Israel Matzav

Who is blundering toward disaster?

David Horovitz has an interesting series of comments on Secretary of State Clinton's AIPAC speech. I urge you to read the whole thing - I'm just going to discuss a small part of it.

Horovitz entitles his piece 'Blundering toward disaster.' He never makes clear who he believes is blundering toward disaster, but the implication (at least as I understood it) is that it is the Netanyahu government or Israel. While Israel may ultimately, God forbid, suffer from the disaster, it is my belief that it is not Israel that is blundering but the Obama administration in its blind faith in the good intentions of the oft-proven malicious 'Palestinians.' Here are two short quotes from Horovitz's article:

But the stress that Clinton chose to place on the untenability of the current reality, and her repeated exhortations to the Israeli leadership to change it – along with markedly less prominent and detailed demands for the Palestinians and the Arab world to do their bit – suggested one of two real problems in the critical US-Israel relationship: Either Israel, under this government, is not demonstrating to a savvy, worldly Washington that it is truly doing what it can to advance the shared interest of peace; or Israel is genuinely doing what it can, but the Obama administration is too inexpert, too influenced by those who place insufficient blame on the Arab side for the deadlock, to appreciate it.

“Last June at Bar-Ilan University, Prime Minister Netanyahu put his country on the path to peace. President Abbas has put the Palestinians on that path as well,” Clinton declared at one point. Much of her text indicated that she doubted the first of those two sentences. Very little of her text suggested that she doubted the second.

It's not that Netanyahu doesn't want peace. It's that there is no interlocutor on the other side and that Netanyahu - not his coalition - is willing to take risks for peace, but not potentially suicidal risks. Abu Mazen takes no risks, pockets concessions received from the United States, and has done nothing to put his country on the 'path to peace.' That Clinton and Obama cannot - or more likely will not - see that is the real blunder toward disaster here.

Here's the second quote:

So is the problem here that Israel, for all Netanyahu’s declared support for a two-state solution, his easing of West Bank freedom of access and his facilitation of major projects to improve the West Bank economy, is nonetheless dashing a willing Palestinian leadership’s desire for viable peace terms through the expansion of settlements and Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem and other provocative actions?

Or is it the case that the Palestinian leadership re-demonstrated its intransigence when rebuffing Ehud Olmert’s take-it-all peace terms, and that the Arab world underlined its hostility by rejecting the Obama administration’s entreaties to normalize ties with Israel, even just a little?

If most Israelis believe the latter, if most Israelis have long since recognized that the much-cited status quo is working against us, if most Israelis fervently wish that Israel could through its own actions resolve our conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world, the message behind Secretary Clinton’s speech on Monday – for all its phrases of friendship and solidarity and partnership – was that the administration thinks differently.

Horovitz is right that this administration sees things differently than Israelis do. And if what he meant by blundering toward disaster is that we are on the way to blowing our special relationship with the United States, he may well be right, at least so long as the Obama administration is in power.

But that relationship was blown from the moment Obama took office for at least so long as he remains in office. Obama was predisposed against Israel, and had definite and immutable ideas how to solve the conflict even before he knew anything about it, as Horovitz himself noted when he interviewed Obama in the summer of 2008 (the original JPost link no longer works).

There is a limit to what can be gauged of a politician's views as expressed in a relatively short interview at the height of an election campaign. But Obama, who chose to give the Post one of the only two formal sit-down interviews he conducted during his visit, was clearly conveying a carefully formulated message - and it was striking in several areas.

He sought to sound resolute on thwarting Iran's nuclear drive, while insisting on the need to "exhaust every avenue" before the military option. He was optimistic on the prospects of potential Syrian moderation. He was succinct and blunt on Jerusalem - and distinctly different from the "poor phrasing" of his "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided" comments during his address to AIPAC's policy conference last month. And most notably, he was explicit and unsympathetic on the matter of West Bank settlement.

...

And on Wednesday evening, Obama answered my question about whether Israel has a right to try and maintain a presence in the West Bank, for security, religious, historic or other reasons, with a vigor and detail that also seemed to confirm Olmert's assessment of where conventional friendly wisdom stands and that expanded significantly on his brief settlement remarks in the AIPAC speech.

And here's more from a JPost editorial published at the time of Obama's visit.

We asked Obama whether he too could live with the "67-plus" paradigm. His response: "Israel may seek '67-plus' and justify it in terms of the buffer that they need for security purposes. They've got to consider whether getting that buffer is worth the antagonism of the other party."

Without that "buffer," the strategic ridges of the West Bank that overlook metropolitan Tel Aviv and the country's main airport would be in Palestinian hands. Eighteen kilometers - or 11 miles - would separate "Palestine" from the Mediterranean, the narrow, vulnerable coastal strip along which much of Israel's population lives.

While Obama promises to dedicate himself, from the "first minute" of his presidency, to solving the conflict, his apparent sanguinity over an Israel shrunk into the 1949 Armistice Lines is troubling. Half the Palestinian polity is today in the clutches of the Islamist rejectionists in Gaza. If the IDF precipitously withdrew, the other half, ruled by the "moderate" Ramallah-based leadership, would quickly fall under Islamist control. And that is something no American president would desire.

Obama's position on territorial compromise, in part, may be a consequence of Israel's abiding inability to achieve a consensual position regarding those areas of Judea and Samaria it feels must be retained under any peace accord, and then to assiduously explain that position internationally.

But he sounded surprisingly definitive in his outlook on this immensely sensitive issue - more so, indeed, than did McCain when we interviewed him in March - even though he was making only his second visit to Israel. He owes it to Israelis and Palestinians - and to himself - to return here for a deeper look.

That 'deeper look' never happened. Obama has not been back here since. But his preconceived notions about Israel and his sanguinity about an Israel shrunken to the 1949 armistice lines (God forbid) remains.

So who is blundering toward disaster? I believe it's the Obama administration that's blundering with their blind adherence to a third-world narrative that sees Israel as an interloper and a colonizer. But the impending disaster won't just impact the United States. God forbid, it could impact all of us.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:44 AM