Obama Policy Will Harm Israel

EpSil0n-// <[email protected]> Fri, 1 May 2009 05:30:35 -0500 (CDT)

Newsgroups	gmane.politics.progressive.news
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Commentary online
How Obama's America Might Threaten Israel
Norman Podhoretz From issue: May 2009

Is there a threat to Israel from the United States under Barack Obama? The
question itself seems perverse. For in spite of the hostility to Israel in
certain American quarters, this country has more often than not been the
beleaguered Jewish states only friend in the face of threats coming from
others. Nor has the young Obama administration been any less fervent than
its last two predecessors in declaring an undying commitment to the
security and survival of Israel.

Nevertheless, during the 2008 presidential campaign, friends of Israel (a
category that, speculations to the contrary notwithstanding, still
includes a large majority of the American Jewish community) had ample
reason for anxiety over Obama. The main reason was his attitude toward
Iran. After all, Iran under its current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
was vowing almost on a daily basis to wipe Israel off the map and was
drawing closer and closer to acquiring the nuclear weapons and the
ballistic missiles that would give the ruling mullocracy the means to do
so. And yet Obama seemed to think that the best way to head off the very
real possibility this posed of another holocaust was by entering into
talks with Iran without preconditions. Otherwise, except for campaign
promises, his record was bereft of any definitive indication of his views
on the war the Arab/Muslim world has been waging against the Jewish state
from the day of its founding more than sixty years ago.

Stilllest we forgetObama did have a history of involvement with associates
whose enmity toward Israel was unmistakable. There was, most notoriously,
his longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In addition to honoring
the blatantly anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan, Wright was on record as
believing that Israel had joined with South Africa in developing an ethnic
bomb designed to kill blacks and Arabs but not whites; he had accused
Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians; and he had
participated in a campaign to get American companies to divest from
Israel. None of this, however, nor all of it together, had elicited so
much as a peep of protest from Obama, never mind provoking him into
leaving Wrights congregation. He remained a member for twenty years,
during which time Wright officiated at his marriage and baptized his
children.

Then there was Rashid Khalidi, holder of a professorship at Columbia named
after his idol, the late Edward Said. As befitted a reverential disciple
of the leading propagandist for Palestinian terrorism, and himself a
defender of suicide bombing, Khalidi regularly denounced Israel as a
racist state in the process of creating an apartheid system. Nevertheless,
Obama had befriended him, had publicly acknowledged being influenced by
him, and, as a member of the board of a charitable foundation, had also
helped to support him financially. And there was also one of Obamas chief
advisers on national security and the co-chairman of his campaign, General
Merrill McPeak, who subscribed to the canard that American policy in the
Middle East was dictated by Jews in the interests not of the United States
but of Israel. Others said to be advising Obama included a number who were
no more notable than McPeak for their friendliness toward Israel: Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power.

True, as the campaign proceeded, Obama either distanced himself from or
repudiated the ideas of such associates. Yet he only got around to doing
so when the political exigencies of his candidacy left him no prudential
alternative.

Not surprisingly, a fair number of Jews who had never voted for a
Republican in their lives were disturbed enough to tell pollsters that
they had serious doubts about supporting Obama. Faced with this horrific
prospect, Obamas Jewish backers mounted a vigorous effort of reassurance.
No fewer than three hundred rabbis issued a statement declaring that his
deep and abiding spiritual faith derived from the teachings of the Hebrew
Prophets. Several well-known champions of Israel also wrote articles
explaining on rather convoluted grounds why they were backing Obama. There
was, for example, Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School: The election
of Barack Obamaa liberal supporter of Israelwill enhance Israels position
among wavering liberals. And Martin Peretz of The New Republic: Israels
conflict with the Arabs . . . is mostly about history, and Obama is a
student of history. And Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution: I
believe Obama passes the kishke [gut] test.

