Israel Deserves a Reprimand from the American Government

I’m curious what Israel’s done wrong here or is liable to be reprimanded for. Israel promised to a 10-month settlement freeze in all of the West Bank, with the explicit exception of East Jerusalem. So it seems rather confusing to reprimand Israel for keeping its promise and building only in East. Jerusalem.

Indeed, the US would not be an honest broker for demanding that Israel go above and beyond what it promised to do. What good are negotiations if you are treated as if you agreed to something that you didn’t?

I’m really tempted to go line by line, explaining why Mr. Sprague is wrong yet again, but fortunately, it seems the Palestine Authority’s actions have beaten me to the punch.

Last Thursday, near Jerusalem, it honored Dalal Mughrabi on what would have been her fiftieth birthday. Ms. Mughrabi has had a square named after her. Just what did she do to deserve such accolades? Why, she and eleven other fellow terrorists hijacked a bus in Israel, killing 37 Israelis and one American.

The amateurish Obama administration has turned an otherwise uneventful and expected story — Joe Biden embarrassing himself yet again — into a public opinion referendum on the State of Israel in the brazen attempt to create a cleavage in the coalition government.

Mr. Sprague knows so little of the situation that he also embarrasses himself. Those 1600 housing units were not remote outposts, but rather mere meters from the Green Line, in a part of East Jerusalem that is just to the west of the Old City. Without a doubt that territory will be a part of any future Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

Of course, as a conservative who believes in Israel’s right to exist just as I do Canada’s or America’s right to exist, I’m dismayed by how the Left seems to be rejecting the only real human rights respecter in the Middle East.

In 2008, only 27 congressmen — virtually all Democrats — supported Israel’s self-defense against Hezbollah. In 2009, some 39 congressmen voted in favor of the Goldstone Report. In 2010, 54 Democratic congressmen have signed a later protesting Israel’s blockade of Gaza. (They seem to have forgotten that Israel is just stopping weapons from getting in — something which seems to happen whenever they lift that alleged blockade.)

But if this be the Democrat strategy for Israel, I welcome my Jewish friends to a party that won’t sell its friends short at the slightest convenience. With their help and support, I hope we can end the most anti-Israel administration’s efforts as soon as this November when pro-Israel conservatives are swept to power.

“I welcome my Jewish friends to a party that won’t sell its friends short at the slightest convenience”

Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!

Yeah, right!

Oh man! You are golden, CJ! I wish we could all live in your insane bubble!

Ahahahahahahahaha!

CJ,
You’re the one who is clearly not familiar with the issues at hand. There’s no such thing as the “Palestine Authority”. There’s only a “Palestinian Authority” (technically the “Palestinian National Authority”). I would be more forgiving of a minor lack of knowledge on your part, but you are the one who raised the issue of lack of knowledge.
Also, you claim I’m ignorant of the situation at hand and then provide not one piece of solid evidence to back up your claim. I realize that some of these housing units are close to the Green Line, but they are still in violation of international law and a clear “fuck you” to the Palestinians. You can’t accuse me of ignorance simply for not including every single detail you find relevant.
You clearly aren’t willing to have a mature debate on this topic and instead want to slander your opponents. I can see why you’re a Republican. Jenny Tulls isn’t behaving respectfully, but you have no moral authority to criticize him/her. Charles, people don’t hate you because of your opinions. People hate you because you’re a douche.

Go Israel

US should be supporting a nation under fire from terrorists.

If only you guys knew of the daily suicide attacks within Israel

Great piece, Charlie.

And CJ, I’m sorry you’re so deluded.

Charles Johnson said it right. Sprague has no idea what he is talking about.

Sometimes lightning does strike twice: I agree with Mr. Sprague yet again!—at least on most of his holdings. But let’s unpack a bit more, particularly the issue of International Law: does it even matter vis-à-vis the Middle East Peace Process? And if it doesn’t—and the Israelis won’t be moved by appeals to obey the “law”—does the U.S. have any other solutions to ameliorate the deleterious effects of Israeli/Palestinian violence on our strategic position?

Israel’s settlement of East Jerusalem—and the settlement of the entire West Bank—is almost certainly a violation of “international law” (whatever that means). Having said that, the Israelis have already established that they’re the de-facto sovereign power in East Jerusalem (and the West Bank) and made it clear that they don’t give two shits about the opinions of the international legal community. (Such are the hazards of “law” among equals: “Where there is no common power, there is no law.”)

