Israel Won't Change Unless the Status Quo Has a Downside

Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Obama
administration in an open confrontation with the Israeli government,
Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman -- who represents the interests of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party on Capitol Hill as
faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry -- called
for a halt. "Let's cut the family fighting, the family feud," he
said. "It's unnecessary; it's destructive of our shared national
interest. It's time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between
the U.S. and Israel. It just doesn't serve anybody's interests but our
enemies."

The idea that the U.S. and Israel are "family" with identical
national interests is a convenient fiction that Lieberman and his fellow
Israel partisans have worked relentlessly to promote -- and enforce --
in Washington over the past two decades. If the bonds are indeed
familial, however, last week's showdown between Washington and the
Netanyahu government may be counted as one of those feuds in which
truths are uttered in the heat of the moment that call into question the
fundamental terms of the relationship. Such truths are never easily
swept under the rug once the dispute is settled. The immediate rupture,
that is, precludes a simple return to the status quo ante;
instead, a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship somehow ends
up on the agenda.

Sure, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are now
working feverishly to find a formula that will allow them to move on
from a contretemps that began when the Israelis ambushed
Vice President Joe Biden, announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing
units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. He was, of course, in
Israel to promote the Obama administration's failing efforts to
rehabilitate negotiations toward a two-state peace agreement, a goal
regularly spurned by Israel's continued construction on land occupied in
1967.

Once again, as when Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze from
the Netanyahu government in 2009, the Israelis will fend off any demand
that they completely reverse their latest construction plans. Instead,
they will shamelessly offer to continue their settlement activity on a "don't-ask-don't-tell"
basis, professing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to
placate the Americans, even as they systematically erode its prospects
on the ground.

There is, as former Secretary of State James Baker has
noted, no shortage of chutzpah in this Israeli government.
"United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each
year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen,
at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans
would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government,"
Baker said in a recent interview. "Given that fact, it is not
unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect U.S. policy on
settlements."

The General Joins the Fray

Sooner or later, the present imbroglio is likely to be fudged over,
but make no mistake, it opened
Washington up to a renewed discussion of the conventional wisdom of
unconditional support for Israel. It also brought into the public
arena the way U.S. administrations over the past two decades have
enabled that country's ever-expanding occupation regime and whether such
a policy is compatible with U.S. national interests in the Middle East.

Back in 2006, the realist foreign policy thinkers John
Mearshimer and Stephen Walt provoked a firestorm of ridicule and ad
hominem abuse for suggesting in their book, The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, that the goals pursued
by the two sides were, in fact, far from identical and often at odds --
and that partisans motivated by Israel's interests lobbied aggressively
to skew U.S. foreign policy in their favor. Israel partisans also
heaped derision on the suggestion by the Iraq Study Group commissioned
by President George W. Bush that the U.S. would not be able to achieve
its goals in the Middle East without first settling the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Response to the reiteration, last week, of the idea that Israel's
behavior might be jeopardizing U.S. interests has been strikingly muted
by comparison. That's because it came
from General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command
(Centcom), which oversees America's two wars of the moment. He is the
most celebrated U.S. military officer of his generation, and a favorite
of those most ferocious of Israel partisans, the neocons.

Petraeus
told Senators on Wednesday: "The enduring hostilities between Israel
and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to
advance our interests in [Centcom's] AOR [Area of Responsibility]." He
added, "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a
perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the
Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships
with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of
moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other
militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict
also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients,
Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas." He also stressed that "progress toward
resolving the political disputes in the Levant, particularly the
Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major concern for Centcom."

Normally, any linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a
wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is pooh-poohed by neocons
and other Israel partisans. Typically, they will derisively suggest
that those who argue for the linkage made by Petraeus are naive in their
belief that al-Qaeda would give up its jihad if only Israel
and the Palestinians made peace. That, by the way, is a straw-man
argument of the first order: The U.S. has done plenty on its own to
antagonize the Muslim world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
would not in itself resolve that antagonism. The point is simply that a
fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary, if
not sufficient, condition for repairing relations between the U.S. and
the citizenry of many Muslim countries.

Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who has made a
profession of trying to negate the difference between anti-Semitism and
criticism of (or hostility to) Israel, gamely ventured
that "Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by
the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the
Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence
of peace and the perceived U.S. favoritism for Israel." His conclusion:
"This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive."

You can, in fact, hear the pain in Foxman's admission that "it is
that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great
American patriot and hero." That Petraeus chose to make his concerns
public at the height of a public showdown between Israel and the U.S.,
and to do so on Capitol Hill, where legislators seemed uncertain how to
respond, signaled the seriousness of the uniformed military in pressing
the issue.

Longtime Washington military and intelligence affairs analyst Mark
Perry caught
the special significance of this at Foreign Policy's website:
"There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the
American Medical Association, the lawyers -- and the Israeli lobby. But
no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military." He
noted as well that, in a January Centcom briefing of Joint Chiefs of
Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, Petraeus had evidently suggested
the Palestinian territories -- over which Israel continues to exercise
sovereign military control -- be included under Centcom's area of
responsibility, a prospect that would make Israel's leadership
apoplectic.

