No shift in US’ Palestine policy

On the afternoon of May 15, 1948, after David Ben Gurion declared the establishment of Israel in Palestine, Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, sat in the Oval Office talking to his Secretary of State, George Marshall, who was trying to persuade him to defer any decision on recognizing the new state.
The recognition, Marshall averred, would alienate Arabs against the United States. Truman responded by saying that to forestall recognition would alienate American Jewish voters against him in an election year. Furthermore, the president added, “I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituency.” A mere two hours after Ben Gurion’s declaration, the White House issued its recognition — and the devil with the impact of that recognition on the lives of millions of Arabs in the region.
Nothing has changed over the last 67 years. Every American administration since Truman’s has remained answerable to a well-organized Jewish community with exceedingly powerful pressure groups doing Israel’s bidding. If there was a difference in how different administrations dealt with
Israel, the difference was in degree not in kind, say, as a case in point, when President Eisenhower in 1956 chose a muscular policy by ordering Israel out of Sinai and, conversely, when in 1977 President Carter chose a wimpy policy by declaring contritely (after being challenged about his call for a “Palestinian homeland”) that “I would rather commit political suicide than hurt Israel.”
But American support of, even subservience to, Israel has never wavered over the years. Recently, President Obama, who had days earlier suffered insults by Israel’s prime minister, meted out to him in his own capital, sent his own national security adviser, Susan Rice, to address AIPAC’s annual conference, where she thundered: “We have Israel’s back, come hell or high water,” and this was soon after that same prime minister contemptuously destroyed a major building block of the administration’s Palestine policy, namely the two-state solution.
That is why those of us who entertained the notion, after last week’s dramatic events, that Israel, by hitting a wrong button or two in Washington it should not have hit, has finally alienated the US and thus a shift in America’s Middle East posture is imminent, should disabuse themselves of that notion. To be sure, entertaining the notion was given credence after administration officials suggested that they might now agree to passage of a UN Security Council resolution embodying the principles of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. Such a Security Council resolution represents no shift in America’s policy, but mere reiteration of it.
In fact, soon after Benjamin Netanyahu won the elections, President Obama not only phoned the Israeli prime minister to congratulate him (admittedly, standard diplomatic protocol), but assured him in the phone call that the US took to heart as “high priority” continued American security cooperation with Israel, which receives more than $3 billion a year in American military aid, along with an additional $3 billion in other perks, including tax-deductible donations by American Jews to Israeli institutions.
At this time in history, alas, sitting American presidents will not only continue to act in lockstep with Israel, and be answerable to its powerful supporters in the US (albeit under duress), but to remain beholden to them.
The change will come, as it surely must, not from Washington but from Europe. Leaders — and peoples — in countries of the European Union have had it up to here with Israel’s excesses that include violations of international law, excesses that they had not in the past tolerated by others around the world. If they set the tone by imposing sanctions, say, a la Russia and Iran, and these prove effective, the US will find itself alone by going it alone in its pathological commitment to Israel.
As for Israel, rest assured that confrontation would remain its national strategy and martial culture its modus operandi, a posture first envisioned by Ben Gurion in his first decade as prime minister.
Brazen? Yes. How brazen? Consider this. Last Friday AIPAC issued a statement saying — hold on to your hats — that if there is a rift between Tel Aviv and Washington, the onus is on the White House to repair the breach.
When will Americans come to the realization, belated though it may be, that this Zionist entity they have supported all these years, a recipient of so much of their largesse, is more trouble than it’s worth?