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Jewish World Review Nov. 23, 2007 /13 Kislev 5768 ‘Israel's best friend’ firmly backing Arabs at Annapolis conference By Caroline B. Glick
Leaked document
Will Bush and Rice do whatever necessary to secure a legacy?
Thursday a draft of the joint statement that Israeli and Palestinian
negotiators are discussing ahead of the conference was leaked to the
media. A reading of the document bears out the IDF's concerns.
The draft document shows that the Palestinians and the Israelis differ
not only on every issue, but differ on the purpose of the document. It
also shows that the US firmly backs the Palestinians against Israel.
As the draft document makes clear, Israel is trying to avoid
committing itself to anything at Annapolis. For their part, the
Palestinians are trying to force Israel's hand by tying it to
diplomatic formulas that presuppose an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949
armistice lines and an Israeli acceptance of the so-called "right of
return" or free immigration of foreign Arabs to Israel.
The Palestinians are also trying to take away Israel's right to
determine for itself whether to trust the Palestinians and continue
making diplomatic and security concessions or not by making it the
responsibility of outside actors to decide the pace of the concessions
and whether or not the Palestinians should be trusted.
As the leaked draft document shows, the Americans have sided with the
Palestinians against Israel. Specifically, the Americans have taken
for themselves the sole right to judge whether or not the Palestinians
and the Israelis are abiding by their commitments and whether and at
what pace the negotiations will proceed.
But the Americans are have shown themselves to be unworthy of Israel's
trust. By refusing to acknowledge Palestinian Authority Chairman
Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party's direct involvement in terrorism and
indeed the direct involvement of his official Fatah "security forces"
in terrorism, the Americans have shown that their benchmarks for
Palestinian compliance with their commitments to Israel are not
necessarily based on the reality on the ground. Then too, the US
demands for wide-ranging Israeli security concessions to the
Palestinians even before the "peace" conference at Annapolis have
shown that Israel's security is of little concern to the State
Department.
IDF sources blame the shooting murder of Ido Zoldan on Monday night by
Fatah terrorists on Israel's decision to bow to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's demand to take down 24 security roadblocks in Judea
and Samaria. If it hadn't been for US pressure they say, it is quite
possible that the 29-year-old father of two small children would be
alive today.
But this is of no concern for Washington. As Rice has made clear
repeatedly, the US wants to see "signs of progress." Since the
Palestinians are taking no action against terror and doing nothing to
lessen their society's jihadist fervor, the only way to achieve "signs
of progress" is by forcing Israel to make concessions to the
Palestinians. And so that is exactly what Rice and her associates are
doing.
Rice is able to force Israel to accept her demands because she faces
the weakest Israeli leaders the country has ever produced. Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense
Minister Ehud Barak are all incapable of standing up to the Americans
or even arguing with them. Olmert and Livni's weakness has been
apparent since their mishandling of the war with Hizbullah last summer
and their negotiations over the ceasefire agreement with Rice. For his
part, throughout his brief and disastrous tenure as prime minister,
Barak behaved as though he were then president Bill Clinton's
employee.
Over the past several weeks, a number of theories have been raised to
explain their behavior. The most frequent explanation is that Rice and
Bush are championing Palestinian statehood at Israel's expense in a
bid to mobilize a coalition of Sunni Arab states to cooperate with the
US against Iran.
According to this theory, if Annapolis is seen as a success, then the
Arab states will be convinced that the US is worth supporting on Iran.
This theory has several flaws. First, as the US's treatment of Israel
makes clear, success in Annapolis involves weakening Israel whose
destruction Iran seeks and empowering the Palestinians who Iran
supports. This means that far from weakening Iran, success at
Annapolis advances Iran's interests.
But beyond that, whether wittingly or unwittingly, by convening the
conference next week, the Bush administration has directly empowered
Iran. Today the determination of whether the administration emerges
unscathed or humiliated from Annapolis is entirely in Iran's hands.
Iran will decide whether the conference opens and closes peacefully or
whether it is convened as Lebanon submerged in civil war by Iran's
proxies Syria and Hizbullah.
According to the Lebanese constitution, Saturday is the last day on
which a new Lebanese president can be elected. Lebanon's president
must be elected by two-thirds of the members of Lebanon's parliament.
Through their campaign of assassination, Syria and Hizbullah have
taken away the 2/3 majority that anti-Syrian forces won in the 2005
elections. As a result, Hizbullah has veto power over the election.
