Israel Not As Powerful As You May Think

Too many peace-and-justice
activists are too quick -- even eager, it sometimes seems -- to feel
powerless. Did you hear all the
wailing and gnashing of teeth the other day from liberals, when the Obama
administration hinted that it might give up the public option for health care?
You'd have thought they pronounced it dead and buried it. A lot of crusaders for
health care reform were so depressed that they were ready to thrown in the
towel.

But professional
politicians like Howard Dean recognized it as merely a trial balloon, a
way to test the strength of opinion for and against the idea, and an invitation
to public-option supporters to fight all the harder.

The same misunderstanding
is a problem for peace activists addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Through the long, dark years of neoconservative ascendancy under Bush and
Cheney, it was common on the left to pronounce U.S. foreign
policy under the thumb of the Israelis. Now the neocons are suffering a
well-deserved obscurity. But the view that Israel is all-powerful, immune to pressures from
anyone including the U.S. government, persists on the
left.

The proof, we're told, is
that the Israelis insist they will go on expanding their settlements, despite a
strong demand from the President of the United States himself that they stop.
At least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps saying that Israel will
do whatever it damn pleases (all in the name of "security," of course),
regardless of what POTUS or anyone else says. That endless flow of defiance from
Jerusalem angers
lots of peace activists here. They seem convinced that Israel has all
the power in this ongoing conflict and richly deserves to be condemned for the
way it abuses that power.

The Israeli policymakers
certainly deserve condemnation for plenty of things -- but not because they are
omnipotent. The signs of their weakness are easy enough to see, for anyone who
is looking carefully.

When Netanyahu recently
laid out Israel's minimum
requirements for a peace settlement, in a public statement, he included "the genuine recognition of the state of Israel" -- but he omitted any demand for
recognizing Israel as "a Jewish state" or "the
homeland of the Jewish people." That was no accident, according to the Israeli
newspaper Ha'aretz: "Foreign diplomats have
reported that people in the prime minister's bureau had phoned some of their
colleagues to draw their attention to the striking absence from the statement."

For those who say it's
actions, not words, that count (though in fact both are equally important) there
is this news: Israel has
quietly stopped approving new building projects in the West
Bank settlements. Although Housing Minister Ariel Atias
took public responsibility for the decision, Israeli officials say that it was made jointly at the highest level, by
Netanyahu, Atias, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Projects under construction
are continuing, and privately-funded projects are being initiated. But the fact
that Israel is not
authorizing public money for new settlement construction marks a major
concession to the U.S.

Israeli political scientist
Jonathan Rynhold explained it this way: Netanyahu "does not want to lose
his credibility with the Americans. He says that you don't have to do everything
they say, but that you do have to be reasonable. Otherwise you will lose all
your backing when there are more important issues on the agenda, like Iran."

But on Iran, too, Israel has been
timid. A senior Israeli official
has said that Israel isn't asking for U.S. permission to attack Iran because the
Netanyahu government doesn't want to risk being told "no." And in early August,
Barak revealed that Israel restrained its attack on
Lebanon in 2006 because "a
message from the United
States indicated we must spare Lebanon's
infrastructure." At about the same time, Barak told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the United
States would present a regional peace plan "in the coming weeks," he added that
"Israel must take the lead in accepting the plan."

Barak did not need
to say what everyone knows: If Jerusalem refuses
to jump when Washington issues a serious order,
it risks losing an unknown amount of the enormous aid package the
U.S. sends
Israel every year. A government that
wants to be reasonable doesn't bite the hand that feeds it.

That may very well be one
reason the Israelis have stopped building the wall that was supposed to separate
them from Palestine. "Much of the unfinished work involves
'fingers' of the barrier around Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank," the
Washington Post said, and that's "potentially controversial in a
climate in which the Obama administration is trying to curb Israeli activity in
the West Bank as a prelude to restarting peace talks."

It's controversial from the
U.S. side because completing
the wall might mean that Israel is defining permanent borders.
It's controversial from the Israeli side because the public there largely
supports the wall project. To give it up is a political risk. Yet it's one that
the Netanyahu government is willing to take.

It's easy enough to
understand why Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers keep saying publicly that
they'll never give in to U.S. pressure. They want to minimize
their political risk, and (as a recent Washington Post headline put it) "Netanyahu's
Defiance of U.S. Resonates at Home; Polls Show Resistance to Settlement Freeze."
But the words that count most are the ones exchanged among the diplomats behind
the scenes -- where, according to all
indications, some progress is being made toward compromise by
Israelis as well as Arabs.

It's harder to understand
why these reports of progress, and all the other encouraging signs of
Israel concessions, are so widely
overlooked by peace and justice activists. Perhaps the belief in Israeli
intransigence heightens the sense of Israeli evil. And let's face it. The more evil the
enemy in a moral battle, the more pleasure we may get in waging that
battle. Perhaps some are even
tempted by the lure of absolutism: If you are fighting an enemy that's
absolutely evil, then you must be absolutely good.

But whatever the appeal of
seeing Israel as immune to all pressure,
it's a political mistake. Peace activists are most effective when they have an
accurate assessment of the political realities they are dealing with. In this case, the reality is that the
most crucial decisions will be made in the White House, not in Jerusalem or anywhere
else.

They certainly won't be
made in the offices of AIPAC. Yes, the right-wing "pro-Israel" lobby does carry
weight in Washington, though more on Capitol Hill than
at the other end of Pennsylvania
Avenue. But at both ends its clout is weakening
-- not because AIPAC pushes any less, but because the peace movement,
especially the Jewish-American peace movement, is pushing more. Groups like J Street, Brit Tzedek, and Americans for Peace
Now are real players in the political game for the first time, and
the rules of the game itself are changing accordingly.

The most important new rule
is that the team that pushes hardest can win. On the Middle
East as on health care reform, the White House has its finger up,
checking the political breezes. What Howard Dean knows about health care is
equally true for the Israel-Palestine conflict: We should not let public words
fool us into think that the battle is over, when in fact it is really just
beginning. The public words are invitations to all of us to work harder than
ever to push the administration in the direction of peace and justice.