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Jewish World Review June 12, 2009 / 20 Sivan 5769 Obama's High Commissioner By Caroline B. Glick
The reason Mitchell's pronouncement might have been interpreted as a move in
Israel's direction is because until he made his call for negotiations,
recent pronouncements on Israel and the Palestinians by the president and
his senior advisors have given the uniform impression that the US no longer
favors a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.
Through their obsessive focus on Israeli building activities in Judea and
Samaria, Obama and his advisors have sent regional leaders the message that
they define their role here not as mediators, but as agents for the
Palestinians against Israel. Consequently, far from giving the sense that
they seek a peace deal that will be acceptable to Israelis and Palestinians
alike, they have convinced the Israelis and the Palestinians - as well as
much of the Arab world - that the US intends to coerce Israel into accepting
a settlement that sacrifices Israeli security and national needs on the
altar of maximalist Palestinian ambitions.
This is the view that Fatah leader and putative PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas
expressed in his interview with the Washington Post last month ahead of
his visit with Obama. As Abbas put it, the Americans "can use their weight
with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us.
Now they should tell the Israelis, 'You have to comply with the
conditions.'" Abbas added that he will "wait for Israel to freeze
settlements," and that until he receives this and other Israeli concessions,
"we can't talk to anyone."
In other words, in light of the administration's apparent hostility and
uncompromising stance towards Israel, Abbas sees no reason to negotiate
anything with the Israelis.
So too, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal made clear on Tuesday that he sees the
Obama administration as a potential ally for his Iranian-controlled
genocidal jihadist movement. Mashaal has four good reasons for viewing
things this way. First, in his speech in Cairo, Obama accepted the Arab view
that Israel is an alien entity to the Middle East which owes its legitimacy
to the genocide of European Jewry by Europeans in Europe, and which has the
moral standing of white slaveholders in the antebellum American south.
Second, Obama has pledged $900 million in US taxpayer funds to
Hamas-controlled Gaza and is pressuring Israel to support Gaza economically
in spite of the fact that Hamas continues to attack southern Israel with
rockets and to expand and diversify its arsenals.
Third, the Obama administration is abandoning its predecessor's bid to
isolate Hamas by pressuring Fatah and Egypt to offer Hamas full partnership
in a Fatah-Hamas unity government which would work to cement Hamas's
international legitimacy.
Finally, in light of the White House's silence after Sunday's attempted
attack on the IDF by a Hamas-affiliated terror group in Gaza, Mashaal is
operating under the impression that nothing Hamas does will divert
Washington from its collision course with Israel. With Obama in charge,
Hamas believes it can attack Israel with impunity.
So with Israelis and Palestinians now joined in their belief that Obama is
looking for a fight with Israel rather than a negotiated settlement, it was
encouraging to hear that Mitchell is planning on forcing the Palestinians to
the negotiating table with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government.
Unfortunately, within hours of his arrival in Israel on Tuesday, it became
clear that Mitchell's statements about negotiations were nothing more than
spin. Mitchell reiterated that the US has no intention whatsoever of budging
on its uncompromising positions that no Jewish construction anywhere past
the 1949 armistice lines is legitimate; that Israel must begin moving
towards a mass expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria; and that the IDF
must drastically curtail its counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria.
That is, Mitchell demonstrated that like the Palestinians and the Saudis,
the Obama administration's idea of a resolution of the Palestinian conflict
with Israel involves a complete Israeli surrender to all Arab (and now
American) demands while trusting our security to the tender mercies of
Palestinian terrorists.
More disturbing than Mitchell's positions are his marching orders from
Obama. Unlike previous presidential envoys who have come to Israel every few
weeks and then disappeared when reality proved stronger than their peace
fantasies, Obama has ordered Mitchell to cast reality to the seven winds and
set up a permanent forward command post in Jerusalem directly subordinate to
the White House.
To fulfill his writ, Mitchell has appointed four deputies - all known for
their open sympathy for the Palestinians and their hostility to the
Netanyahu government. They are Mara Rudman, of the George Soros-financed
Center for American Progress; Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton who is now building a
Fatah army in Jordan which he recently acknowledged will turn its
American-financed guns on Israel within a few short years if Israel refuses
to establish a Jew-free Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria; Fred Hoff,
one of the greatest champions of a US-Syrian rapprochement and of an Israeli
surrender of the Golan Heights; and David Hale, the architect of the current
US policy of rebuilding the Hizbullah-infested Lebanese army. Hale will be
permanently stationed in Jerusalem in a large office suite that will house
Mitchell's operation.