The small community of politically conservative Jews did what it could to
counter this campaign, but to no avail. In the event, Obama received 78
percent of the Jewish vote. This was a staggering 35 points higher than
the pro-Obama white vote in general (43 percent), and it was even 11
points higher than the Hispanic vote (67 percent). Only with blacks, who
gave him 95 percent of their vote, did Obama do better than with Jews. The
results were just as dramatic when broken down by religion as by race and
ethnicity: Protestants gave 45 percent of their vote to Obama (33 points
less than Jews), and Catholics gave him 54 percent (24 points less than
Jews).

_____________

But if the forecasts of a Jewish defection from Obama were all wrong, the
prediction of his Jewish opponents that he would be less friendly toward
Israel than George W. Bush has turned out to be more accurate than any
kishke test. Bushs friendliness manifested itself in various ways. One of
the most important was his backing for the measures Israel had been taking
to defend itself against suicide bombingthe building of a wall and the
institution of checkpoints that would make it harder for suicide bombers
to get through from the West Bank and into Israel proper. These measures
were denounced almost everywhere as oppressive in themselves and as a
species of apartheid, while the accompanying assassinations of the leaders
who recruited, trained, and supplied the suicide bombers were routinely
condemned as acts of murder. But Bushthat is, the Bush who emerged after
9/11would have none of this. So far as he was concerned, suicide bombing
was a form of terrorism and therefore evil by definition. Israel had an
absolute right to defend itself against this great evil, and in fighting
it, the Israelis were struggling against the same enemy that had declared
war on us on 9/11.

A similar logic guided Bushs view of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in
2006 and of its attack on Gaza in 2008. Since, contrary to the confident
assurances of their opponents, the wall, the checkpoints, and the targeted
assassinations had all but eliminated suicide bombing, the terrorists were
now resorting to a different tactic. From its redoubt in Lebanon,
Hizballah rained rockets into the north of Israel, and from its base in
Gaza, Hamas fired them into the south. In each of these cases, when the
Israelis finally responded, they were furiously accused by most of the
world of using disproportionate force that allegedly resulted in the
wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians. But Bush would have none of
these egregious defamations either. Both in 2006 and 2008, he again
affirmed Israels right to defend itself against terrorist assault, and he
worked to fend off efforts by the UN to stop the Israelis before they
could finish the job they had set out to do.

To be sure, Barack Obama (while still President-elect) said about the then
impending Israeli incursion into Gaza, that

If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters
sleep at night, I would do everything in my power to stop that and I would
expect Israelis to do the same thing.

This sounded very much like Bush. But whereas an altogether new conception
of how to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians undergirded Bushs
support for the tactics Israel had been using to defend itself against
terrorist attack, there was nothing in Obamas record or in his past
statements or in his history to suggest that he shared, or even was aware
of, this conception.

George W. Bush was the first American President to come out openly in
favor of a Palestinian state. But he also decided to attach a codicil that
was even more novel. Today, he declared on June 24, 2002,

Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This
is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment
of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight
against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.

To this he added the requirement that they elect new leaders, not
compromised by terror, which amounted to an implicit demand that Yasser
Arafat be replaced.

Of course, Bush also challenged Israel to take concrete steps to support
the emergence of a viable, credible Palestinian state. Yet he most
emphatically did not follow the usual practice of blaming Israel for the
persistence of the war against it. Instead, in an entirely unprecedented
move, he placed the onus on the Palestinian leaders and the Arab states
backing them up. By saying up front that there is simply no way to achieve
. . . peace until all parties fight terror, he was blaming the absence of
peace on the Arab states and the Palestinian authorities (who were
encouraging, not opposing, terrorism), and he was exonerating the Israelis
(who were being victimized by terrorists, not supporting them).

Nor was this all. Two years later, in an addendum to his codicil, Bush
said that as part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and
recognized borders, and that these must include already existing major
Israeli population centers. To put it plainly, the United States rejected
the almost universally accepted idea that a precondition for the
establishment of a Palestinian state was the forcible removal of every
last Jew from the West Bank. In all other contexts, this is known as
ethnic cleansing and regarded as a great crime. But in this context alone,
and by a process of reasoning that has always escaped me, it has been
magically transmuted into the exercise of a sacred human right. Not,
however, to Bush.

