Neo-con narrative sidelines Palestinians
By Eli Clifton and Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Gleeful Israeli leaders and their neo-conservative supporters here
have spent much of the past week insisting that the United States State
Department cables published by WikiLeaks prove that Sunni Arab leaders in the
Middle East are far more preoccupied with the threat posed by an ascendant and
possibly nuclear Iran than with a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
But a closer look at the relevant cables shows a far more consistent message to
Washington coming from its Arab allies: that curbing Iran and resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict are inextricably linked and that the most
effective way of achieving the former is make tangible progress on the latter.
Indeed, endorsements of "linkage" - the notion, accepted at the highest levels
of the US military, that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will help
promote US strategic interests in the
Middle East - emerges as a recurring theme in previously confidential
discussions with Arab leaders and US diplomats on how best to counter Iran's
growing regional power and deter Tehran's nuclear program.
That's not the message that Israel and its backers have been touting since the
first batch of 220 documents was released on November 29 by WikiLeaks.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized on purported
anti-Iranian comments by the Arab leaders quoted prominently in the New York
Times as a vindication of Israel's position.
"There is a gap between what is said by leaders in private and what they say in
public, especially in our region, because our region is hostage to a narrative,
and that narrative is the result of nearly 60 years of propaganda," he told a
media conference in Tel Aviv immediately after the initial WikiLeaks release.
"In this narrative, the single greatest threat to regional peace and to the
region's future is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israel's alleged
aggression."
"However, the reality is that leaders understand that this narrative is
bankrupt. The reality is that there is a new understanding that there is a new
threat here," he declared, suggesting the existence of a de facto consensus
between Israel and Sunni Arab states that Tehran must be prevented from
achieving a nuclear-weapons capacity by any means necessary.
That message was echoed by neo-conservative backers of Netanyahu's Likud Party
in the US for much of the past week.
"Obama has taken his eye off the real ball, placed friendly Arab states in a
precarious situation, and misrepresented to the American people and the world
that the non-peace talks are necessary to curb the Iranian threat," asserted
Jennifer Rubin in Commentary magazine's Contentions blog.
"Governments in the region do not in fact care very much about the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute. They are transfixed by Iran,” wrote David Frum, a
former George W Bush speechwriter on his FrumForum blog and in Canada's
National Post. "If the Palestinian issue is so unimportant to the Middle East,
why is it so important to us?"
While that line has since been repeated continuously by neo-conservative
bloggers, columnists, and publications, they find little echo in the cables
themselves.
"The key to containing Iran revolves around progress in the Israel/Palestine
issue," Crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the United
Arab Emirates armed forces Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan told visiting US
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during a July 15, 2009, meeting, according
to one cable dated five days later.
"To win [over Arab public opinion], the US should quickly bring about a
two-state solution over the objections of the Netanyahu government," added bin
Nayef, whose bristling hostility toward Iran was made plain by his comparison -
highlighted by the Times - of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad to Adolf
Hitler.
Five months later, in a December 9, 2009, meeting with Deputy Secretary of
Energy Daniel Poneman, bin Zayed returned to that theme. He "emphasized the
strategic importance of creating a Palestinian State (i.e. resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict) as the way to create genuine Middle Eastern unity
on the question of Iran's nuclear program and regional ambitions," the cable's
author reported.
A May 27, 2008, cable describes a conversation between Representative Jeff
Fortenberry with Gamal Mubarak, son and heir apparent of Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak. Asked by the congressman how best to counter Iran's nuclear
program, Mubarak replied, "Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as Jordan, are the
'heavyweights' that can counter Iran."
The cable goes on to describe Mubarak as "advocating movement on the
Israeli/Palestinian track to remove a prime issue that Iran can use as a
pretext."
"Speaking to PolOffs [political officers] in early February 2009, immediately
after the Gaza War, director of the Jordanian Prime Minister's Political Office
Khaled al-Qadi noted that the Gaza crisis had allowed Iranian interference in
inter-Arab relations to reach unprecedented levels," according to a cable from
the US Embassy in Amman shortly after the three-week Gaza War between Israel
and Hamas ended in January 2009.
Jordan's government also depicted the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a
key factor in the expansion of Iran's regional influence, according to the
April 2, 2009 cable.
"Jordanian leaders have argued that the only way to pull the rug out from under
Hezbollah - and by extension their Iranian patrons - would be for Israel to
hand over the disputed Shebaa Farms to Lebanon," it went on. "With Hezbollah
lacking the 'resistance to occupation' rationale for continued confrontation
with Israel, it would lose its raison d'etre and probably domestic support."
During a February 14, 2010, meeting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee
chairman John Kerry, Qatar Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-thani suggested that
Israel's efforts to rally US and Arab support for a more confrontational policy
towards Iran was really related to the Israel-Palestine conflict. "The
Israelis," he is reported as telling his guest, are "using Iran's quest for
nuclear weapons as a diversion from settling matters with the Palestinians".
Three days later, according to a cable sent on February 22, 2010, UAE Foreign
Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan warned another congressional
delegation led by Nita Lowey, a strong Israel supporter in the House of
Representatives, against a military attack on Iran. According to the cable, the
minister ended the meeting with a "soliloquy on the importance of a successful
peace process between Israel and its neighbors as perhaps the best way of
reducing Iran's regional influence."
The fact that the Arab leaders placed so much emphasis on the importance of
making progress in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute clearly did not
come as any surprise to US regional experts; nor would it be surprising to them
if Israeli leaders and their neo-conservative backers had worked hard - as they
have for the past week - to ignore or obscure that message.
Already in a January 2007 cable released by WikiLeaks, the US Embassy in Tel
Aviv was warning secretary of state Condoleezza Rice that the Israeli
government was "deeply concerned that Israeli-Palestinian issues not become
linked in American minds to creating a more propitious regional environment for
whatever steps we decide to take to address the deteriorating situation in
Iraq", which at the time appeared to be disintegrating into sectarian civil
war.
That concern was prompted by the publication the previous November of a report
by the Iraq Study Group headed by former US secretary of state James Baker and
former representative Lee Hamilton which, among other findings, bluntly
concluded that "the United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the
Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli
conflict".
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