Jacob Weisberg

A Friend in Need

Barack gets tough on Bibi.

Published Jun 13, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jun 22, 2009

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Since the first stirrings of the Arab-Israeli peace process after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, America's relations with Israel have been characterized by a paradox: those presidents regarded as the least friendly to the Jewish state have done it the most good. Its strong allies have proved much less helpful.

This history begins with Jimmy Carter, who threatened a cutoff of American aid to pressure Menachem Begin into returning all of Sinai to Egypt, which made possible the 1979 Camp David agreement. The other significant U.S. contribution to Mideast peace came under the first George Bush. When the Israelis refused to participate in the 1991 Madrid conference, Secretary of State James Baker withheld loan guarantees and said that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir should call him when he got interested in peace. Madrid led to a peace treaty with Jordan, the recognition of Israel by many other countries and the first face-to-face negotiations with Palestinians.

By contrast, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, all trusted friends, often encouraged Israel's worst tendencies. Reagan looked benignly upon biblically based claims of ownership over the West Bank, Israel's occupation of Lebanon and its refusal to talk to the PLO. Under Clinton, "we never had a tough or honest conversation with the Israelis on settlement activity," former peace negotiator Aaron David Miller writes in his memoir, The Much Too Promised Land. George W. Bush continued to ignore the settlements, neglected the peace process and condoned Israel's military misjudgments in the West Bank, Lebanon and Gaza. The actions of these presidents steadily built up Arab resentment while fostering Israeli illusions that there was an alternative to trading land for peace.

Happily, President Obama seems poised to defy this old dichotomy. That he means well for Israel there's little doubt. "I haven't just talked the talk, I've walked the walk when it comes to Israel's security," Obama told a Jewish group during the campaign. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, special envoy George Mitchell and Vice President Joe Biden can make the same claim. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has an Israeli father and once served as a civilian volunteer for the Israeli Army. That this crew is serious about pressuring Israel is equally apparent. In his Cairo speech, Obama demanded that Israel freeze its settlements in the West Bank and enter peace negotiations with the Palestinians based on the principle of two states.

This is a gutsy step forward. Being a good friend to Israel today means leaning harder on the Jews and the Arabs to get serious about a deal. And even if they don't produce a peace agreement, Obama's personal commitment and evenhanded reframing of the conflict could have large benefits. The perception that the United States is pushing its ally Israel as well as the Palestinians should help America's standing in the Middle East enormously. But to carry off this coup, Obama will have to do the nearly impossible several times over.

First, he needs to force either a change in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself or a change in the Knesset. In Israeli politics, Bibi has always stood for the proposition that the Palestinians will settle only for the destruction of the Zionist state. After a decade out of power, his hostility to an independent Palestine clearly hasn't dimmed, and has been compounded by a dangerous fixation on striking militarily against Iran's nuclear capability. But Netanyahu is also a cunning politician who knows he can't survive mismanaging his country's most important relationship. Obama's gamble is that the Israeli public, if not Bibi himself, will take the threat of diminished American support seriously.

At the same time, the president needs to assuage nervous American Jews. If this were any other ally, the next diplomatic steps would be fairly simple. You want us to keep supplying nearly 20 percent of your defense budget? Selling you our most advanced weapons? Sticking up for you at the U.N.? Enough with the settlements. But a too-overt use of leverage courts a dangerous backlash from Christians and Jews who suspect the president of clandestine Muslim tendencies. Conservatives are keen to encourage those doubts. So far, Team Obama has gone at the problem in a canny way by lining up Israel's allies in Congress in support of his tough-love policy. When Netanyahu visited Capitol Hill last month, he was surprised to discover that many of Israel's strongest backers were on Obama's side.

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Posted By: farmdad @ 07/05/2009 1:19:31 PM

Froy, if you are still there. I???m not saying that Jews should claim the entire West Bank. But you seem to be saying that Jews should not be allowed to live there at all. The settlements were built on land that was neither privately owned nor under any recognized Palestinian sovereignty. No Palestinian entitlement to the entire land has ever existed (again, please identify the international agreement that asserts otherwise), yet you have somehow divined that it is their birthright to have every square inch of the stateless, untitled land that actual international agreements designated for a Jewish homeland. Even though the Arabs rejected every partition compromise that has ever been proposed, attacked Israel on several occasions, and launched a campaign of vicious terrorism, Israel is willing to concede 97% of the West Bank. And as soon as Palestinians demonstrate they are no longer inclined to shoot rockets or blow up pizza parlors, many of the security measures that the Palestinians have brought upon themselves can be eased.