_____________

Now, on a number of issuesmost notably IraqObama as President has
surprised many people by in effect signing on to Bushs policies (while
claiming to be reversing them). Yet even though he will certainly follow
Bush in pushing for the establishment of a Palestinian state, it would be
nothing less than astounding if he were also to accept the conditions
prescribed by the Bush codicil and its addendum. For neither Obama himself
nor those of his appointees who will be involved in the peace processhis
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton; his special envoy to the Middle East,
George Mitchell; his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones; and his
Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, although she made the right noises at
her confirmation hearinghave ever so much as suggested that it is the
Palestinians and not the Israelis who are blocking the way to the holy
grail of a two-state solution. On the contrary, Obama and his team are all
great worshipers at the shrine of even-handedness, which has long served
as a deceptive euphemism for pressuring Israel to make unilateral
concessions to Palestinian demands.

No wonder, then, that the Obama administration is already reverting to the
old pre-Bush assumptions that have repeatedly been discredited in
practice: that Israeli intransigence is the main obstacle to ending the
conflict with the Palestinians; that restarting the peace process
therefore requires putting the onus back on Israel; and that this in turn
necessitates forcing Israel back to the 1967 borders. In other words,
Jerusalem must be redivided and the major centers of Jewish population in
the West Bank that Bush had promised would remain part of Israel must also
be evacuated and the West Bank as a whole be made Judenrein.

Indeed, during Hillary Clintons first trip as Secretary of State to
Israel, she went evenhandedly out of her way to castigate the Israelis
over the issue of Arab housing in Jerusalem while making a great show of
the $900 million the U.S. has pledged to Gaza.

_____________

It is too early to tell whether the return to this approach will go so far
as to substantiate the fear expressed by the former UN ambassador John R.
Bolton, who foresees pressure on Israel to acknowledge the legitimacy of
[Hamas and Hezbollah], and to negotiate with them as equals (albeit
perhaps under some artful camouflage).1 But it is not too early to tell
that nothing will come of a reversion to the pre-Bush assumptions. Nothing
will come of it with the Israelis because theyeven most of the doves among
themhave learned that withdrawing from previously occupied territories
means the creation of bases from which terrorists will rain rockets on
Israeli towns. Thus, when in 2000 they withdrew from the security zone
they had established in southern Lebanon, Hizballah moved in, and then
their withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 resulted in a takeover by
Hamaseventuating in both cases not in peace or even improved prospects for
peace but in war and more war. Furthermore, the withdrawal from Gaza,
entailing as it did the dragging of some 8,000 Jews out of their homes,
was so painful a national trauma that doing the same to more than thirty
times that many Jews living in the West Bank has become unthinkable.

Nor will anything come of the old approach with the Palestinians. The
writ, such as it is, of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian
Authority extends only to the West Bank, not to Gaza, so that even if he
were to reach an agreement with Israel, he lacks the power to deliver on
it.

But a deeper reason may be at work here as well. When people quote Abba
Ebans famous quip that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss
an opportunity, the opportunity they have in mind is the achievement of
statehood. And it is true that on at least three occasions when they could
have had peace and a state of their own for the askingin 1947, under the
UN partition plan; in 2000, under the extremely generous terms proposed
jointly by Israel under Ehud Barak and the United States under Bill
Clinton; and in 2005, after the Israeli withdrawal from Gazathe
Palestinians rejected statehood and chose war instead.

May it not be, then, that they failed to seize these opportunities because
they have never really wanted a state of their own?

Giora Eiland, a retired general and the former head of Israels National
Security Council, argues that this is indeed the case. He writes:

The Palestinian ethos is based on values such as justice,
victimization, revenge, and above all, the right of return. . . . Its true
that the Palestinians want to do away with the occupation, but its wrong
to assume that this translates into a desire for an independent state.
They would prefer the solution of no state at allthat is, the State of
Israel will cease to exist and the area between the Mediterranean Sea and
the Jordan River will be divided among Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.

