A Greater IsraelBy Robert Parry
February 12, 2007
A big part of the crisis confronting the United States in the Middle East can be traced back to what is now more than a quarter-century-old competition among American politicians over who can best pander to Israeli hardliners.
Rather than furthering Israel’s long-term interests – or those of the American people – these politicians seek short-term electoral gains by appealing to blocs of right-wing Christian and Jewish voters who reject any criticism of Israeli policies.
But this calculated positioning – from the likes of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards on the Democratic side to George W. Bush and the neoconservatives on the Republican side – has thrown the diplomatic calculus in the Middle East out of whack.
Whereas the United States traditionally served as an honest broker between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the current dynamic is for ambitious American politicians to adopt what they see as the favored Israeli position and thereby deepen the anger of the Muslim world.
So you get former Sen. Edwards appealing to an Israeli security conference earlier this year with tough talk about putting military pressure on Iran – “We need to keep ALL options on the table. Let me reiterate – ALL options must remain on the table” – without offering a word of criticism about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s policies toward the Palestinians.
You get Sen. Clinton eagerly sharing a platform last summer with Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, a notoriously anti-Arab bigot who joked at a 2006 conference of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee that “while it may be true – and probably is – that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim.”
You get President Bush – only 10 days after taking office – giving a green light to an Israeli crackdown on Palestinians. At the first meeting of his National Security Council, Bush jettisoned President Bill Clinton’s efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
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After al-Qaeda’s terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush spotted a political opportunity to implement a long-held neoconservative strategy for eliminating anti-Israeli governments in the Middle East, whether or not they represented security threats to the United States.
The invasion of Iraq was sold to Americans alternatively as necessary to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist; to topple a tyrant; or to spread democracy. But the underlying neocon plan was to conquer Iraq for use as a base of American power that would then force additional “regime change” in Iran and Syria.
In 2003, the punch-line for a neocon joke about whether U.S. forces should next go west to Syria or east to Iran was that "real men go to Tehran."
Once those two governments were removed, the theory went, Israel’s front-line enemies – Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories – would be starved of support, brought to their knees and forced to accept peace terms dictated by Israel.
Though this neocon pipedream has proved to be a disastrous fantasy – with 3,100 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq and anti-Americanism surging around the world – Bush still earned a reputation in some pro-Israeli circles as “the best friend Israel’s ever had.” .......
The old-fashioned friends of Israel balanced their support for its legitimate security needs with criticism of overly harsh policies against Palestinians or other actions that might unnecessarily estrange Israel from its Arab neighbors.
Yet many of those friends are now smeared with the ugly epithet “anti-Semite” and shouted into silence, while the panderers continue to jostle for position to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel’s hardest of hardliners.
So, Bush’s Middle East policies now neatly dove-tail with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s. In both Washington and Tel Aviv, military force against Islamic militancy is seen as the only acceptable answer, with only periodic lip service paid to the cause of peace.
Though on one level Israel is getting what it wants, the neocon strategy also guarantees eventual catastrophe, the prospect of casting one of the world’s most strategic and volatile regions into a cauldron of violence that, in the end, could jeopardize Israel’s very survival.
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While the madness of these Bush-neocon schemes has become apparent to millions of Americans and is even beginning to dawn on Official Washington, U.S. politics is stuck in the rut of pandering to Israeli hardliners, even at the long-term expense of Israel.
Recently, when I mentioned to one former Israeli intelligence official that some American Jews were calling George W. Bush “the best friend Israel’s ever had,” the Israeli laughed bitterly.
“The best friend Israel ever had was Jimmy Carter,” the Israeli said. “He negotiated peace with Israel’s most dangerous enemy, Egypt.”
But Carter’s role in the Camp David accords, which returned the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace between the two countries, angered Prime Minister Menachem Begin and other Israeli hardliners.
In 1980, Begin’s Likud Party effectively threw in its lot with Republican Ronald Reagan and worked behind the scenes to stop Carter’s reelection.
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The neocons’ intensely pro-Israeli positions frightened Democrats about the possible loss of Jewish voters, a key element of Franklin Roosevelt’s historic coalition. So, the pandering competition was on in earnest.
Even facing the geo-strategic disaster in Iraq and after the uprising of American voters in November 2006, Democratic leaders still tread carefully around any criticism of Israel. For instance, they quickly distanced themselves from former President Carter when he came under attack for his cautionary new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Very few politicians from either American party, it seems, dare offer the constructive criticism that might guide Israel to a brighter and a more secure future. They prefer to play it safe for themselves, politically, even if that means putting Israel and the world in greater long-term danger.