Arrogant Isolationism

Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest and most reliable ally in the Middle East. Likewise, through billions and billions dollars of aid packages, mostly military, our Security Council veto power at the United Nations and the support of Congress and the American people – despite the fact that only 2% of our population is Jewish – we have reciprocated in spades. Israel has garnered strong additional support from the American Evangelical community, for reasons that still make me shudder. According to these Evangelicals, to foment a Biblical promise of a second coming of Christ, a war to end all wars (Armageddon) must emanate in the Middle East between Israel and her neighbors that decimates the earth. A strong and nuclear-armed Israel is the cornerstone of that prophecy.

The official U.S. policy towards peace in the Middle East embraces reasoned accord between Israel and a Palestinian state, eventually resulting in some negotiated form of Palestinian autonomy. We have attempted, without much success of late, to mediate such a solution, but as time passes, the credibility of the United States as a middleman is all but gone. America’s wars in Afghanistan (Middle East adjacent, but Islamic nonetheless) and Iraq have caused us to be viewed as a regional colonizer among most average regional Muslim citizens. To many, they have the mistaken view that Israel is a de facto U.S. colony. We tend to forget that the victims of Islamic extremism are overwhelmingly other Muslims, notwithstanding a very hostile anti-Western litany of hate-mongering from these demonic groups.

Palestinians are themselves torn between the violent change-advocates of Hamas (mostly in Gaza) and the more moderate Fatah faction concentrated on the West Bank in Israel. But as Israel authorizes many more Jewish “settlements” on the West Bank, as her government has dug in its heels against Palestinian aspirations, it seems increasingly clear that the last six years of leadership by Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu – as leader of ultra-conservative Likud – have pushed back hard, and most recently resulted in his eleventh hour campaign pledge never to allow an independent Palestine and to increase the growth of those West Bank Jewish settlements.

As Netanyahu’s rather obvious recent political pre-election move suggests – he responded to a GOP invitation to speak before Congress opposed by Dems as “political during an active foreign campaign” and as a usurpation of the foreign policy power of the president – there is now a very real political alliance between his Likud and the U.S. Republican Party. This American intrusion into the Israeli political process is indeed unfortunate. Picking sides in an election, particularly selecting a leader whose drop in his own local polls has been consistently downwards with each election, would seem to limit American options, demonstrates open hostility to center and left-of-center Israeli parties.

Israeli politics is a bit strange. “No party has ever won an outright majority under Israel's proportional representation voting system, and neither [party got] more than a quarter of the votes in Tuesday's election [March 17^th].” BBC.com, March 17^th. In that Israeli election, Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union Party and Netanyahu’s Likud were in a dead heat… until the last moment. The results of that eleventh hour surge: 30 seats for Likud, 24 for Zionist Union in the 120-seat Knesset. Netanyahu will now generate a coalition totaling at least 61 votes, while Israel is more polarized than it has been for years.

“The Likud activists were dancing and singing within minutes of the TV stations’ broadcasting their exit polls quite simply because they can see a relatively simple pathway towards the formation of another right-wing coalition… It would involve Mr Netanyahu teaming up with the secularists of Yisraeli Beitenu and Kulanu, and adding the religious nationalists of Jewish Home and the parties that represent ultra-orthodox Jews like Shas.” BBC.com, March 17^th. If Netanyahu’s existing right of center coalition was fragile, his going-forward assemblage will be even less cohesive. American Republicans are cheering; Democrats are looking at a hostile government leading Israel for the next few years.

Aside from Netanyahu’s insertion of himself as a pro-Republican force in American politics, making a ton of unnecessary enemies on the other side of the aisle along the way, his hardline tactics are now the bullet points in Palestine’s end-around move to further isolate Israel as an alleged rogue state, a human rights violator (Hamas is hardly innocent!) and an impediment to freedom and Middle Eastern stability. Citing Israeli intransigence, Palestine has mounted a global effort to achieve official recognition as a separate and independent state. Israel is on the wrong side of the vast majority of global sympathies.

“On Thursday, 29 November 2012, in a 138–9 vote (with 41 abstaining) General Assembly resolution 67/19 passed, upgrading Palestine to ‘non-member observer state’ status in the United Nations. The new status equates Palestine's with that of the Holy See. The change in status was described by The Independentas ‘de facto recognition of the sovereign state of Palestine.’ Voting ‘no’ were Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Panama and the United States of America.” Wikipedia. Not a lot of support for the Israeli position, and even that minimal support is dwindling by the minute. Regardless of Hamas’ violent excess, it is Israel that is globally perceived as the big bad bully, crushing the Palestinian state and continuing the disenfranchisement of its people

“On Wednesday [December 17^th], European parliamentarians endorsed Palestinian statehood. Symbolically. In principle. A compromise motion. .. Carrying overwhelmingly – 498 to 88 with 111 abstentions…  An estimated 134 nations recognize Palestinian statehood. Sweden the latest to join ranks with others. The first EU country to do so… Britain, France, Spain and Portugal extended unofficial/symbolic parliamentary recognition. So did Ireland.” GlobalResearch.ca, December 18^th.

While hope for a negotiated solution is now unlikely if not impossible, Netanyahu’s rhetoric is sure to isolate Israel even more, should he be able to manage his new coalition “his way.” “[His] new stance would further fray Mr. Netanyahu’s ruinous relationship with the Obama administration and heighten tension with European countries already frustrated with the stalled peace process.

“‘I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,’ he said in a video interview published on NRG, an Israeli news site that leans to the right. ‘There is a real threat here that a left-wing government will join the international community and follow its orders.’…

“Mr. Netanyahu’s chief challenger, Isaac Herzog of the center-left Zionist Union, backs the two-state solution and has promised to try to restart talks with the Palestinians, though he has warned an agreement may not be possible. He has, however, made Mr. Netanyahu’s alienation of allies, especially Washington, a prime campaign point, and said Israel’s international isolation is itself a security threat.” New York Times, March 16^th. Indeed, as Netanyahu’s extreme hardline approach has isolated Israel in most of the world, so has lock-step American support for the Jewish state added a touch of that isolation to us. But for now, Herzog and his Zionist Union have been muzzled.

Nevertheless, U.S. grassroots support for Israel, outside of the Evangelical community, is beginning to erode, and anti-Semitism is beginning to rear its ugly head here in the U.S. and so much more virulently in Europe. If it weren’t for the massive distractions of murderous regimes like ISIS and Boko Haram, Palestinian aspirations probably would have advanced rapidly in this increasingly anti-Israeli world. Netanyahu keeps painting Israel into an increasingly untenable international corner; he’s got nowhere else to go in his Palestinian quandary except more violence. He quickly realized how alienating his pre-election pledge never to recognize a separate Palestine was, so he back-tracked two days after the vote and suggested he never veered from his willingness to accept a two-state solution. Right. His lips were just moving.

Israel cannot persist in the belief that it can go it alone in an ultra-hardline approach, that it can expand its West Bank settlements without limit and thus doom any negotiated peace process and still generate the kinds of international sympathies it needs to survive. We need Israel, and Israel needs us, but they also need to start taking political positions that we can defend and support, butt out of American politics as we should butt out of theirs, start taking positions that encourage peace and not long-standing wars of attrition that no one can continue to afford… and provide realistic paths to regional (Iranian) nuclear disarmament.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time to begin rebuilding our very necessary relationship with Israel that has now reached its lowest point since formation of that Jewish state.