Largely in consequence of this support for Israel within the U.S. political establishment, President Obama’s attempts to bring about a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians between 2009 and 2012 got precisely nowhere. And while no serious pressure was applied to Israel to comply with official U.S. policy, the Obama administration brought great diplomatic pressure to bear on other countries to prevent them from voting in the UN to recognize Palestinian independence. On the basis of this experience, there seem no serious grounds for belief that as long as the U.S. domestic political order retains its present shape, the United States—whether under Democratic or Republican administrations—will ever be able to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians. If change is to come, it will have to come from within Israel itself, and the Israeli political order seems too fragmented to be able to generate a consensus behind the necessary concessions.
The U.S. relationship with Israel, in the form that it has taken from the 1960s to the present day, has two highly negative effects on the United States (as well as highly negative effects on Israel, but these are the subject for a different book). The first relates to the U.S. position in the Muslim world, and threats to the United States from Islamist terrorism. The second relates to the subject of this book, and how the character of American nationalism is affected by the link to Israel.
Since 9/11, U.S. relations with the Muslim world have become central to American strategy and American security. At the time of this writing, the United States was fighting a war in one Muslim country, remained heavily involved in several more, and was deeply engaged in the entire Middle East. Most importantly, through Sunni Islamist terrorism, Muslim societies are generating the only truly serious threat now existing of a catastrophic attack on the American mainland. Success or failure in the struggle against this terrorism may also therefore be of existential importance for the survival of Western liberal and pluralist democracy. Given certain tendencies observable in the wake of 9/11, it is not difficult to imagine how even worse attacks in the future could push Western political cultures in a much harsher, more chauvinist, and authoritarian direction in America, away from the creed and toward its various antitheses.
As repeated polls and surveys have indicated, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is also central to how Muslims perceive the United States, and how Europeans and others view U.S. strategy in the Middle East. Large majorities in every Arab country view the Palestinian issue as “the most” or a “very important” issue facing the Arab world today.5 This has remained true after the “Arab Spring” of 2011. In November 2011, a poll in Arab countries by the Saban Center in Washington asked what two steps by the U.S. administration would most help improve the respondents’ attitude toward America. Of those polled, 55 percent said that this would be a U.S.-sponsored Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement, and 42 percent said an end to U.S. aid to Israel.
This poll did show an increase in positive views of the United States (though only from 10 percent to 26 percent), perhaps as a result of America’s endorsement of the democratic revolutions and failure to back President Mubarak of Egypt. However, it made clear that Israel continued to be the biggest reason for Arab hostility toward the United States. President Obama received a relatively high popularity rating of 34 percent, thanks to his rhetorical support for a peace settlement; but 43 percent had a negative view, above all because of his failure to actually achieve one.6
In 2011, hostility toward the United States in Turkey reached an all-time high, with only 10 percent of the population expressing a favorable view. This was in large part because of the way in which the U.S. administration had supported Israel over the incident on May 10, 2010, when Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish ship attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, killing nine.7 Turkey was long regarded as a U.S. ally in the Middle East, second only to Israel itself. The fact that the U.S. political elites have watched with indifference as this alliance has collapsed says a great deal about the supremacy of the link to Israel over every other U.S. interest in the region.
According to the Bush administration’s most important international ally, British prime minister Tony Blair, “there is no other issue with the same power to reunite the world community than progress on the issues of Israel and Palestine.” Blair also declared that “this terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse, in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people, the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel; and to translate this moreover into a battle between East and West; Muslim, Jew and Christian.”8
The European Union’s (EU’s) security strategy of December 2003 declares that “resolution of the Arab/Israeli conflict is a strategic priority for Europe. Without this, there will be little chance of dealing successfully with other problems in the Middle East.”9 It also goes without saying that if China ever decides to challenge the U.S. position in the Middle East, Beijing will find unconditional American support for Israel to be by far China’s greatest political asset.
Unfortunately, as the above votes indicate, of all important world issues, this is probably the one on which the United States is most completely isolated from the rest of the international community. It has thereby contributed significantly to weakening the U.S. capacity for leadership by persuasion and consent. America’s position, and isolation, on this issue has fed the spirit of unilateralist nationalism in the United States and helped draw large sections of the U.S. liberal intelligentsia (not just Jewish Americans, but sympathizers with Israel in general) away from previously held internationalist positions. For if on this critical issue it is believed that America need not and should not listen even when the whole of the international community tells it something, how long can any genuine sense of internationalism or “decent respect to the opinion of mankind” (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) survive with regard to other issues?