Isn???t it remarkable that in the 60 years since the Fourth Geneva Convention, the High Contracting Parties have convened only to condemn Israel? I guess the atrocities against people in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, Congo, and Tibet have been too trivial to warrant their attention when compared to Jewish construction projects. In 1999, the meeting lasted for an entire 17 minutes. No wonder no one bothered to read Article 2; there was barely any time. The December 5, 2001 affair was a great follow-up to the UN so-called Conference against Racism in Durban three months earlier. The December meeting was particularly obscene, occurring within days of Palestinian suicide attacks in Haifa and Jerusalem which killed more than two dozen Israeli citizens, with barely a peep about it from the high-minded humanitarians in attendance. I especially liked how Jewish NGO???s were banned from the parallel conference on December 4, a harbinger of the absurdity to follow. At least the U.S. and Australia had the good sense to join Israel in boycotting the kangaroo court on December 5 whose outcome was predetermined by the Arab bloc that instigated the meeting. As for the moral authority of the UN since the 1970???s? What can you say about an organization in which Sudan is considered the authority on Human Rights? The real atrocity is how formerly respected humanitarian institutions have been hijacked for transparently biased political purposes.
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Posted By: froy1100 @ 07/01/2009 12:45:25 AM

Of course, farmdad, the analogy of Israel and Apartheid South Africa must encompass all the territories controlled by Israel. As I pointed out earlier, the real problem here is occupation, which is allowing the existence of a new kind of apartheid. Even visiting South African politicians to the West Bank have attested this resemblance, only remarking that the situation of Palestinians is much worse. I also take for granted that Israel will not annex the West Bank and Gaza willingly. Afrikaners also rejected this at the beginning, adducing excuses shockingly similar to the ones posed by Israel (the blacks will turn the country in a dictatorship, they will ruin the economy, they will kick us out, they will kill us all???), all of which turned out to be wrong and false. To achieve the end of the Bantustans and true democracy it was necessary enormous international pressure. In the case of Israel, a similar path should be followed: diplomatic isolation, sanctions, etc. Unfortunately, the blind diplomatic and economic support of the US for Israel renders this solution highly unlikely. Palestinians and Arab nations have realized this, and for that reason they have adopted the pragmatic position evidenced by the Arab Peace Offer. Palestinians have already explicitly accepted to live alongside Israel in a separate state, provided that it???s viable, so it???s not valid that Israel keeps dragging its feet arguing that they just want to destroy Israel. Nobody is buying that anymore. The one-state option would indeed be the most just and democratic solution, just like it was in South Africa, but Palestinians and Arab nations have proved to be pragmatic enough to accept this new partition. Israel has run out of excuses.

From your comments I can just infer that you just prefer the status quo to continue indefinitely (until Israel decides that the Palestinians ???genuinely want peace???, that???s a good one), while at the same time keep with their continuous land grab. But that???s just not an option. Occupation must end.
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Posted By: froy1100 @ 06/30/2009 11:25:40 AM

Farmdad, the West Bank belongs to the peoples who inhabit it, as long as they don't do so illegally, as in the case of the Israeli settlements. The inalienable right of self-determination of the peoples, internationally recognized, guarantees this regardless of the fact of the preexistence of a sovereign state of their own. Presuming that the land they inhabited for generations doesn't belong to them, but to the newly-arrived Israeli settlers, is not only at odds with International Law, but with common sense.

Jews in the WB accounted before partition for less than 2% (around 10.000 of a total population of over 700.000). To justify a claim over the WB based on such paltry Jewish presence and negate the right of 98% of its people is plainly ridiculous. If those expelled in 1948 want to return to their rightful properties and live in peace under Palestinian authority, by all means, but Israel will have to do the same with the 800.000 they expelled in the same period. I don't think you want to continue down this road.

And then you go again with another of the peculiar interpretations of International Law by Israel. If you find jurist outside Israel supporting this interpretation of the 4th GC, he must surely be in a mental asylum. On 15 July 1999 a conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention met at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. It ruled that the Convention did apply in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Jerusalem.In 2001, at a one-day conference of High Contracting Parties, 114 countries adopted a three-page declaration re-affirming that the terms of the Convention applied to the Palestinian territories. Israel's position has not been accepted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, nor has it been endorsed by the other High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 1 of the Convention states that "The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances". This position was previously asserted in the UN???s Security Council resolution 446, and reiterated in resolutions 452, 465, 471 and 607.

But what is most absurd of all is to maintain that ???Jews moving to the West Bank have done so on their own initiative???, when it???s notorious that the Israeli government has offered active support and voiced encouragement for the settlement of the West Bank, built all kind of infrastructures for their comfort (the infamous Jew-only roads), and financed their land grab with soft loans that settlements don???t even have to pay back if they stay a certain amount of time. This is not individual initiative, this is a state-driven policy with the clear aim to expand its territory at the expense of the Palestinians, thus in full contravention of the Geneva Convention.