The international law game works only so long as there are norms and enforcement mechanisms. Enforcement mechanisms are non-existent—I don’t see anyone threatening to invade Israel to stop the settlements—and the Israelis don’t seem to care for the norms. Either that, or (more likely) they’re invoking their right to self-defense to justify their actions. Given that the state’s prime directive is self-preservation, I can hardly blame them (even if I find their assessment of their self-interest myopic).

The Israelis have been settling the West Bank for decades because they can’t allow it to remain ethnically homogenous, lest the Arabs there establish a sort of de-facto Arab zone that could one day become a major building block of a Palestinian state. While many Israeli governments—including the present regime—have pledged their dedication to a two-state solution, it’s become quite clear that the present Netanyahu government views any Palestinian state other than an absurdly weak one as a serious threat, if not an existential one.

To this end, the Israelis continue to cut up the West Bank with settlements, so that over time the area has become ethnically heterogeneous and much harder to divide cleanly, save into small, fractured pieces. How can one have a geographically coherent—not to mention plausibly defensible—Palestinian state (read: a state of Palestinians) without a coherent land mass? The correct answer, of course, is that one cannot. And that’s the idea.

To the extent that the present Israeli government will allow a two-state solution, the Palestinian state will be a collection of fractured regions without much territorial integrity. And is the UN really going to send troops into the West Bank and forcibly remove 500,000 Israelis by force so that the Palestinians can have a unified landmass? Fuck no. By the same token, Israel has made East Jerusalem similarly impossible to “give back” to the Palestinians, both by declaring all of the Jerusalem the “eternal capital” of Israel and by settling Israelis throughout East Jerusalem. And without East Jerusalem, there is no feasible capital for a Palestinian state. Again, that’s the idea.

The Israelis are going to keep settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem unless the U.S. takes firm measures to stop them like calling them out in public, cutting aid, hurting their NGOs, and refusing to back them in the international community. As long as we’re allies with Israel, we need to stop the Israelies from settling the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, before it becomes indivisible due to demographics, because without a sizeable chunk of the West Bank to serve as part of the foundation of a future Palestinian state, there is no Peace Process. Without a Peace Process and an eventual Palestinian State, our interests in the region are going to remain even more FUBAR than they would otherwise be. But perhaps there is another option—one with a higher human cost, (fortunately?) to be born by the Palestinians.

The Israelis seem hell-bent on establishing a Greater Israel, one in which Palestinians live in semi-autonomous regions of relative crapiness, or one next to which lies a Palestinian state that is weak, toothless, and unable to provide security for its populace. Either way, the Arabs are getting the shaft, which is fine—it just means that the U.S. can’t remain good friends with the Israelis because of the strategic problems that the friendship is creating. If they want to go raze Gaza and such every five years, no one’s going to stop them (not even their “compassionate” Arab neighbors who “care about the Palestinians” oh-so-much).

If we move away from the Israelis to a more distant relationship, it hopefully won’t be any more of a problem than when our buddies the Saudis put down riots with machine guns. What has Israel done for you lately? Uncle Sam sticks out his neck for Israel against his better judgment—but does anyone trust that Israel really looks out for anyone but Israel? I certainly don’t. (And again, I don’t blame them for doing so.)

But by the same token, I hope the Israelis don’t expect us to keep giving them understood security guarantees, granting them billions of dollars in aid, and continuing to be their unconditional guardians in the international community. The U.S. government, callous as it sounds, might be able to live with Israel’s Arabs getting the shaft; what it might not be able to live with is being an accessory to the beating.

Of course, the biggest problem with option #2 (abandon Israel to extricate the U.S. from culpability) is that at present, the Israeli’s remain our most valuable military ally in the region. I’m a huge fan of the Saudis, Turks, Kuwaitis, UAEers, and Jordanians myself, but with the exception of the Turks—whose military is so swell that they even play an important political role!—the rest of the states aren’t exactly long on military might. Also, cutting aid to the Israelis might cause friction between them and the Egyptians: I’m under the impression that we essentially bribe the two states to keep them at peace (in addition to keeping Sinai a buffer zone).

So after all that, it looks like Mr. Sprague is right (even if I think international law is meaningless in this particular situation). Unless we’re ready to cut loose the Israelis and treat them like all our other friends—you know, the way alliances are supposed to work—and suffer the consequences of doing so, President Obama had best get on his horse and get Netanyahu and Co. to stop settling East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank as best he can. Otherwise, our strategic position in the region will continue to be undermined.

