Time for Some Tough Love

Zee,
You undermine your own argument when you point to Oslo as being a result of American pressure on Israel. To the extent that this is true (and I wouldn’t completely absolve Rabin and Peres from blame here), you are, in effect, if not in intent, affirming that the results of the US elections are of vital importance to Israel and should therefore be of paramount concern for those Jews who take Israel’s security seriously.

So your argument that we should be less concerned about the US President’s stances on Israel because “Israel is Israel and America is America and they each individually have their own issues that need to be dealt with” is really way off base. Yes, Israel has its own elections and internal politics, but whoever is the next Israeli PM, be it Tzipi Livni or Bibi Netanyahu, they will have to deal with the next US President and the amount of pressure he chooses to exert on the Jewish State. So while the “quit trying to influence my politics for the sake of your politics” line is a great “rhetorical flourish,” at the end of the day you must concede that American politics are going to affect Israeli politics — it’s just a question of how and to what extent. (To give another example, Bibi Netanyahu ran on an explicitly anti-Oslo platform the first time he was elected PM, and was helped in this election by the anti-Oslo Zu Artzeinu movement of Moshe Feiglin. Once elected, however, he caved to US pressure and continued on the disastrous path of Oslo, empowering the PA and signing away places like Hevron. Who the American President is is a game-changer for Israel.)

As for your argument about US aid to Israel, it’s a straw man argument you were making, even though it’s often made elsewhere and you were invoking it only to respond to it. The $2.5 billion or so that Israel receives from the US is less than 2% of its GDP — hardly a make-or-break scenario if such funding were cut off. And with that I will quote from a 1992 Jerusalem Post article about a confrontation Obama’s VP pick Joe Biden had with one of Israel’s greatest Prime Ministers, Menachem Begin, during the first Lebanon War:

“In a conversation with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after a sharp confrontation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of the settlements, Begin defined himself as “a proud Jew who does not tremble with fear” when speaking with foreign statesmen.

During that committee hearing, at the height of the Lebanon War, Sen. John Biden (Delaware) had attacked Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria and threatened that if Israel did not immediately cease this activity, the US would have to cut economic aid to Israel.

When the senator raised his voice and banged twice on the table with his fist, Begin commented to him: “This desk is designed for writing, not for fists. Don’t threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the US lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us.”

After the meeting, Sen. Moynihan approached Begin and praised him for his cutting reply. To which Begin answered with thanks, defining his stand against threats.”

Sadly, it is clear Israel’s leaders today would not take such a stand. Under an Obama administration though, we’d still have Joe Biden influencing policy towards Israel.

“but we need to have an Israel more resilient to the US’s liberal peace now douche baggary”

Agreed, but we do not have a Menachem Begin at the helm (see the end of my last post). We have an Ehud Olmert, a Tzipi Livni, or a Bibi Netanyahu, all of whom would readily cave to US pressure.

The fact that Oslo was “over 10 years ago” is completely irrelevant. Since that time, the path of Oslo has been followed consistently — Wye, Hevron, Camp David, Annapolis, the “roadmap”…the list goes on. The “political landscape,” or rather the “land-for-peace” paradigm, has unfortunately not changed all that much. American pressure, especially from the Bush administration over the last few years has significantly influenced Israeli political decisions. Whereas even under an Oslo framework, prerequisites to a final status agreement included the Arabs actually cracking down on terrorism (as opposed to conducting it), compliance by the Arabs with such provisions of these agreements has become increasingly irrelevant under a Bush/Rice administration. This is not a Republican vs. Democrat issue. It’s an issue of who will pressure Israel to give more dangerous concessions, and by all indications (based on his advisers, his statements, and his personal associations) Obama would be significantly worse than McCain in this respect.