This is the second evil effect of the “love affair” between Israel and the United States: the boost it has given to American chauvinism in general. The effort to explain how the United States can be correct or justified in the face of such a unanimous weight of world opinion against it has encouraged a view of the international community in general as irredeemably malignant, anti-Semitic, and by extension anti-American. This has fed into much older hatreds and paranoias on the Right in the United States concerning the outside world in general and international institutions in particular. It has contributed to the kind of vicious attitudes toward “the world” displayed by people like Charles Krauthammer and Phyllis Schlafly in the passages quoted in the introduction and elsewhere.
In the view of the British scholar and journalist Timothy Garton Ash, the new split between the United States and Western Europe after the unity created by 9/11 began with the escalation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in early 2002:
The Middle East is both a source and a catalyst of what threatens to become a downward spiral of burgeoning European anti-Americanism and nascent American anti-Europeanism, each reinforcing the other. Anti-Semitism in Europe, and its alleged connection to European criticism of the Sharon government, has been the subject of the most acid anti-European commentaries from conservative American columnists and politicians. Some of these critics are themselves not just strongly pro-Israel but also “natural Likudites”…pro-Palestinian Europeans, infuriated by the way criticism of Sharon is labeled anti-Semitism, talk about the power of a “Jewish lobby” in the US, which then confirms American Likudites’ worst suspicions of European anti-Semitism, and so it goes on, and on.10
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict in turn contributes to wider tendencies on the American Right toward national autism, an inability either to listen to others or to understand their reactions to U.S. behavior. This is, of course, especially true of the views of Muslims, and of U.S. officials who are viewed as too friendly to Muslims. The res
ulting prejudice against “Arabists” in the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the part of supporters of Israel has done immense damage to the ability of the American government to develop accurate analyses of the Middle East.11
As noted, this is a strange feeling to encounter in a country as powerful, wealthy, and open as America. It is, however, very characteristic of small and embattled nations, especially when their populations have in the past been subjected to ferocious massacre and persecution—as in the case of Israel. The aggrieved and embattled sentiments of Israel have spread back to the United States, strengthening the already existing tendencies toward paranoia, resentment, and chauvinism that were examined earlier.
For this and other reasons, contemporary U.S. policies toward Israel and toward the Middle East in general fit all too well into the thesis–antithesis duality set out in this book, and are perceived to do so by Muslims and Europeans. On the one hand, President Bush committed the United States to what he called “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East,” a strategy solidly rooted in the universalist values of the American Creed: the encouragement of liberty, democracy, free speech, the rule of law, and “healthy civic institutions.” The Obama administration followed this with a public commitment to support the democratic revolutions of the “Arab Spring” (even if that support was often qualified and hesitant).12
On the other hand, the U.S. Congress, and to a very considerable extent successive U.S. administrations as well, have pursued policies of largely unconditional support for Israel, irrespective of Israeli behavior in the “Occupied Territories”—behavior that is often completely incompatible with the ideals the United States professes and the standards it demands elsewhere. The reasons for this almost unanimous stance by U.S. politicians in support of Israel are rooted partly in genuine identification with that country, and in some cases sympathy with Israeli ideologies. Thus the dominant elements of the Bush administration proved especially close to the Likud-led government of Ariel Sharon.13 There is also, however, a strong element of political calculation, opportunism, and indeed fear related to the real or perceived strength of the Israel lobby. In the words of M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum:
The fact is that both Democrats and Republicans are very adept at this game and sometimes the sheer effrontery of it is astonishing. Democrats attack a Republican for “selling out” Israel even though the policy advocated by the Republican is the same one they supported when a Democrat advanced it. And Republicans do the exact same thing. Is it any wonder that candidates seem to go to great lengths to avoid saying anything remotely substantive on the Middle East?…Knowing that any substantive statement could be used against them, candidates just play it safe. And segments of the pro-Israel community encourage them by criticizing constructive suggestions as anti-Israel, and by giving ovations to candidates who tell them what the candidates think they want to hear.14
The conservative commentator Robert D. Novak summed up the domestic political factor in American policy very cogently in May 2003, describing
serious GOP [i.e., Republican] efforts to end absolute Democratic domination over the small but important Jewish constituency. The question is whether that constrains President Bush’s pursuit of Israeli–Palestinian peace. The private assessment by important Republicans is that it should and that it does….
[Republican leaders]…argue that social and economic liberalism now runs a poor second to support for Israel and that they have for the first time outdone Democrats in cheering the Jewish state. There is no more unyielding supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policies than House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the exemplar of muscular Republicanism.
But what about Bush’s advocacy of the Road Map [for Israeli–Palestinian peace]? He surely had to embrace it to retain Britain in the Iraq War coalition and to keep moderate Arab states friendly. The question is whether he will risk Jewish votes by pressing for Middle East peace.
Republican activists leave no doubt about their views. Delay has called the Road Map “a confluence of deluded thinking” between European elites, the State Department bureaucracy and American intellectuals. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an intimate adviser of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, called the Road Map a conspiracy by the State Department and foreign powers to work against US policies….
