MANAGING
OBAMA’S WAR AGAINST ISRAEL
Our current
situation is unpleasant. But it isn’t the end of the world.
On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Municipality
announced it is shelving plans to build 1,500 apartments in the Har Homa
neighborhood. Officials gave no explanation for its sudden move. But none was
needed. Obviously the construction of
apartments for Jews in Jerusalem was blocked in the hopes of appeasing US
President Barack Obama. But is there any reason to
believe he can be appeased? Today the White House is issuing condemnations of
Israel faster than the UN. To determine how to handle
what is happening, we need to understand the nature of what is happening.
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| PATRIOT vs LEFTIE |
First we need to understand
that the administration’s hostility has little to do with Israel’s actions. As Max Boot explained
Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, the administration’s animosity toward
Israel is a function of Obama’s twin strategic aims, both evident since he
entered office: realigning US policy in the Middle East toward Iran and away
from its traditional allies Israel and the Sunni Arab states, and ending the
US’s strategic alliance with Israel. Over the past six years we
have seen how Obama has consistently, but gradually, taken steps to advance
these two goals. Toward Iran, he has demonstrated an unflappable determination
to accommodate the terrorism supporting, nuclear proliferating, human rights
repressing and empire building mullahs. Beginning last November, as
the deadline for nuclear talks between the US and its partners and Tehran
approached, Obama’s attempts to accommodate Tehran escalated steeply.
Obama has thrown caution to
the winds in a last-ditch effort to convince Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei to
sign a deal with him. Last month the administration published a top secret
report on Israel’s nuclear installations. Last week, Obama’s director of
national intelligence James Clapper published an annual terrorism threat
assessment that failed to mention either Iran or Hezbollah as threats. And this week, the
administration accused Israel of spying on its talks with Iran in order to tell
members of Congress the details of the nuclear deal that Obama and his advisers
have been trying to hide from them.
In the regional context, the
administration has had nothing to say in the face of Iran’s takeover of the Bab
el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden this week. With its Houthi-proxy now in
charge of the strategic waterway, and with its own control over the Straits of
Hormuz, Iran is poised to exercise naval control over the two choke points of
access to Arab oil. The administration is
assisting Iranian Shi’ite proxies in their battle to defeat Islamic State
forces in the Iraqi city of Tikrit. It has said nothing about the Shi’ite
massacres of Sunnis that come under their control.
Parallel to its endless
patience for Tehran, the Obama administration has been treating Israel with
bristling and ever-escalating hostility. This hostility has been manifested
among other things through strategic leaks of highly classified information,
implementing an arms embargo on weapons exports to Israel in time of war,
ending a 40-year agreement to provide Israel with fuel in times of emergency,
blaming Israel for the absence of peace, expressing tolerance and understanding
for Palestinian terrorism, providing indirect support for Europe’s economic war
against Israel, and providing indirect support for the BDS movement by
constantly accusing Israel of ill intentions and dishonesty.
Then there is the UN. Since he
first entered office, Obama has been threatening to withhold support for Israel
at the UN. To date, the administration has vetoed one anti-Israel resolution at
the UN Security Council and convinced the Palestinians not to submit another
one for a vote. In the months that preceded
these actions, the administration exploited Israel’s vulnerability to extort
massive concessions to the Palestinians. Obama forced Benjamin
Netanyahu to announce his support for Palestinian statehood in September 2009.
He used the UN threat to coerce Netanyahu to agree to negotiations based on the
1949 armistice lines, to deny Jews their property rights in Jerusalem, Judea
and Samaria, and to release scores of terrorist murderers from prison.
Following the nationalist
camp’s victory in last week’s election, Obama brought to a head the crisis in
relations he instigated. He has done so for two reasons. First, next week is the
deadline for signing a nuclear agreement with Iran. Obama views Netanyahu as
the prospective deal’s most articulate and effective opponent. As Obama sees it, Netanyahu
threatens his nuclear diplomacy with Iran because he has a unique ability to
communicate his concerns about the deal to US lawmakers and the American
people, and mobilize them to join him in opposing Obama’s actions. The letters
sent by 47 senators to the Iranian regime explaining the constitutional
limitations on presidential power to conclude treaties without Senate approval,
like the letter to Obama from 367 House members expressing grave and urgent
concerns about the substance of the deal he seeks to conclude, are evidence of
Netanyahu’s success.
The second reason Obama has
gone to war against Israel is because he views the results of last week’s
election as an opportunity to market his anti-Israel and pro-Iranian positions
to the American public. If Netanyahu can convince
Americans to oppose Obama on Iran, Obama believes that by accusing Netanyahu of
destroying chances for peace and calling him a racist, Obama will be able to
win sufficient public support for his anti-Israel policies to intimidate
pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers into accepting his pro-Iranian policies.
