I'd love to be able to take the position of "Israel first, last and always." It sure seems to make the folks who take it feel good. Unfortunately, that position ignores the way the world works and accomplishes absolutely nothing when it isn't actually counterproductive. As a matter of fact, that position serves neither the security interests of either the United States or Israel insofar as it perpetuates a status quo which might eventually lead to the destruction of Israel as we know it.
One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that far too many pro-Israeli commentators aren't pro-Israeli as much as they are Likud Party partisans. This is especially true of those affiliated with or sympathetic to the Republican Party or Conservative Party of Canada. Oftentimes those commentators are well to the right of the average Israeli, and one should be leery of anyone who considers themselves more Israeli than the Israelis, particularly when they happen to be a Baptist from Tennessee. Or a Mormon with a Fox News program who plans to spend his impending retirement as the new King of the Jews. I would suggest that if you believe that the Holy Land is actually in Missouri, you need to work a little harder than everyone else to establish credibility on the Middle East.
Any objective observer - and the majority of Israelis themselves - will agree that Israel's security is dependent on a deal with the Palestinians. Once that happens, it follows that Tel Aviv can establish diplomatic relations with the remaining Arab powers and the wider Islamic world. Israeli security also requires strong American relations with both sides.
However, for a deal to be a deal, it must be acceptable to the Palestinians and the Arab world. Anything short of that is an exercise in wishful thinking and not the basis of serious negotiations. More importantly, it places the United States in an intractable position where it has only the options of fully supporting Israel, fully supporting the Palestinians, or withdrawing from the region entirely.
Interestingly, many foreign Likud enthusiasts are also subscribers of Mark Steyn's America Alone theory, which is predicated on a demographic Islamification of Western Europe's democracies. Yet for reasons that I can't determine, they believe that Israel is somehow exempt from this demographic shift, despite its geographic position within the Muslim world. At some point, the growing Palestinian presence in both the Territories and Israel itself makes the continued existence of the Jewish state untenable. There will almost certainly come a day when they simply say, "Let's vote." If Jerusalem accepts such a vote, it ceases to be Jewish. If it ignores it, it ceases to be a democracy. Either way, Israel as it was established ceases to exist.
Because of the demographic realities, time is probably not on Israel's side and a final status deal is in its vital national interest. All of the militaristic posturing in the world is not going to change that fact. Indeed, the Arab Spring democracy movement makes an agreement more imperative rather than less because Israel may no longer have the rhetorical tool of castigating Arab tyrannies.
President Barack Obama made a speech this week about the state of the Middle East which has practically everyone going insane. The political-media-Internet outrage machine has been in hyperdrive since Thursday, all of it to the benefit of Benjamin Netanyahu and Republicans generally, but contrary to the national security interest of the United States and Israel.
Obama essentially has said out loud what everyone in the international community, including the last eight American presidents, have recognized privately: that any final peace deal is going to have to be based on the pre-1967 borders. The Occupied Territories are precisely that, occupied territories, and with that comes some legal responsibilities. This President also seems to understand that the policy tilt toward Israel since '67 has accomplished nothing and made American Middle East policy an intractable mess for decades.
Obama wasn't the first person to recognize this. President Truman's secretary of state and personal hero, General George Marshall, opposed the recognition of the Jewish state precisely because it would make relations with the Arab world unmanageable. Truman made clear that American recognition was based on moral considerations rather than strategic ones.
Nor is Obama, as some deliberately ignorant or dishonest commentators called him, "the most anti-Israel president in American history." In fact, Obama hasn't been all that tough on Netanyahu, particularly given the provocations on the Likud government's part. The Obama White House made the prime minister enter and exist through the back door only after he deliberately announced a West Bank settlement policy that Vice President Biden was in the country to lobby against. How do you suppose that the United States would respond to such a premeditated humiliation from any other country? If that happened to Dick Cheney while he was in, say, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, how do you think George W. Bush would react?
Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush were immeasurably tougher on Israel than Obama when circumstances warranted it. Eisenhower was furious that David Ben-Gurion had lied to his face in the month leading up to the Suez Crisis and threatened to cut off all aid to Israel, going so far as to say "If those fellows start something, we may have to hit 'em - and, if necessary, with everything in the bucket."
During Israel's 1982 siege of Beriut, Reagan twice described the military offensive to Menachem Begin as a "Holocaust" and said that if it continued "our entire future relationship (meaning America and Israel's) was endangered (see The Reagan Diaries, page 98.) It was perhaps the most controversial and confrontational communication between an American president and an Israeli prime minister. It was also one that Reagan was deeply proud of, highlighting it in his memoir, An American Life.
