Pissing on our rug?
I actually thought of that old LBJ quote when I read this article:
Netanyahu beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild; he played him like a fiddle; he pounded him like a big brass drum. The Prime Minister of Israel danced rings around his arrogant, professorial opponent. It was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters go up against the junior squad from Miss Porter’s School; like watching Harvard play Texas A&M, like watching Bambi meet Godzilla — or Bill Clinton run against Bob Dole.
The Prime Minister mopped the floor with our guy. Obama made his ’67 speech; Bibi ripped him to shreds. Obama goes to AIPAC, nervous, off-balance, backing and filling. Then Bibi drops the C-Bomb, demonstrating to the whole world that the Prime Minister of Israel has substantially more support in both the House and the Senate than the President of the United States.
President Obama’s new Middle East policy, intended to liquidate the wreckage resulting from his old policy and get the President somehow onto firmer ground, lies in ruins even before it could be launched. He had dropped the George Mitchell approach, refused to lay out his own set of parameters for settling the conflict, and accepted some important Israeli red lines — but for some reason he chose not to follow through with the logic of these decisions and offer Netanyahu a reset button.
I haven’t got too much use for my second country’s current president, but I’m not sure I like the implications of this.
Anyway, it seems worth having a look at the two speeches that bookended this little contretemps.
Netanyahu’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress.
***
When a foreign leader is said by a respected foreign policy analyst to have beaten the president of the United States “like a red-headed step-child”, something is deeply amiss in Washington DC.
Update: I’m watching Netanyahu’s speech — wow, does he ever know how to talk to Americans.
And in the speech, he hugs the president ever closer.
Now, as to whether the policy he’s pushing will, in the long-term, be successful — well, that can be judged only by historians.
Update again: Krauthammer –
Every Arab-Israeli negotiation contains a fundamental asymmetry: Israel gives up land, which is tangible; the Arabs make promises, which are ephemeral. The long-standing American solution has been to nonetheless urge Israel to take risks for peace while America balances things by giving assurances of U.S. support for Israel’s security and diplomatic needs.
It’s on the basis of such solemn assurances that Israel undertook, for example, the Gaza withdrawal. In order to mitigate this risk, President George W. Bush gave a written commitment that America supported Israel absorbing major settlement blocs in any peace agreement, opposed any return to the 1967 lines and stood firm against the so-called Palestinian right of return to Israel.
For 2 1/2 years, the Obama administration has refused to recognize and reaffirm these assurances. Then last week in his State Department speech, President Obama definitively trashed them. He declared that the Arab-Israeli conflict should indeed be resolved along “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
Nothing new here, said Obama three days later. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different” from 1967.
It means nothing of the sort. “Mutually” means both parties have to agree. And if one side doesn’t? Then, by definition, you’re back to the 1967 lines.
Nor is this merely a theoretical proposition. Three times the Palestinians have been offered exactly that formula, 1967 plus swaps — at Camp David 2000, Taba 2001, and the 2008 Olmert-Abbas negotiations. Every time, the Palestinians said no and walked away.
And that remains their position today: The 1967 lines. Period. Indeed, in September the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to get the world to ratify precisely that — a Palestinian state on the ’67 lines. No swaps.
Note how Obama has undermined Israel’s negotiating position. He is demanding that Israel go into peace talks having already forfeited its claim to the territory won in the ’67 war — its only bargaining chip. Remember: That ’67 line runs right through Jerusalem. Thus the starting point of negotiations would be that the Western Wall and even Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter are Palestinian — alien territory for which Israel must now bargain.
The very idea that Judaism’s holiest shrine is alien or that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter is rightfully or historically or demographically Arab is an absurdity. And the idea that, in order to retain them, Israel has to give up parts of itself is a travesty.
Well, that’s where we’re at. Israel will refuse to give up Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, and there probably won’t be peace.
There are three reasons and three reasons only this is even an issue. New York, Florida and California.
Jewish voters are few in number — it’s broader American public opinion that matters, and ensures that American foreign policy will not change.
And yes it it disconcerting how the elites of both of your countries dance to Likud’s tune. It is like Jerusalem is the capital of North America and Bibi is our sovereign lord.
He’s just really, really good.
Jewish voters are small, but are concentrated in three of the most important electoral college states. Fortunately, they know Bibi better than most Americans. But, on Israel, like Cuba, electoral college politics explains the importance of the issue.
Of those three states, only Florida swings.
American politicians tend to favour Israel because American public opinion overwhelmingly favours Israel. It really is that simple.
I don’t understand why this is such a difficult hill to climb.
