having berated Netanyahu -
behind closed doors - over his plans for settlement expansion, warning that it
would put at risk the lives of American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan.
The tough-love solution
In public Biden offered familiar pablum direct from Lieberman's "family" album:
"From my experience, the one precondition for progress [in the Middle East] is
that the rest of the world knows this - there is no space between the US and
Israel when it comes to security, none. That's the only time that progress has
been made."
In fact, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests that the
reverse is true. The origins of the peace process the Obama administration is
now trying so desperately to resuscitate do not lie in the unconditional
American support for Israel that has become a third rail in national politics
over the past two decades. They lie in the national interest-based tough love
of the administration of president George H W Bush.
Grounded in a realist reading of American national interests across the Middle
East - at a moment when a military campaign to eject Saddam Hussein's Iraqi
forces from Kuwait had put hundreds of thousands of US troops on the ground
there - the first Bush administration recognized the need to balance Israel's
reasonable interests with those of its Arab neighbors. That's why, in 1991, it
dragged Israel's hawkish Likud government under prime minister Yitzhak Shamir
to the Madrid conference, and so broke Israel's "security" taboo on direct
engagement with Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
