[WCUSP] Israel's false friends

[yvonne simmons]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-mearsheimer6jan06,0,7615085.story?coll=la-tot-opinion&track=ntothtml

>From the Los Angeles Times
Israel's false friends
U.S. presidential candidates aren't doing the Jewish
state any favors by offering unconditional support.
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

January 6, 2008

Once again, as the presidential campaign season gets
underway, the leading candidates are going to enormous
lengths to demonstrate their devotion to the state of
Israel and their steadfast commitment to its "special
relationship" with the United States. 

Each of the main contenders emphatically favors giving
Israel extraordinary material and diplomatic support
-- continuing the more than $3 billion in foreign aid
each year to a country whose per capita income is now
29th in the world. They also believe that this aid
should be given unconditionally. None of them
criticizes Israel's conduct, even when its actions
threaten U.S. interests, are at odds with American
values or even when they are harmful to Israel itself.
In short, the candidates believe that the U.S. should
support Israel no matter what it does. 

Such pandering is hardly surprising, because
contenders for high office routinely court special
interest groups, and Israel's staunchest supporters --
the Israel lobby, as we have termed it -- expect it.
Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or
"Christian Zionists," two groups that are deeply
engaged in the political process. Candidates fear,
with some justification, that even well-intentioned
criticism of Israel's policies may lead these groups
to turn against them and back their opponents instead.


If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts.
Israel's friends in the media would take aim at the
candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel
individuals and political action committees would go
elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states
with many electoral votes, which increases their
weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?),
and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to
Israel would lose some of their support. And no
Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel
subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is
a significant part of the GOP base. 

Indeed, even suggesting that the U.S. adopt a more
impartial stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict can get a candidate into serious trouble.
When Howard Dean proposed during the 2004 campaign
that the United States take a more "evenhanded" role
in the peace process, he was severely criticized by
prominent Democrats, and a rival for the nomination,
Sen. Joe Lieberman, accused him of "selling Israel
down the river" and said Dean's comments were
"irresponsible." 

Word quickly spread in the American Jewish community
that Dean was hostile to Israel, even though his
campaign co-chair was a former president of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Dean had
been strongly pro-Israel throughout his career. The
candidates in the 2008 election surely want to avoid
Dean's fate, so they are all trying to prove that they
are Israel's best friend. 

These candidates, however, are no friends of Israel.
They are facilitating its pursuit of self-destructive
policies that no true friend would favor.

The key issue here is the future of Gaza and the West
Bank, which Israel conquered in 1967 and still
controls. Israel faces a stark choice regarding these
territories, which are home to roughly 3.8 million
Palestinians. It can opt for a two-state solution,
turning over almost all of the West Bank and Gaza to
the Palestinians and allowing them to create a viable
state on those lands in return for a comprehensive
peace agreement designed to allow Israel to live
securely within its pre-1967 borders (with some minor
modifications). Or it can retain control of the
territories it occupies or surrounds, building more
settlements and bypass roads and confining the
Palestinians to a handful of impoverished enclaves in
Gaza and the West Bank. Israel would control the
borders around those enclaves and the air above them,
thus severely restricting the Palestinians' freedom of
movement.

But if Israel chooses this second option, it will lead
to an apartheid state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said
as much when he recently proclaimed that if "the
two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a
South African-style struggle." He went so far as to
argue that "as soon as that happens, the state of
Israel is finished." Similarly, Israel's deputy prime
minister, Haim Ramon, said earlier this month that
"the occupation is a threat to the existence of the
state of Israel." Other Israelis, as well as Jimmy
Carter and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have
warned that continuing the occupation will turn Israel
into an apartheid state. Nevertheless, Israel
continues to expand its settlements on the West Bank
while the plight of the Palestinians worsens. 

Given this grim situation, one would expect the
presidential candidates, who claim to care deeply
about Israel, to be sounding the alarm and
energetically championing a two-state solution. One
would expect them to have encouraged President Bush to
put significant pressure on both the Israelis and the
Palestinians at the recent Annapolis conference and to
keep the pressure on when he visits the region this
week. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently
observed, settling this conflict is also in America's
interest, not to mention the Palestinians'. 

One would certainly expect Hillary Clinton to be
leading the charge here. After all, she wisely and
bravely called for establishing a Palestinian state
"that is on the same footing as other states" in 1998,
when it was still politically incorrect to use the
words "Palestinian state" openly. Moreover, her
husband not only championed a two-state solution as
president but he laid out the famous "Clinton
parameters" in December 2000, which outline the only
realistic deal for ending the conflict.

But what is Clinton saying now that she is a
candidate? She said hardly anything about pushing the
peace process forward at Annapolis, and remained
silent when Rice criticized Israel's subsequent
announcement that it planned to build more than 300
new housing units in East Jerusalem. More important,
both she and GOP aspirant Rudy Giuliani recently
proclaimed that Jerusalem must remain undivided, a
position that is at odds with the Clinton parameters
and virtually guarantees that there will be no
Palestinian state.

Sen. Clinton's behavior is hardly unusual among the
candidates for president. Barack Obama, who expressed
some sympathy for the Palestinians before he set his
sights on the White House, now has little to say about
their plight, and he too said little about what should
have been done at Annapolis to facilitate peace. The
other major contenders are ardent in their
declarations of support for Israel, and none of them
apparently sees a two-state solution as so urgent that
they should press both sides to reach an agreement. As
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security
advisor and now a senior advisor to Obama, noted, "The
presidential candidates don't see any payoff in
addressing the Israel-Palestinian issue." But they do
see a significant political payoff in backing Israel
to the hilt, even when it is pursuing a policy --
colonizing the West Bank -- that is morally and
strategically bankrupt. 

In short, the presidential candidates are no friends
of Israel. They are like most U.S. politicians, who
reflexively mouth pro-Israel platitudes while
continuing to endorse and subsidize policies that are
in fact harmful to the Jewish state. A genuine friend
would tell Israel that it was acting foolishly, and
would do whatever he or she could to get Israel to
change its misguided behavior. And that will require
challenging the special interest groups whose
hard-line views have been obstacles to peace for many
years. 

As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami
argued in 2006, the American presidents who have made
the greatest contribution to peace -- Carter and
George H.W. Bush -- succeeded because they were "ready
to confront Israel head-on and overlook the
sensibilities of her friends in America." If the
Democratic and Republican contenders were true friends
of Israel, they would be warning it about the danger
of becoming an apartheid state, just as Carter did. 

Moreover, they would be calling for an end to the
occupation and the creation of a viable Palestinian
state. And they would be calling for the United States
to act as an honest broker between Israel and the
Palestinians so that Washington could pressure both
sides to accept a solution based on the Clinton
parameters. Implementing a final-status agreement will
be difficult and take a number of years, but it is
imperative that the two sides formally agree on the
solution and then implement it in ways that protect
each side.

But Israel's false friends cannot say any of these
things, or even discuss the issue honestly. Why?
Because they fear that speaking the truth would incur
the wrath of the hard-liners who dominate the main
organizations in the Israel lobby. So Israel will end
up controlling Gaza and the West Bank for the
foreseeable future, turning itself into an apartheid
state in the process. And all of this will be done
with the backing of its so-called friends, including
the current presidential candidates. With friends like
them, who needs enemies?

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political
science at the University of Chicago. Stephen M. Walt
is a professor of international affairs at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government. They are the authors of
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published
last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.



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