When Quebeckers voted en masse for the NDP, no one thought it was because Québec and Montréal are full to the brim with unionised, hemp-shirt-clad, fixie-riding Concordia grads. Everyone is on board with the idea that Jack’s campaign resonated with the province’s voters (even when the local candidate was absentee) more than the efforts of the Grits and Tories.
But when it’s support for Israel, it has to be because Jews are in critical chokepoints forcing an unpopular view down our collective throats. It can’t be because a majority of the populace actually sympathises with Israel’s tortuous dilemma.
If I were on the other side of the aisle I think I’d rather believe that the general populace is supportive of Israel. That at least gives you the option of effecting policy changes through moving non-Jewish public opinion. If you take the “Jews have an eternal lock on FL, NY, CA” approach then your only hope of effecting change is through altering the demographics of those states, changing the constitutional framework of the country, or convincing more Jews to abandon their faith. All of which seems a whole lot more difficult.
I support Israel. but not unconditionally. I suspect that is closer to the majority view in this country. I can’ t speak for the U.S. Maybe all Americans are Likudists.
I’m certain that is is the majority view, unless one assumes humans to be zombies. The question is, why do you assume NY, FL and CA to be Zombie-land when support for Israel is demonstrably quite broad, across the nation?
Isn’t it possible that a majority of people—nationwide—conditionally support Israel, but the limit of what they consider acceptable conduct might differ from yours? You can kinda see a similar dynamic at work in any playground or shopping mall, for that matter. Let alone foreign policy.
As to the politics of Israel in the U. S., If the Jewish population was more evenly distributed, Israel would be a minor issue. Call me a cynic but that’s how I see it.
Was looking for the most recent poll I saw, but this will do, from 2009:
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/6680/why-are-americans-so-pro-israel
In a recent nationwide survey, the Gallup organization asked Americans: “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?” For the fourth year in a row, 59 percent — nearly 6 in 10 — said their sympathies were with Israel, while just 18 percent sided with the Palestinians. When respondents were asked for their opinion of various countries, 63 percent said they had a favorable view of Israel (21 percent said very favorable), compared with just 15 percent who thought highly of the Palestinian Authority.
Conversely, only 29 percent of Americans told Gallup that their opinion of Israel was negative, even as a whopping 73 percent expressed a negative attitude toward the Palestinians.
Basically, it’s a three-to-one split in favour of the Israelis over the Palestinians. (The choice, you see, is significant. As one can say “yes, I’m pro-X” to both in isolation.)
This is why you see even liberal Democrats, whose sensibilities might be closer to yours, Greg, rush to cheer Netanyahu. They do it because they end up in trouble politically, if they do not.
The lone dissenter, as far as I can tell: Rand Paul. He sat out the speech by staying in the Senate:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0511/Paul_wages_solo_protest.html?showall
That’s somewhat politically risky — I was forwarded that article by an outraged Republican friend.
Support for Israel is a motherhood issue, but ask Americans if it is ok for Israel to shell civilians with white phosphorus, you might get a more nuanced answer. Of course, Arab life is cheap since 911so I could be wrong.
Nobody wants civilians to eat WP, but as a practical matter any soldier can tell you that its ubiquitous. Used in tons of smoke and illumination rounds, grenades, you name it. Not to mention pretty much any type of round that comes out of the business end of an artillery piece is going to do horrible things to any human it comes into contact with, incendiary or not.
Sure, there’s the 1980 convention but as a practical matter it’s all but useless. Everything the military drives, flies and sails has WP smoke rounds mounted on the hull that will get lobbed a few hundred feet once activated. They are there in case you need concealment, to buy you a couple seconds of time to get away from the thing shooting at you, and make it harder to tell where you are going next.
In order to prevent their use in an antipersonnel role you’d have to replace those shells with an illumination/smokescreen round that doesn’t burn people like crazy. Which would probably also mean that it wouldn’t illuminate or smoke too well. So, there’s that.
It’s an ugly tragedy when it happens, but just about everything in the military inventory will look vile when some toddler ends up taking the brunt of it on TV. Someone get to work on a foolproof method of preventing the opposition from siting forces in close proximity to civilians.
White phosphorus? *goes to Google*
Ah, this story:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5521925.ece
Well, I wish they wouldn’t use white phosphorus. On the other hand, when they say Hamas was firing from the UN compound, I believe them.
Mind you, when that stuff was going down, here’s where US public opinion was at re that conflict:
http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1232015642.shtml
The time may come when liberal Democratic pols break from the rest on the issue, but I doubt it’ll be soon…
I churn over his. No one deserves to be attacked for who they are. I don’t cheer anything in the conflict but there has to be legitimacy in the right to defend. Yet there are limits as to the tools to be used by a society that recognizes human rights. I don’t pretend to know where the line lays.