Aside from overseeing his deputies, Mitchell has also been charged with
leading a new administration program aimed at undermining Israel's ability
to make independent military and intelligence decisions. Back in 2008, when
Obama's National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones served as then secretary of
state Condoleezza Rice's special advisor on Israeli-Palestinian security
issues, he authored a report calling for the US to assess what Israel's
"real" security interests in Judea and Samaria are and to limit US support
to Israel to filling those necessarily minimal interests. Jones's report,
which rejected all Israeli claims in Judea and Samaria and underplayed the
strategic significance of Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist,
was viewed as deeply hostile towards Israel and the Olmert government
prevailed on the Bush administration to set it aside.
This is not the case today however. Obama shares Jones's view that Israel's
perception of its security needs is exaggerated. As he made clear in his
speeches last week at Cairo and Buchenwald, Obama thinks that Israel suffers
from a Holocaust-induced paranoia that causes it to wrongly believe that
Arabs and Iranians wish to wipe it off the map. In Obama's view, Israel's
fears can be dealt with, and a Middle East peace can be wrought through a US
takeover of both Israel's security assessments and its military and
intelligence operations and policies.
To t
his end, and in line with Jones's 2008 report, according to last
Friday's Yediot Ahronot, the administration is building an apparatus
designed to prevent Israel from exercising independent judgments about its
tactical and strategic challenges and deny it the ability to secure its
interests without US involvement and consent.
The apparatus reportedly includes members of every US security, foreign
policy and intelligence body. These officers will be stationed in Israel and
will report to Mitchell who in turn will report to Jones and Obama. Each
officer will be assigned to coordinate with Israeli counterparts in mirror
organizations including the IDF, the Shin Beit, the Mossad, the police and
every other relevant Israeli body.
Since there is no polite way for Israel to reject this effective US bid to
subvert its capacity to make independent decisions, the most urgent dilemma
the Netanyahu government must solve is how to handle Mitchell's new supreme
headquarters in Jerusalem. To address this issue, the government must be
clear about what it wishes to accomplish in its relations with Mitchell
specifically and the Obama administration generally.
As the Obama administration's treatment of Israel to date shows clearly,
the President and his advisors have no intention of compromising their
hardline positions on Israel. The administration is building its supreme
headquarters in Jerusalem to enable Mitchell to act like a colonial
governor and confront the unruly Jewish natives — not to cut a deal with
us.
For its part, Israel has nothing to gain, and much to lose from an open and
prolonged confrontation with Washington. And so Netanyahu's goal in
contending with Mitchell must be twofold: He must seek to avoid an ugly
fight with the White House, and he must do so while yielding nothing of
substance to the Mitchell command post.
Today, Netanyahu clearly hopes to achieve this goal by showing great respect
for Mitchell. On Tuesday he reportedly devoted a full four hours of his
schedule to talks with Mitchell and his aides.
While understandable, Netanyahu's willingness to humor Mitchell is a recipe
for disaster. Netanyahu cannot allow Mitchell to tie him or his senior
ministers down for hours at a time in fruitless discussions about Obama's
peace fantasies, or which set of suicidal Israeli "gestures" might assuage
the Obama administration's hunger for a confrontation. Bluntly stated,
Israel's Prime Minister has better things to do with his time. Moreover,
Netanyahu cannot debase his office by subordinating his schedule to the
whims of a mere presidential envoy.
And so, as former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton first suggested in
January during his visit to Israel, Netanyahu must elegantly remove himself
from Mitchell's orbit.
To this end, in his policy speech at Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat
Center on Sunday, Netanyahu should announce that in the interests of
fostering cooperation with the US and advancing prospects for peace, he is
appointing a Special Prime Ministerial Envoy to Obama's Special Presidential
Envoy Mitchell. This envoy — and his purposely inflated staff — should be
charged with handling all contacts with Mitchell and his staff and reporting
all of their suggestions to Netanyahu for his consideration.
Netanyahu's special envoy should be a senior persona whom he trusts
implicitly. Prime candidates for the position would be ambassador Dore Gold
- who served as UN ambassador during Netanyahu's first term as prime
minister — and former minister Natan Sharansky - who Netanyahu has
nominated to head the Jewish Agency. Either man would be more than capable
of respectfully deflecting US pressure on the Palestinian issue away from
Netanyahu and so freeing the Prime Minister to attend to the Iranian threat.
And that's the thing of it. At the end of the day, Netanyahu has three main
challenges that he must meet if he is to successfully protect Israel in the
coming years. He must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He must
secure Israel's national and strategic interests in Judea and Samaria and
sole Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. And he must do what he can to avoid
an open breach with Washington.
By deploying Mitchell to Jerusalem, Obama is trying to prevent Netanyahu
from achieving any of these aims. Only by neutralizing Mitchell will
Netanyahu free his schedule to contend with them.
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.
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