To this end, Obama has
announced that the threat that he will abandon Israel at the UN has now become
a certainty. There is no peace process, Obama says, because Netanyahu had the
temerity to point out that there is no way for Israel to risk the
transformation of Judea and Samaria into a new terror base. As a consequence,
he has all but made it official that he is abandoning the peace process and
joining the anti-Israel bandwagon at the UN.
Given Obama’s decision to
abandon support for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians,
modes of appeasement aimed at showing Israel’s good faith, such as Jewish
building freezes, are no longer relevant. Scrapping plans to build apartments
in Jewish neighborhoods like Har Homa will make no difference. Obama has reached a point in
his presidency where he is prepared to give full expression to his plan to end
the US’s strategic alliance with Israel. He thinks that doing so is
both an end to itself and a means of succeeding in his bid to achieve a
rapprochement with Iran. Given this dismal reality,
Israel needs to develop ways to minimize the damage Obama can cause. Israel needs to oppose Obama’s
policies while preserving its relations with its US supporters, including its
Democratic supporters. Doing so will ensure that it is in a position to renew
its alliance with the US immediately after Obama leaves office.
With regards to Iran, such a
policy requires Israel to act with the US’s spurned Arab allies to check Iran’s
expansionism and nuclear progress. It also requires Israel to galvanize strong
opposition to Obama’s goal of replacing Israel with Iran as America’s chief
ally in the Middle East and enabling it to develop nuclear weapons.
As for the Palestinians,
Israel needs to view Obama’s abandonment of the peace process as an opportunity
to improve our diplomatic position by resetting our relations with the
Palestinians. Since 1993, Israel has been entrapped by the chimerical promise
of a “two-state solution.” By late 2000, the majority of
Israelis had recognized that there is no way to achieve the two-state solution.
There is no way to make peace with the PLO. But due to successive governments’
aversion to risking a crisis in relations with Washington, no one dared abandon
the failed two-state strategy. Now, with Obama himself
declaring the peace process dead and replacing it with a policy of pure
hostility toward Israel, Israel has nothing to gain from upholding a policy
that blames it for the absence of peace. No matter how loudly Netanyahu
declares his allegiance to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel’s
heartland, Obama will keep castigating him and Israel as the destroyer of
peace. The prevailing, 23-year-old
view among our leadership posits that if we abandon the two-state model, we
will lose American support, particularly liberal American support. But the
truth is more complicated.
Inspired by the White House
and the Israeli Left, pro-Israel Democrats now have difficulty believing
Netanyahu’s statements of support for the establishment of a Palestinians
state. But those who truly uphold liberal values of human rights can be
convinced of the rightness of Israel’s conviction that peace is currently
impossible and as a consequence, the two-state model must be put on the back
burner. We can maintain support among
Republicans and Democrats alike if we present an alternative policy that makes
sense in the absence of an option for the two-state model. Such a policy is the Israeli
sovereignty model. If the government adopts a policy of applying Israeli
sovereignty over Judea and Samaria in whole – as I recommend in my book The
Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, or in part,
in Area C, as Economy Minister Naftali Bennett recommends, our leaders will be
able to defend their actions before the American people, including pro-Israel
Democrats. Israel must base its policy of
sovereignty on two principles. First, this is a liberal policy that will ensure
the civil rights of Palestinians and Israelis alike, and improve the
Palestinians’ standard of living. Second, such a policy is not
necessarily a longterm or permanent “solution,” but it is a stable equilibrium
for now.
Just as Israel’s decision to
apply its laws to united Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past didn’t
prevent it from conducting negotiations regarding the possible transfer of
control over the areas to the Palestinians and Syrians, respectively, so an
administrative decision to apply Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and
Samaria will not block the path for negotiations with the Palestinians when
regional and internal Palestinian conditions render them practicable. The sovereignty policy is both
liberal and strategically viable. If the government adopts it, the move will
rebuild Israel’s credibility and preserve Israel’s standing on both sides of
the aisle in Washington. Never before has Israel had to
deal with such an openly hostile US administration. Indeed, until 2009, the
very notion that a day would come when an American president would prefer an
alliance with Khamenei’s Iran to its traditional alliances with Israel and the
Sunni Arab states was never even considered. But here we are. Our current situation is
unpleasant. But it isn’t the end of the world. We aren’t helpless. If we act
wisely, we can stem Iran’s nuclear and regional advance. If we act boldly, we
can preserve our alliance with the US while adopting a policy toward the
Palestinians that for the first time in decades will advance our interests and
our liberal values on the world stage.
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