Adding to the plausibility of this theory is the most recent polling data
showing that a large majority of Palestinians would reject the two-state
solution even after the settlement of all issues in dispute, and would be
unwilling to accept a state of their own even with its capital in East
Jerusalem and an unlimited right of return.

But whether or not Eiland is rightand I for one think that he is, at least
about the no-state solutionthe futility under current conditions of
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians is so obvious that even
devout American peace processers like Aaron David Miller and Martin Indyk
acknowledge it. Hence (along with certain high-placed Israelis) they now
advocate shifting to the Syrian track. But nothing will come of this
either. Even under the delusion that, in exchange for the Golan Heights,
Syria would be ready to give up the dream of wiping Israel off the map
that it shares with its closest ally Iran, it is hard to see how the
Israelis would be willing to do unto the 20,000 Jews living there what
they did to the 8,000 who lived in Gaza.2

When I say that nothing will come of renewed American pressure on Israel
to accept the demands that are the precondition of a deal with the
Palestinians and/or the Syrians, I mean that nothing will come of it on
the ground. It is, however, likely to result in the same souring of
relations that developed in the 1990s when George H.W. Bush was in the
White House and Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister of Israel, and that then
carried over to their successors, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Unpleasant as this would be, it does not rise to the level of a threat.

But what surely does rise to the level of a threat is American policy
toward Iran. In making the ridiculous boast during his presidential
campaign that he could talk Iran into giving up its quest for nuclear
weapons (and the missiles to deliver them), Obama was careful to add that
the military option remained available in case all else failed. But
everyone, and especially the Iranians and the Israelis, had to know that
this was pro forma, and that if elected Obama would pursue the same
carrot-and-stick approach of the Europeans who had been negotiating with
Iran for the past five years. He would do this in spite of the fact that
the only accomplishment of the European diplomatic dance had been to buy
the Iranians more time; in spite of the fact that they had spurned the
carrots they were offered and defied the sanctions put in place by the
Security Council; and in spite of the fact that the Russians and the
Chinesewho had prevented stronger sanctions from being adoptedwere still
determined to veto measures like a blockade or a cutoff of gasoline
imports that could conceivably do the trick.

How much time do we have? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at first said
that Iran was still five years or more away from the bomb. This estimate
relied on the CIA, in which Gates worked for more than 25 years, including
a stint (1991-93) as its director. But the CIA does not exactly have a
brilliant record of tracking nuclear proliferation. It was wrong in 2007
about Irans suspension of its nuclear program; wrong in 2003 about Syrias
nuclear program; wrong in 2002 about Saddam Husseins possession of weapons
of mass destruction; and wrong in exactly the opposite direction before
the First Gulf War in 1991, at whose end UN inspectors discovered that the
Iraqi nuclear program was far more advanced than the American intelligence
community had thought. By contrast, an increasing number of experts
(possiblyto judge by hints he has thrown outthe current Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, among them) agree with the
head of Israeli military intelligence, who warns that the Iranians have
already crossed the nuclear threshold. Perhaps this is why, in an
interview with the Financial Times, Gates has now backed away from his
complacent five-year estimate (How much more time [we have] I dont know.
It is a year, two years, three years). Admit it or not, then, the awesome
choice of bombing Iran or letting Iran get the bomb is hard upon us.

Although it is certain that Obama has removed American military action
from the table, it is difficult to tell whether he still thinks that he
can talk Iran into giving up its nuclear program. On the one hand, his
Secretary of State reportedly admits that this is very doubtful, but on
the other hand she invites the Iranians to a conference on Afghanistan,
then Obama himself sends a videotaped message proclaiming his respect for
the brutal and tyrannical regime in Tehran, and finally it is announced
that the U.S. will now join the Europeans, the Russians, and the Chinese
in the farcical negotiations with Iran we had previously shunned.
Naturally the mullahs, seizing this gift of an opportunity to buy yet more
time for reaching their nuclear goal, welcome the renewal of constructive
dialogue.