And so far, Iran and Syria have refused to allow Hizbullah to back any
candidate. This is the case despite the anti-Syrian majority's
willingness to support a pro-Syrian presidential candidate.
Due to the Iranian-Syrian induced impasse, today there are two
possible scenarios for what may happen in the next few days in
Lebanon. Either Iran and Syria will allow elections to take place and
an agent of their regimes and Hizbullah will take over the presidency,
or elections will not take place and two governments - one anti-Syrian
under Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and one pro-Syrian will be formed.
The pro-Syrian government will be supported by Hizbullah and the
Lebanese army. The anti-Syrian government will be supported by
Christian, Sunni and Druse militias. A civil war will ensue. Syria,
Hizbullah and Iran will win.
In a bid to induce the first scenario, Bush has been lobbying every
leader he can think of to appeal to Teheran and Damascus to relent and
allow elections to go through. To this end, he even asked their
primary arms supplier Russian President Vladimir Putin to intervene.
Olmert's decision to allow Fatah security forces to receive 25
advanced Russian armored personnel carriers in spite of IDF objections
was no doubt a consequence of Bush's appeal to Putin for help.
If the Americans believe the key to countering Iran is to build an
anti-Iranian Arab coalition, the crisis in Lebanon shows just how
futile their efforts are. Just as the Sunni Arab states oppose Iran
acquiring nuclear weapons, so they oppose Iranian control over
Lebanon. Yet in spite of this, they have done nothing to prevent Iran
and its proxies from taking control of the country. To the contrary,
the Saudis have encouraged the Siniora government to support
pro-Syrian candidates for the presidency.
So if the administration has decided to embrace the Palestinians as a
means of weakening Iran, its decision is wrong on three counts. First,
given Iran's support for the Palestinians, empowering them against
Israel simply advances Iran's interest. Second, the Annapolis
conference has become a hostage of Iranian goodwill which is
non-existent. And finally, even if it were formed, an anti-Iranian
Arab coalition would be powerless to check Iran's power.
Even though the summit at Annapolis weakens the US's position
vis-ŕ-vis Iran, it might still make sense for the Bush and Rice to
support Palestinian statehood if doing so enhanced public support for
the administration. But the opposite is occurring. Bush and Rice's
seeming obsession with Palestinian statehood is being criticized from
all sides of the aisle.
Critics on the Left like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and
former Clinton negotiator and Palestinian apologist Robert Malley have
expressed mystification at the administration's insistent advance of
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians when there is no
chance that those negotiations will bring peace. So too, over the past
few weeks, four Republican presidential candidates - Rudy Guiliani,
Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson - have criticized Bush and
Rice's Palestinian policies generally and the convening of the
conference at Annapolis in particular.
There is also the theory that Bush and Rice's primary concern in
pushing for Palestinian statehood is their legacies. Rice's stated
intention of seeing a Palestinian state declared before Bush leaves
office lends weight to this view. But of course, given that the
maximum that Israel is willing to concede to the Palestinians is less
than the minimum that the Palestinians are willing to accept, and
given that the Olmert government will be brought down if Olmert agrees
to any major concessions, it is clear that there is no chance that
Rice will succeed.
Finally there is the thought that Rice and Bush understand that there
is no chance of achieving peace, but that they think that their
legacies will be strengthened just for having tried. After all, Bill
Clinton is remembered well for his attempts to achieve peace between
Israel and the Palestinians in spite of the fact that his attempts
brought war rather than peace. But Clinton's example is no longer
applicable because the conditions under which Clinton pursued peace
were far different than those that exist today.
Clinton's peace policies caused a war that began only at the end of
his presidency. Until then, they seemed like relatively safe and
cost-free moves. On the other hand, Bush's presidency has occurred in
its entirety against the backdrop of the Palestinian jihad. Every
attempt he has made at peacemaking from the Tenet Plan through the
Roadmap and Sharm el Sheikh and onto Annapolis has been blown apart
through violence before it could get off the ground.
So then there is no good excuse for the Bush administration's decision
to embrace the Palestinians at Israel's expense. It all comes down to
Bush and Rice not thinking through the consequences of their moves.
It is a singular tragedy that Israel's elected leaders are too weak to
make them understand that by harming Israel, they are harming the
United States and making fools of themselves.
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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