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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: 24KT on March 17, 2010, 11:42:03 AM
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George Jonas: A telling tiff between Washington and Tel Aviv
Posted: March 17, 2010, 8:00 AM by NP Editor
George Jonas
No one had a kind word to say about Israel last week. The critics included the country’s own prime minister. “This was an embarrassing incident,” Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted saying to Germany’s Angela Merkel and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. “I admit that and I am sorry, and I even apologized to Vice President Biden.”
Netanyahu ordered an investigation into “the events that unfolded during U.S. Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel.” What exactly was there for a commission to investigate? Hard to say, since all that “unfolded” was an announcement that Israel would construct 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, something America opposed. Given Israel’s undisputed entitlement to issue building permits without clearing them with the White House, the only thing to investigate was the inadvisability of rubbing Biden’s nose in it. If Netanyahu didn’t know — he says he didn’t — maybe the commission could identify the genius of Jewish diplomacy who displayed such impeccable sense of timing, and groom him for the foreign minister’s post when the popular Avigdor Liberman retires.
If you ask the U.S. Vice President or his boss (or me, for that matter) Israel needs 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem right now about as urgently as the bubonic plague. But there’s something the Jewish state needs even less: An inquiry.
Inquire into what, why Israel builds apartments? That’s what countries do. Into why it builds on disputed territory? Every inch of Israel is disputed. That’s what the Middle East conflict is about.
Borders are contested in conference rooms, but they’re decided on battlefields. It’s wars that settle who gets to build what and where. Victorious wars are preferable — winning the War of 1948 validated the Jewish State building apartments in Haifa and Tel Aviv — but even losing wars confer legitimacy. Should a Palestinian state come into being, it would owe much to the War of 1973, a.k.a. the Yom Kippur War, even though the Arab side didn’t win it.
In Russia and the Arabs, Yevgeny Primakov makes the observation that after the War of 1973 Palestinian aspirations advanced from a refugee problem to an issue of national self-determination for the world community. By dispelling the myth of Israeli invincibility and displaying the reality of demographic power combined with Russian arms, the Arab forces, though eventually defeated, put Palestinian statehood on the map.
Primakov, the old Soviet Middle East hand, later became Russia’s prime minister in the post-Marxist Kremlin. His account confirms that Arabs and Israelis, far from being hand puppets of Western and Soviet imperialism, were outsized tails wagging bewildered dogs. They were allies only as long as their interests, real or perceived, coincided with those of their superpower masters.
In the chess game of history pawns may be sacrificed. Alliances aren’t bankable assets. No union is sacred, not even marriage. Some frontiers are settled in boudoirs rather than on battlefields — the Habsburg dynasty’s motto proclaimed “Let others wage war; you, merry Austria, marry” — but as Marie Antoinette discovered, making love no more guarantees a happy outcome than making war.
This is what the stone tablets say:
Hear O Israel, (1) Don’t build on land to which your title is disputed, but if you think you have to (2) Don’t thumb your nose at allies whose help you need to defend the land on which you’re building. However, if not thumbing your nose at your allies amounts to forgetting about building whatever you think you have to, (3) Do remember it’s better to be hanged for a sheep than a lamb.
With Barack Obama in the Oval Office, America may be Israel’s ally but it isn’t Israel’s friend. This isn’t to say Obama may not aid Israel in a crunch. As U.S. President, he’s not his own man. He must follow certain geopolitical and historical imperatives. But the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s one-time parishioner shares enough of his pastor’s world-view for a tiff with Israel to make his day.
By now Obama’s policies, foreign and domestic, have made his leanings abundantly clear — not that they were hazy before. It would make no sense for anyone to exposes his family to Reverend Wright’s virulently anti-First World sermons without sharing his loony-Fanonist sentiments — and if something doesn’t make sense, as TV’s Judge Judy never ceases to tell us, it usually isn’t true.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let Netanyahu have it with both barrels for “insulting” America just as Vice President Biden reiterated his country’s commitment to Israel’s security. Netanyahu said little in reply, other than offering the distraught lady some refreshments.
The prime minister refrained from saying that with the Obama- administration’s commitment to its security and a dollar, Israel might buy a cup of coffee. Resisting such a remark probably represents the high water mark of the Netanyahu government’s diplomacy.
Encouraged by Mrs. Clinton’s tirade, threats of intifada duly followed. “If Israel continues these practices, it’s coming,” said the PLO’s Ahmed Qureia, a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, this week. Between its friends in Washington and its own diplomatic skills, Israel needs no enemies.