There are such things as intractable conflicts. Just because they don’t fit into our paradigm doesn’t mean the Israelis and the Palestinians are stupid, they’re just playing a different game. Robert Aumann, a Jewish game theorist, wrote some fascinating articles on the theory of conflict resolution (he actually wrote papers on the subject for the Department of Defense during the cold war). This business with the settlements could just be an attempt to utilize one of his central theories. As awful as I feel quoting wikipedia, “Simplistic peacemaking can cause war, while arms race, credible war threats and mutually assured destruction can reliably prevent war.”

If we assume Israel has a view similar to this one, it easily explains its seeming overreaction to a few rocket attacks, when Israel made a point of making a large scale military incursion in hopes of creating a credible future threat. It also explains Israel’s willingness to support settlements in the face of international pressure. If Israel bows to the pressure, what threats can they make at any peace table to ensure reliable bargaining from both sides? (Please don’t argue that threats won’t factor into a negotiation). What incentive would the Palestinians have to come to the table if they though that they could simply wait the Israelis out.

Great article. I’ve posted this somewhere else as well but I think the following 1796 quote from George Washington foreshadows/applies to American policy toward Israel really well. Nice to see a departure from blind support in favor of more critical evaluation and fairness.
“A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.”

Obama as a Modern Pharaoh

Kevin MacDonald

June 5, 2009

Those of us who are critical of the power of the Israel Lobby have been intrigued by the fact that the Obama administration seems to be standing up to the Israelis — and, by implication, to the Israel Lobby. After all, during the election campaign Obama did all the right things to show his support of the Israel Lobby and calm the fears of some Jewish activists that he would not be sufficiently pro-Israel, including which Philip Weiss termed a “truckling” speech at the AIPAC convention.

Obama was rewarded for his apparent fealty. Around 80% of Jews voted for Obama, and Jews contributed more than 50% of the Democratic Party’s money during the campaign. His choice of Rahm Emanuel (who served with the Israeli Defense Force during the 1991 Gulf War) as Chief of Staff and the presence of seasoned pro-Israel activists like Dennis Ross in the State Department also made it seem that Obama’s policy toward Israel would not be a major departure.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration has appointed George Mitchell (who has a reputation as relatively evenhanded) as Middle East envoy and made conciliatory statements toward the Muslim world. More importantly, the administration has called for a two-state solution and pressed Israel to put a meaningful freeze on settlement expansion—including what Steven Walt terms the “fig leaf of ‘natural growth’”. (The New York Times reports that if all the currently approved West Bank housing units were actually built, it would almost double the total.)

One could be excused for being skeptical about these developments. Walt interprets the Obama administration’s behavior as entirely in keeping with the thrust of the ideas presented in The Israel Lobby. He interprets the stance of the Obama administration as a hopeful sign that the United States is at last pursuing a policy that is in the interests of both the US and Israel. But he warns that thus far, it’s all rhetoric.

Indeed, other presidents—most notably Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush—have put pressure on Israel, only to be thwarted because of the power of the Israel Lobby in Congress. There have already been murmurs of dissent in Congress about Obama’s statements among both Democrats and Republicans—the latter doubtless sensing a political opening.

It must concentrate the minds of the Obama administration to realize that Carter and Bush were one-term presidents who were heavily criticized by the Israel Lobby. Jimmy Carter was widely viewed as hostile to Israel during the 1980 election, and his policy toward Israel was the main impetus to the migration of neoconservatives to the Republican Party. Many believe that George H. W. Bush’s loss in 1992 stemmed from his attempt to rein in the settlements. (George W. Bush apparently got the message and decided not to alienate the Lobby on the settlement issue. This resulted, among other things, in his administration becoming bogged down in a needless and costly war in Iraq.)

One wonders if many American Jews feel they would have been better off with John McCain and his neocon foreign policy advisors—especially considering that McCain’s treasonous attitudes on immigration and the rest of his domestic agenda were compatible with Jewish attitudes.

The reaction to the Obama administration’s rhetoric by Jewish fanatics in Israel has been predictably over the top. National Religious Party’s leader, Science Minister Daniel Herschkowitz, compared Obama to an archetypal anti-Semite from the past: “The American demand to prevent natural growth is unreasonable, and brings to mind Pharaoh who said: Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river.”

Israeli activists are launching protests, and posters of “Barak Hussein Obama” (middle name included) in Arabic headgear with the statement “Anti-Semitic Jew Hater” are being distributed throughout Israel.

Philip Weiss notes that one of the protests was organized by “none other than Nadia Matar, who when we last saw her was raising [tax deductible] money in a New York synagogue and calling for Mahmoud Abbas to be assassinated.” The following statement by an activist gets at the depth of emotion involved:

I’m here to tell Obama that Eretz Yisrael belongs to the Jewish people. What right does anybody have to tell us to stop building in the land that was given to us by God? I’m not going to stand by and let Obama, or anybody else, tell me where I can live and where I can’t live.

