If you had entertained notions about alleged tensions in the US-Israel relationship, or about a lingering animus between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, the official meeting of the US president and the Israeli prime minister at the White House last Monday must have dispelled them. The relationship is rock solid, and as far as Washington is concerned, Israel continues to be right — right or wrong.
The long and short of it is this: Netanyahu paid lip service to the idea of a two-state solution, claiming, “I remain committed to a vision of two states for two peoples,” he said, though with one caveat: “A demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.” And Obama, according to senior administration officials, “did not see an agreement, nor perhaps any negotiations, between Israel and the Palestinian Authority for the rest of his presidency.”
So wham bam, and we’re back to square one. It’s as if nothing has happened between the Rogers Peace Plan of December 1969, aimed at achieving an end to belligerence in the Arab-Israeli conflict following the Six-Day War, and President Obama’s “A New Beginning” speech at Cairo University in June 2009, where he attempted to heal the wounds inflicted on Arabs by the US before his own tenure in the White House.
What is it about this bizarre relationship (one can’t think of any other word to describe it) between a Big Power and a two-bit garrison state where, for close to seven decades, the tail has wagged the dog with impunity? No doubt the question has been raised repeatedly over the years, bedeviling analysts seeking an answer, but we all were propelled to ask it again as we watched Obama in the Oval Office last Monday, sitting across from Netanyahu, the very man who had insulted the leader of the free world by railing against the Iran nuclear deal in Congress, appointing as his new chief of public diplomacy a person who called the American president an anti-Semite and identified the secretary of state as a dimwit with the mental agility of a 12-year-old.
Did the POTUS need all this? Did he, deep down, harbor the same sentiments — but chose to eat humble pie in order to appease his insufferable guest — as those expressed that day by sundry demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue, outside the House, who held signs proclaiming “Netanyahu War Criminal,” “Stop All Aid To Israel” and “Boycott Israel”? Difficult to say.
But the US has never wavered in its support for this entity. Israel continues to receive $3.9 billion annually in foreign military grants, along with $8 billion in loan guarantees, from American taxpayers. This is all the more puzzling when you consider that this largesse is handed out to a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income equal to that, say, of Spain, an EU country.
Add to all that the diplomatic support the American government gives Israel — again whether Israel is right or wrong. Consider this: Since 1948, the US has used its veto power in the Security Council 42 times with respect to resolutions, deemed detrimental to Israel, out of a total of 83 times. Meanwhile, in the General Assembly, the US often found itself voting alone, among Western Nations, against resolutions favoring the Palestinians, often with farcical results.
As Norman Finkelstein, the well-known academic, author and activist, put it: “Every year, the UN General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled ‘Peaceful Resolution of the Palestine Conflict’ every year, the vote is the same. The whole world is on one side — the whole world! — and on the other side, the US, Israel, and usually Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia.”
To be sure, the US and Israel have had, well, spats. In 1975, for example, President Ford threatened Israel with a “reassessment” of Israeli-American relations. In 1989, Secretary of State James Baker was bold — and foolhardy — enough to tell an audience at an AIPAC conference that Israel should abandon its “expansionist policy.” And in 1991, President George H. W. Bush raised the ire of the Likud government when he said at a press conference that East Jerusalem was “occupied territory” and later briefly cut off loan guarantees to Israel for its unrepentant policy of building new colonies, or expanding old ones, in the occupied territories.
But those were just spats, not unlike the putative spat between Obama and Netanyahu recently. Between the US and Israel, everything always returns to the status quo ante — the “special relationship.”
US foreign policy shapes events in every corner of the world and nowhere more so than in the Middle East, a region of great strategic interest to Washington. For the past several decades, as any college Freshman majoring in Middle Eastern Studies would tell you, the recurring theme of that policy has been America’s unwavering support for — indeed America’s kowtowing to — Israeli demands. What Israel wants, Israel, in the end, gets. All of which has triggered enormous expressions of anti-Americanism around the Arab and Muslim world. Why do they do it? Why do American policy-makers soldier on like that, year in, year out, decade in, decade out?
As John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt asked, seemingly rhetorically, in their iconic work, The Israeli Lobby and American Foreign Policy (2008): “The situation has no equal in American history. Why has the US adopted policies that jeopardize its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?”
Search me, but do ask the folks at the White House, the State Department and the Congress. Maybe they have an answer to this Rubik’s Cube puzzle.