Yet to Obamas offer of a new day in the relations between us, the
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of that regime, responds in a
speech heaping scorn on the United States to the accompaniment of an
audience chanting Death to America. And far from having leaped at Obamas
old offer of direct talks without preconditions, the Iranians have
rebuffed it and insisted on a few preconditions of their own, beginning
with an apology for all the atrocities we have committed against them and
a promise of deep and fundamental change in our policy.

In order to avoid this humiliation, Obama (we learn from the New York
Times) has chosen the slightly lesser humiliation of seeking an
understanding with Syria. The idea here, according to the Times, is that
through the Syrians, the United States could increase the pressure on Iran
to respond to its offer of direct talks. And to compound the double
foolishness of expecting the Syrians to lend us a helping hand with Iran
and the Iranians to join with us against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Obama
expects that

such an understanding [with Syria] would also give Arab states and
moderate Palestinians the political cover to negotiate with Israel. That,
in turn, could increase the burden on Hamas, the Islamic militant group
that controls Gaza, to relax its hostile stance toward Israel.

Well, compared to this concatenation of wishful delusions, the prophet
Isaiahs vision of the end of days when the lion will lie down with the
lamb is a piece of hardheaded realism.

_____________

The upshot is that, barring military action by Israel (or a miracle), Iran
will get the bomb, and sooner rather than later. What then? For some time
now, many pundits with the ear of the Obama administration have finally
recognized that neither carrots nor sticks nor any combination of the two
can work. But instead of going on to support military action, they have
fallen back on the position that we can live with a nuclear Iran.In line
with the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), they soothingly
tell us, the mullahs can be deterred by the fear of retaliation much as
the far more heavily armed Soviets and Chinese were deterred during the
cold war. They also say that Ahmadinejadwho in his fanaticism admittedly
sounds as though he can hardly wait to use nuclear weapons against
Israelneither runs the regime nor speaks for it.

What they forget to mention, however, is that Ahmadinejad could never have
issued his threats without permission from the Ayatollah Khamenei, who
does run the regime, and who has himself described Israel as a cancerous
tumor that must and will be excised. Besides, even Ahmadinejads
predecessor as president and the current Speaker of the Assembly of
Experts, the Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, known far and wide as a
moderate, has declared that his country would not be deterred by the fear
of retaliation:

If the day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the
arms Israel has in its possession . . . application of an atomic bomb
would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce
damages in the Muslim world.

If this is the position of even a reputed Iranian moderate, how could
Israel depend upon MAD to keep the mullahs from launching a first strike?
Much anxiety has been voiced over the nuclear arms race that would be
triggered throughout the region if Iran were to get the bomb, but in all
truth we would be lucky if there were enough time for such a race to
develop.For consider: if the Iranians were to get the bomb, the Israelis
would be presented with an almost irresistible incentive to beat them to
the punch with a preemptive strikeand so, understanding this, would
Tehran. Either way, a nuclear exchange would become, if not inevitable,
terrifyingly likely, and God alone knows how far the destruction would
then spread.

Measured against this horrendous possibility, even the worst imaginable
consequences of taking military action before the mullahs get the bomb
would amount to chump change. But to say it again, with American military
action ruled out, the only hope is that such actionwhich could at the very
least head off the otherwise virtually certain prospect of a nuclear
warwill be taken by Israel.

Forget about the Palestinian and Syrian tracks: if there is a threat to
Israel coming from Obama, it is that, having eschewed the use of force by
the United States, he will follow through on his Vice Presidents
declaration that the Israelis would be ill-advised to attack the Iranian
nuclear sites and will prevent them from doing the job themselves.
About the Author

Norman Podhoretzs twelfth book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, will be published
by Doubleday in the fall.
Agree? Disagree? Write a letter to the editor

Let us know what you think! Send an email to editor-vXQT3nW/D8tmxXauHYRHI/[email protected]
Footnotes

1John R. Boltons article in this Special Report begins on page 27Ed.

2There are also other factors at play here that Bret Stephens brilliantly
spells out in The Syria TemptationAnd Why Obama Must Resist It
(Commentary, March 2009).
Commentary