|
|
|
Jewish World Review January 16, 2009 / 20 Teves 5769 Friends of Israel have a lot of repair work to do — in America By Caroline B. Glick
As far as the commentators are concerned, Olmert's puerile attack on the
American Secretary of State in the midst of a war shows that the he is still
the same prideful, vain, motor-mouth that Israelis have come to know and
despise over the past several years. Then too, by responding with borderline
hysteria to Olmert's statement, Rice has demonstrated, once again that she
remains a thin-skinned whiner.
These insights make for piquant news analyses. But they miss the most
important truths that the Olmert-Rice slap-down brought to the surface.
Their fight tells us two crucial things. First, it tells us that when
President-elect Barack Obama enters office next week, Israel's relations
with the US will be at a low point.
The US's abstention from the vote on Resolution 1860 is a stunning statement
of US hostility towards Israel. As former UN Ambassador Dore Gold wrote in
the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Resolution 1860 is drafted in a manner that
presumes moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas
— an illegal terrorist organization — must stop fighting it says. The
resolution also draws a false moral equivalence between Hamas's illegal
rocket campaign against Israeli civilians and Israel's assertion of its
right to close its borders to enemy traffic.
While Olmert presents the US's abstention in the vote as a major diplomatic
victory for Israel, in truth it is a stunning defeat. The US was a cosponsor
of Resolution 1860, along with Britain. The fact that the US sponsored such
an anti-Israel resolution in the first place is a major rebuke of Israel.
And the fact that Washington then allowed the deeply adversarial and
dangerous resolution to pass only compounds the failure.
The second aspect of the US abstention on Resolution 1860 that is deeply
disturbing is the fact that Israel's leaders say they were taken completely
by surprise by the move. On a simplistic level, the fact that apparently
until the last moment, Israeli officials were certain that the US was
planning to veto the resolution or, at a minimum force a significant delay
in voting on the measure, bespeaks a remarkable incompetence on the part of
Israel's UN mission and in particular, it bespeaks a personal incompetence
on the part of Ambassador Gavriela Shalev.
What were Israel's representatives at the UN doing in the days preceding the
vote? Who were they talking to? What messages were they communicating to
their UN colleagues and back home that the government could have been
blindsided by the US action?
And while this fiasco provides just cause for recalling Shalev to Israel,
the buck on this one cannot stop with her.
Shalev is not a professional diplomat. She had no notable experience in
international affairs or public diplomacy to speak of before Livni — who
insisted that she would only appoint a woman to the post - sent her to
Turtle Bay. Shalev receives her guidance on how to deal with the US from
Livni. And throughout her tenure as Foreign Minister, Livni, together with
Olmert has insisted that Israel's relations with the US have never been
better.
But this has been anything but the case. On the issues of the most urgent
importance to Israel, the US has repeatedly, and with an ever growing degree
of contempt and hostility, adopted positions diametrically opposed to
Israel's interests.
For instance, this week the New York Times reminded us that the US has
refused to sell Israel refueling planes and bunker-buster bombs necessary to
attack Iran's nuclear sites. The US has also consistently refused Israeli
requests to overfly Iraqi airspace. The Times' story reports that the
administration answered Israeli requests to this effect with a hearty, "Hell
no!"
And it isn't just that the Bush administration has in recent years preferred
to indulge the Iraqi leadership's kneejerk anti-Semitism over supporting
Israel's need to preempt threats of national annihilation. The Bush
administration has also belittled those threats and so allowed them to grow.
Rice pushed the US on the road towards accepting Iran as a nuclear power
when she opted to join the EU-3 in their feckless negotiations with the
mullahs in May 2007. Her decision was followed by the deeply mendacious
National Intelligence Estimate released in November 2007 which claimed
wrongly that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The US's coddling of Iran at Israel's expense has also included its
preference for the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese government and military over
Israel's national security. In the 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel,
the US forbade Israel from attacking Lebanese government targets and so left
Israel with few good options for fighting Hizbullah to victory. The reason
the US acted in this manner is because Rice wished to prolong the fiction
that the pro-Western March 14 movement was in charge of the Lebanese
government when in fact, they subservient to Hizbullah.
When Israel became bogged down, the US forced Jerusalem to accept a
ceasefire that left Hizbullah in charge of southern Lebanon and allowed it
to rebuild its arsenals and present its campaign against the Jews as a
strategic victory for the forces of jihad. After Hizbullah staged a putsch
against the pro-Western forces in the Lebanese government last May, rather
than acknowledge that Hizbullah is now in full control over the government
and the military, the US has showered Lebanon with money and guns.