It's not that, as far as we know, Petraeus harbors any particular
animus, or affection, for the Jewish state. It's that, in his
institutional role as the commander of hundreds of thousands of U.S.
troops stationed across what Washington strategists like to call the
"arc of instability," he is concerned about aggravating hostility
towards the United States.

The idea that Washington needs to rein in Israeli expansionism and
force a political solution to its conflict with the Palestinians is
hardly novel for America's unsentimental men in uniform. Former
Secretary of State Colin Powell and former U.S. Mideast envoy General
Anthony Zinni, both of whom had their formative experiences of the
region in the course of massive U.S. military deployments there, were on
the same page as Petraeus is today.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton is the U.S. officer responsible for
creating and training the Palestinian Authority security force that has
cracked down on West Bank militants and restrained them from attacking
Israel over the past few years. He was no less blunt than Petraeus in
a speech in Washington last year. He emphasized the premise on
which the force was built, and withstood charges from within its own
community that it was simply a gendarmerie for Israel: its soldiers
believed themselves to be the nucleus of the army of a future
Palestinian state. The loyalty of his men, he warned, should not be
taken for granted: "There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told
that you're creating a state, when you're not."

Vice President Biden, too, was quoted
in the Israeli press as having berated Netanyahu -- behind closed doors
-- over his plans for settlement expansion, warning that it would put
at risk the lives of American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan.

The Tough-Love Solution

In public, of course, Biden offered familiar pablum direct from Joe
Lieberman's "family" album: "From my experience, the one precondition
for progress [in the Middle East] is that the rest of the world knows
this -- there is no space between the US and Israel when it comes to
security, none. That's the only time that progress has been made."

In fact, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests
that the reverse is true. The origins of the peace process the Obama
administration is now trying so desperately to resuscitate do not lie in
the unconditional American support for Israel that has become a third
rail in national politics over the past two decades. They lie in the
national interest-based tough love of the administration of President
George H.W. Bush.

Grounded in a realist reading of American national interests across
the Middle East -- at a moment when a military campaign to eject Saddam
Hussein's Iraqi forces from Kuwait had put hundreds of thousands of U.S.
troops on the ground there -- the first Bush administration recognized
the need to balance Israel's reasonable interests with those of its Arab
neighbors. That's why, in 1991, it dragged Israel's hawkish Likud
government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid conference,
and so broke Israel's "security" taboo on direct engagement with Yasir
Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The Bush administration also made it clear that there would be
immediate and painful consequences for Israel if it continued building
settlements on land conquered in the war of 1967, construction which the
U.S. was then willing to term not only "unhelpful" -- the preferred
euphemism of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack
Obama -- but illegal. Under the direction of Bush family consigliere and
Secretary of State Jim Baker, Washington threatened to withdraw $10
billion in loan guarantees if Israeli colonization of Palestinian
territory continued. In the resulting political crisis, Israelis --
mindful of their dependency on U.S. support -- voted Shamir out of
office and chose Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.

Rabin has been rightly lionized as a leader who took a courageous
decision to change course in the face of bitter domestic opposition. To
understand how Israel started down the path of peace, however, it's
necessary to clean the Vaseline off the lens of history and quiet the
string section.

Only three years earlier, Rabin had ordered
Israeli troops to use baseball bats to break the limbs of
stone-throwing teenagers in hopes of stopping the Palestinian intifada
or uprising. He certainly did not embrace the Oslo peace process with
the PLO out of some moral epiphany. He changed course thanks to a
cold-blooded assessment of Israel's strategic position at the time.

The United States then had a growing stake in creating a regional Pax
Americana that required Arab support. Given the end of the Cold
War, Israel's value as an ally was diminishing, while its expansionist
policies, antagonizing Arab public opinion and making it more difficult
for vulnerable regional governments to ally with Israel's enabler, were
increasingly a liability for Washington.

Rabin had reason to believe that U.S. support for Israel at the
expense of its neighbors would prove neither unconditional nor eternal.
At the same time, the PLO had been weakened by years of Israeli military
attacks and by a disastrous diplomatic blunder -- it had aligned itself
with Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. It was a fortuitous moment,
he concluded, to press for a political solution with the Palestinians on
favorable terms, by trading the West Bank and Gaza for peace.

Where are the Consequences?

Rabin acted because the consequences of maintaining the status
quo seemed increasingly unpleasant, which takes nothing away from
his courage in doing so. The same could be said for South Africa's last
white President, F.W. de Klerk. He opted to negotiate an end to
apartheid with Nelson Mandela's ANC because the collapse of the Soviet
Union had removed the most persuasive rationale the U.S. and other
Western powers had for backing his white-rule regime. Similarly, it's
unlikely that the Soviet political system would have put Mikhail
Gorbachev in power if the KGB hadn't determined that far-reaching
changes were necessary to prevent Moscow from being eclipsed as a
superpower, thanks to Western economic and technological advances.