When Yitzhak Shamir's settlement policy threatened the Madrid Conference that President Bush promised in return for Arab participation in the first Gulf War, Bush cancelled Israel's loan guarantees. Less than a year later, Likud was defeated by Yitzhak Rabin and Labor.
Obama has done nothing even approaching the severity of those three actions. Compared to Eisenhower, Reagan and Bush 41, he has been absolutely timid in his Israel policy. The only difference is that Eisenhower, Reagan and Bush were Republicans. There is some precedent in the Obama-Netanyahu relationship in Begin's dealings with President Carter, although Begin was far too smart to condescend to any American president in public the way Netanyahu did on Friday.
Netanyahu's contention that the '67 borders are "indefensible," which has subsequently become a major Republican talking point, is simply silly. They were more than adequately defended in 1967, which is how Israel came to occupy the territories in the first place. There isn't an Arab military in existence right now that Israel can't defend against, especially with its nuclear deterrent. If the borders are, in fact, indefensible, the United States would probably do well to ask what all of its military aid to Israel is accomplishing in the first place.
Contrary to the popular opinion of most bloggers and media types, the United States has no explicit duty to ensure Israel's survival, nor does even Israel suggest that it does. Were that the case, there would be mutual defense treaty or an extension of the "nuclear umbrella," such as Japan or South Korea enjoys. Indeed, Israel has been steadfast in not asking for an American security guarantee. Nor has any president mentioned committing U.S troops in defense of the Jewish state. American policy, at least until 2001, has been to supply Israel with aid and support negotiations of a final settlement.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his Oval Office exchange with Obama, referred to "certain changes that have taken place on the ground, demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years." These "demographic changes" are the settlements, which were seemingly designed to make serious negotiations impossible. That is the "facts on the ground" tactic, which is why building settlements on occupied territory is illegal under international law. If an Arab army somehow captured Israeli territory and began effectively colonizing it, the United States wouldn't tolerate it, nor would they ask Jerusalem to.
Netanyahu ignored a very important historical reality on Friday in Washington, that Israel's intractable enemies are always replaced with something worse. The PLO was replaced with Hezbollah in Lebanon and supplanted by Hamas in Gaza. There is a very real possibility that Hamas could be overtaken by an al-Qaeda inspired or affiliated group in the near future. Waiting for a more agreeable negotiating partner is an exercise in folly, if only because one has never appeared before.
On the other hand, I could be wrong. Problematically, that could be even worse for Israel. That would be widespread blooming of democracy in the Arab world. There is no reason to believe that democratic Arab governments would demand anything less than their autocratic ones do now. But they would have a great deal more credibility with the international community generally, and the United States in particular.
It should be remembered that America's great democratic ally, Iraq, does not recognize Israel, nor does it denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. There is no reason to believe that any other democratic Arab government would behave any differently, but their positions might seem a tad more reasonable when unattached to names like Bashir Assad or Saddam Hussein.
Add to that the possibility that the Palestinians might have learned from their mistakes and come to understand that violent resistance isn't going to get them anywhere. A peaceful intifada might be an irresistible force in the international community and could very well isolate Israel, especially an Israel with a hardline Likud government. There's no way of knowing how even Israeli public opinion would react to demonstrations like the ones in Tahrir square, but it's virtually certain that the American consensus in support of Israel would fracture.
Another danger is the continuing financial disintegration of the U.S government. Americans are traditionally an isolationist people and the if the current fiscal crisis gets much worse, there is likely to be a fundamental review of U.S foreign policy and a return to the practices advocated by the Founding Fathers. It is entirely possible that the United States will not be a guarantor of Middle Eastern security a generation from now, and no other world power would be as favourable to Israeli interests. In any event, it's hard to justify American foreign policy continuing to be hobbled by the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, especially with South Asia emerging as a flashpoint.
The fact is that the '67 borders are the only serious basis for negotiation, both politically and as a matter of international law. No, they almost certainly won't be the borders in any final agreement, but there isn't any other realistic starting point.
What Netanyahu and his supporters don't seem to understand is that the choice isn't necessarily between a political settlement and war. It could be a choice between a political settlement and simple demographics accomplishing what war couldn't. The status quo, particularly when you factor in the possibility of democracy breaking out in the Middle East, doesn't favor Israel in the long term.
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