This is actually quite mild compared to the comments (most of them scatological) by young Israelis in this video by Max Blumenthal. Blumenthal defends his video here, noting the “climate of extremism that exploded into the open when the country attacked Gaza.” His video shows that “vitriolic levels of racism are able to flow through the streets of Jerusalem like sewage, why the grandsons of Holocaust survivors feel compelled to offer the Shoah as justification to behave like fascist street thugs, and how the sons and daughters of successful Jewish American families casually merged Zionist cant with crude white supremacism.” It’s an excellent example showing that attitudes that are normal in Jews are absolutely forbidden to Europeans.

J Street and the Israeli left (and commentators such as Steven Walt) believe that freezing the settlements and agreeing to a viable Palestinian state are good for Israel. I have expressed doubts about this in my review of The Israel Lobby—the main point being that Israel has the power, especially with the cooperation of the US, to achieve its goal of seizing substantially all of the West Bank and relegating the Palestinians to a completely degraded status to the point that most will emigrate.

Of course, these aggressive, expansionist policies make Israel into an international pariah. But the Israel Lobby has a long and successful track record in rationalizing Israeli behavior, at least in the United States.

The more important point is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s good for Israel. The present government is the most right-wing in Israeli history, and many of its supporters are the types of fanatics putting up posters stating that Obama is an “Anti-Semitic Jew hater.”

The extremists have had a powerful say in Israeli politics, at least since the 1967 war. They are now more entrenched than ever. There is simply no way that these people are going to make major territorial concessions without a fight.

Any attempt to rein in the settlements or make a meaningful withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem or allow a viable Palestinian state would produce a civil war among Israelis. But it’s also quite clear that there is no political will in Israel for supporting such policies. The Labor Party functions mainly to collaborate with the right in order to give it a fig leaf of respectability (see also here). (Predictably, Labor leader Ehud Barak was sent to the US to present the Israeli position on the settlements.) According to my calculation, the ethno–religious–nationalist–pro-settlement right holds 92 of 120 seats in the Knesset.

As throughout Jewish history, it is the most committed members who determine the direction of the entire group. This is doubtless true of most groups, but it is especially the case with Jews where there is a long history of fanaticism. In the present case, the most fanatical members of the Jewish community are firmly in support of territorial expansion in the West Bank. They are a solid majority in Israeli politics.

I am reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s depiction of Jewish fanatics in her excellent TV documentary, God’s Jewish Warriors (now back online[!]). One of the early scenes shows a large force of Israeli soldiers forcibly removing settlers from a Hebron neighborhood. Imagine what it would be like to remove anything approaching the nearly 500,000 settlers (as of 2006) now living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

These West Bank settlers and Jewish activists are massively ethnocentric, and they do not accept Western values like democracy and free speech. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception is colored by their Jewish identity. Theirs is an apartheid world separated by high concrete walls from their Palestinian neighbors, where even tiny settlements are necessarily protected by the Israeli army.

At a time when Americans are constantly being encouraged by Jewish organizations like the ADL to be ever more tolerant of all kinds of diversity, these people are anything but tolerant. Calls for expropriation and expulsion of the Palestinians are commonplace among them. Many believe that God gave Jews all of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Such people may not be representative of the Jewish community, at least in America. But their numbers are large, and they have created “facts on the ground” that make any kind of reasonable settlement impossible.

In the foreseeable future, it is quite clear that no Israeli government will fail to promote their interests. And the problem will only exacerbate as time goes on because the fanatics are the ones having the children. Already, the calls for “natural growth” of the settlements are rationalized because of the high fertility of the settler population.

As Walt points out, there are indeed signs in America that the less fanatic Jews, such as J Street, may have some influence in blunting the force of the Israel Lobby or possibly even turning it against the settlement movement. However, in keeping with the general finding that the most extreme Jews tend to win the day within the Jewish community, I predict that in the end Jews will be forced to choose between supporting their extremist brethren, or become marginalized or even ostracized from the Jewish community. The great majority of activist Jews in the US will support Israel even if it continues to stand firmly behind the settlement movement.

And when push comes to shove, Jews will go along with the activists who lead the organized Jewish community. One can talk about U.S. interests or Israeli interests all one wants, but this is a fight to the finish.

I’m not sure that Obama realizes what he’s getting into.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-ObamaPharaoh.html

Bang! And he was right!