If U.S. pressure and the specter of isolation and opprobrium pushed
Israel onto the path of a two-state solution, the easing of that
pressure and the creation of the "familial" notion of U.S.-Israel ties
have coincided with a steady movement away from completing the peace
process. Even at the height of the Oslo era, coddled by Clinton, the
Israelis kept on expanding the settlements that jeopardized geographic
prospects for Palestinian statehood.

The Israeli opposition, led by Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, sought to
prove Rabin wrong. They were convinced that American support could be
maintained without conceding Palestinian statehood -- by making constant
end runs around the Oval Office and appealing directly to Capitol Hill
and U.S. public opinion.

Sharon and Netanyahu were vindicated in spades when the
suicide-terror strategy taken up by the second Palestinian intifada
and the attacks of 9/11 led George W. Bush's administration to
reconceptualize the world on the basis of its "Global War on Terror."
This, in turn, led Washington's political class to accept Israel not as
just another ally in that war, but as a model for how to conduct it.

In the Bush years, the peace process and the two-state solution
became a hollow catechism that could be mouthed by Israeli leaders (and
their supporters in Washington), while getting on with the task of
smashing the Palestinian national movement and expanding settlements.
In real terms, the peace process -- the series of reciprocal moves
designed to build confidence for concluding final status talks and
implementing a two-state solution -- died when Ariel Sharon came to
power in February 2001.

Even his 2005 withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza was never
conceived in terms of a peace process; it wasn't even negotiated or
coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon, in fact, imagined
his unilateral withdrawal as a substitute for a peace agreement. It was
designed, as Sharon's top aide Dov Weissglass so
memorably explained, as a dose of "formaldehyde that's necessary so
that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

Despite mounting Arab exasperation, the Bush administration put no
pressure on Israel to bring the peace process to a conclusion, limiting
itself to the Grand
Guignol of the "Annapolis process." With all external compulsion to
conclude a peace agreement removed, domestic political pressure in
Israel not surprisingly collapsed as well. The Palestinians were now
largely locked behind the vast
separation wall that winds through the West Bank and the siege
lines of Gaza. Their plight is once again invisible to Israelis, only 40% of whom, when
asked by pollsters, even express an interest in seeing the peace process
restarted. Only around 20% believe that such a move would bring any
results.

"Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing
the Palestinian people to exercise their rights," wrote
Israeli political commentator Gideon Levy in Haaretz last
week. "Israel does not truly intend to pursue peace, because life here
seems to be good even without it. The continuation of the occupation
doesn't just endanger Israel's future, it also poses the greatest risk
to world peace, serving as a pretext for Israel's most dangerous
enemies. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent and
condescending Israel of today."

The Obama administration can't be under any illusions on this score.
And they are being forced to confront it by another kind of pressure.
The bills are coming due for Bush's War-on-Terror adventurism. Those
responsible for maintaining the U.S. imperium in the Muslim world are
now raising warning flags that the price to be paid for continuing to
indulge Israel in evading its obligation to offer a fair settlement to
the Palestinians could be high -- and, worse than that, unnecessary.

Israel's leaders, and its voters, have amply demonstrated that they
will not voluntarily relinquish control of the Palestinian territories
as long as there are no real consequences for maintaining the status
quo. Sure, you can tell them that the status quo is untenable, but the
whole history of Israel from the 1920s onward has been about
transforming the impossible into the inevitable by changing the facts on
the ground. Building settlements on occupied territory in violation of
international law after 1967 seemed untenable at the time; today, the
U.S. government says Israel will keep most of those major settlement
blocs in any two-state solution. It is precisely in line with this sort
of improvisational logic that Sharon calculated he could hold on to the
settlements of the West Bank if he gave up the settlements of Gaza; the
same logic allows
Netanyahu to say the words "two states for two peoples" while always
winking at his base that he has no intention of allowing it to happen.

A peace process that requires Israel and the Palestinians to reach a
bilateral consensus on the distribution of land and power under the
prodding of U.S matchmakers is a non-starter -- and therefore unlikely
to lead to a goal which is of increasing urgency in America's national
interest. Arguably, it's increasingly important even for the Israelis,
since the status quo has already eroded prospects for a
two-state solution to the point where both sides may be consigned to an
even longer and bitterer conflict.

Hence, the necessity of correcting Vice President Biden: progress in
the Middle East will not come until the U.S. changes Israel's
cost-benefit analysis for maintaining the status quo. The only
Israeli leader capable of accepting the parameters of a two-state peace
with the Palestinians, which are already widely known, is one who can
convincingly demonstrate to his electorate that the alternatives are
worse. Right now, without real pressure, without real cost, with nothing
but words, there is simply no downside to the status quo for
Israel. Until there is, things are unlikely to change, no matter the
peril to U.S. troops throughout the Middle East.