This confronts Bush with a classic presidential decision that may forge his place in history. Should he follow Powell’s advice that American leadership on creating a Palestinian state is essential for peace in the Middle East? Or should he follow the path urged by his party’s leaders to guarantee his re-election?15
This Republican strategy can be seen as a continuation of Reagan’s strategy of the 1980s in trying to draw away the votes of “Reagan Democrats,” described by Joseph Harsch as comprising mainly “Southern [white] evangelicals, Northern ‘blue collar’ workers and pro-Zionist Jews.”16 This Republican bloc was based on thoroughly Jacksonian principles of conservative populism at home and aggressive nationalism abroad (though under Reagan, as noted, this nationalism was to some degree more rhetorical than real).
That is not to say, of course, that this Republican strategy has necessarily been successful after Reagan left the scene. In general, voting patterns and surveys suggest that when it comes to elections, most Jewish Americans remain true to their liberal traditions. In the 2008 elections 78 percent of American Jewish voters voted for Obama, though by 2010 according to some polls support for him among Jews had dropped to only 51 percent, largely because of the way in which he had been portrayed as hostile to Israel.17 The alliance with Christian fundamentalists does often make Jewish American liberals very uneasy, for as Roberta Feuerlicht has written, “in Jewish history, when fundamentalists came, Cossacks were not far behind.”18 However, Jewish voters punished Carter very severely in 1980 for his moves toward dialogue with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and there were fears among Democrats and hopes among Republicans that the same might happen to Obama in the elections of 2012.
If Bush had wished his administration to be taken seriously as a force for peace in the Middle East, he would have had to fire those of his own senior officials who in the course of the 1990s had opposed the Oslo peace process and advised the Israeli government to abandon it.19 In their policy paper of 1996, “A Clean Break,” Richard Perle (later chairman of the Defense Advisory Board in the Bush administration), Douglas Feith (later deputy under-secretary of defense in the Bush administration), and other members of the “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) advised the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon both the Oslo process and the whole idea of land for peace in favor of insistence on permanent control of the occupied territories: “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years is legitimate and noble…Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, “peace for peace,” is a solid basis for the future [italics in the original].” The use of the word “our” in this context is especially striking.
The paper makes clear that it rules out the “peace for land” idea on which the whole “two state” solution is based, describing this as “cultural, economic, political, military and diplomatic retreat”; and what it means by “peace for peace” is to go on attacking Arab regimes until they accept Israeli rule over the whole of Palestine. The authors were thereby opposing, in the name of “our” claim to the whole of Palestine, not only the then policy of the Clinton administration, but that of all previous U.S. administrations, and that formally adopted later by the Bush administration, in which some of them were to be officials.20 Elliott Abrams, appointed by Bush in 2003 as chief official for the Middle East at the National Security Council, had also argued—before the collapse of talks in 2000 and the second Intifada—that Oslo should essentially be abandoned in favor of a new crackdown on the Palestinians.21 By 2012, the vast majority of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress
had in effect abandoned all opposition to Israeli settlements and all concrete support for a Palestinian state.
It is true that, on the one hand, U.S. policy, and the U.S. public discourse concerning the Palestinians, has improved greatly since the 1970s, when Washington essentially echoed Israel in declaring that no such separate people existed.22 A critical moment in this regard was the Sadat peace initiative, when, for the first time, an American poll showed more Americans approving of an Arab leader’s policy than that of the Israeli government, by 57 percent to 34 percent.23
Since the Iraq War, public figures like Zbigniew Brzezinski and General Anthony Zinni have argued strongly that the new U.S. role in the Middle East demands a serious change of emphasis in dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. On the other hand, 9/11, and the link made between anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism, means that much of the American political class and public opinion have once again become strongly anti-Palestinian, and are willing to see Israeli actions simply as part of the “war against terrorism.” As a result of this and the iron grip of the Israeli lobby on the U.S. Congress, American support for Israel, including its occupation of the Palestinian territories, has continued unchanged—with all that this means for the image of the United States in the Muslim world, and therefore for U.S. chances of success in the struggle against Islamist terrorism.
Israel and the American Antithesis
One of the principal arguments made in defense of unconditional U.S. support for Israel over the past generation is rooted in the American Creed: namely, that Israel is a fellow democracy, and the “only democracy in the Middle East,” and therefore deserves American support. This is repeated incessantly by Israeli spokesmen, including Benjamin Netanyahu in his address to Congress of May 2011.24 But as this becomes more and more difficult to square with Israeli actions—most especially, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the planting of Jewish settlements there—other arguments, which have always been present, may gain greater prominence.
America Right or Wrong Page 30
