THE ISRAELIS are not used to being shouted at by the Americans. They like to look on their relationship with the United States, as a partnership underwritten by the powerful US Zionist lobby. That partnership is normally never so strong as in the first term of a US president, who is traditionally presumed to be anxious to keep US Zionists sweet, so that he can have their backing for a second term of office. Yet this week, Israelis have been yelled at, in no uncertain terms, by CIA chief George Tenet.
It was a stunned Israeli government that signed up to the cease-fire this week after Tenet had reportedly delivered a high decibel, tough, no-holds barred lecture on the harsh political realities of Israel’s not buying into the Mitchell peace plan, which includes the suspension of all new building on Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Tenet is not a diplomat but America’s top spy. He undertook his peace mission because he has enjoyed the respect of both the Israeli establishment and the Palestinian leadership. But it is worth considering the background to his trip. President George W. Bush is already displaying an impatient, some would say risky attitude toward his country’s existing foreign policy commitments. It seems that as far as the Middle East is concerned, he may be minded to start over with a blank sheet of paper. His view of the Arab world may well have been informed by his Secretary of State Colin Powell. As commander of the international forces that liberated Kuwait, Gen. Powell was in a position to appreciate the Arab point of view.
It is still too early to be certain, but he appears to have carried that understanding into the State Department. It is however notable that after ten months of mounting violence, no one on either side is celebrating the truce. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have given the Palestinian leadership a qualified commitment to suspend their attacks. However the Israelis are already trying to sow distrust among the Palestinians. Hours after the truce was agreed, some Israelis were briefing journalists that the deal included the arrest by the Palestinian authorities of leading Hamas and Islamic Jihad members. Given the growing outrage at Israeli aggression, such a move at this time would merely plunge the Palestinian community into conflict. The one thing that would let Israeli Premier Sharon off the diplomatic hook on which George Tenet has hung him, would be another bombing. Israel has proven in the past that it is not above committing such an outrage against its own people, if it suited the greater realpolitik of the Zionist state. By coincidence, exactly fifty years ago today a Zionist terrorist threw a grenade at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue in Baghdad, as part of a murderous campaign to terrorize Iraqi Jews into fleeing to the new Israeli state. Later some of the victims sued the Israeli government, which chose to settle out of court. Whatever the immediate impact of the fragile truce on the Palestinians and Israelis, it could serve the wider purpose of influencing the way the international community views the Palestinian struggle. European public opinion, led by the French and Scandinavians, has in recent years swung increasingly behind the Palestinians. In stark contrast, in the United States the general view is entirely hostile. The Zionist lobby has done a splendid job of coloring American perceptions.
For most US citizens, the Palestinians were and remain terrorists, who hijacked and blew up airliners. The Israelis meanwhile are the good guys, whose terrorist past was never terrorism, but brave freedom fighting and whose violent present is merely the enforcing of law and order in the face of continuing Palestinian extremism. The lumbering supertanker of US public opinion is unlikely to change course overnight. But this week there seem to have been the first faint indications that the new Bush White House has decided that, after years of sterile support for the aggressive Israeli state, it is time to review America’s whole approach to the Palestinian question.