As for the Palestinians, over the past three years, the US has been
expansive, indeed obsessive in its support for Fatah - and through it for
Hamas - at Israel's expense. Rather than recognize that the Palestinian
voters' decision to elect Hamas to lead them in January 2006 constituted a
rejection of the notion of a two-state solution on the part of Palestinian
society, the Bush administration judged the move as an act of civil
disobedience reminiscent, in Rice's view, of the US civil rights movement.
Far from cutting the Palestinians off, the US massively increased its
assistance to the Palestinian Authority. For the first time US taxpayers
began financing the PA's budget and so, indirectly paying the salaries of
both Fatah and Hamas terrorists. Moreover, the US began a massive effort to
train Fatah commandos in Jordan. With Fatah terrorists in Gaza shooting
missiles at Israel alongside their Hamas terror buddies today, it is unclear
what good can come of these US-trained Palestinian special forces.
In the face of all of this clear US hostility towards Israel, marked as well
by the continued criminal prosecution of former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen
and Keith Weissman, and former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin for their
"crime" of discussing their concern about Iran's nuclear weapons program,
Israel has played the role of Chicken Little.
Israel has offered no significant protest against the US's moves. It has
treated Rice and her colleagues at the CIA as friends and trusted allies.
And Livni and Olmert have repeatedly boasted that Israel's relations with
the US have never been better, when in fact they have arguably never been
worse.
It is because of the government's refusal to contend with difficult truths
that Israel was caught by surprise at the Security Council last week. And
due to the government's refusal to acknowledge the true state of Israel's
relations with Washington, the government has given little consideration to
either how to improve them, or how to work around Washington's hostility.
This situation is liable to only get worse next week with the inauguration
of President-elect Obama. Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton
pledged in her Senate confirmation hearings that the new administration will
immediately seek to engage Iran diplomatically. She also stated that the US
intends to actively pursue better relations with Iran's Arab
satellite-state, Syria. Moreover, she pledged that the Obama administration
will make an immediate push to establish a Palestinian state.
Clinton's testimony makes clear that Obama's major initiatives will all
involve forcing Israel to pay a price. According to a source in close
contact with Obama's transition team, the first price that Israel will be
pressured to pay will be the Golan Heights.
Obama has pledged that soon after taking office he will make a major speech
in an Islamic capital to strengthen US ties to the Muslim world. And the
source asserts that Obama intends to make that speech in Damascus. Moreover,
he intends to exert pressure on Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to
Syria as "payback" for any Syrian indication that it will weaken its ties to
Iran.
While Israel must treat the US with diplomatic deference, it must also base
its policies towards the US on how the US is actually treating Israel and
not on fictions. There is no doubt that Israel would have handled the
ceasefire diplomacy at the UN and elsewhere differently if its leaders were
willing to notice that official Washington views Israel's defense of its
citizens and Hamas's assaults on Israel's citizens as morally
indistinguishable actions. Certainly, Israel wouldn't have been taken by
surprise by America's decision to allow Resolution 1860 to pass.
Throughout his tenure in office, Bush has been outspoken in his warm
statements about Israel. Both his advisers and the many people who have come
to know him over the past eight years are unanimous in their belief that
Bush truly cares about Israel and views Israel as an important US ally. He
recognizes that Israel and the US share the same enemies and that our
enemies seek to destroy us because we represent the same thing: freedom.
But as many of his friends and advisors have ruefully noted over the years,
Bush never learned how to translate his personal views into policy. As
former Pentagon official Richard Perle wrote in an article this week in The
National Interest, Bush was undercut on the most crucial foreign policy
issues he faced by the State Department and the CIA, which either ignored
his policies or openly sought to discredit them.
As Perle described Bush's presidency, "For eight years George W. Bush pulled
the levers of government - sometimes frantically - never realizing that they
were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As
a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in
speeches, in public and private meetings, in backgrounders and memoranda
often had little or no effect on the activities of the sprawling
bureaucracies charged with carrying out the president's policies."
This reality has been apparent since at least the middle 0f 2003, and yet,
Israel's leaders stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. They preferred
instead to believe that Bush would never let anything bad happen to us. As
if he had the power to stop it.
The passage of Resolution 1860 could be a blessing in disguise if Israel is
capable of learning its principal lesson: No one, not even our friends, will
fight out battles for us.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
| ||||||||||
