Pro-Israel policy begins to hurt US' interests

Some topics a

re so inflammatory that they are never discussed without first inserting a number of caveats. And so, when Anthony Cordesman, a foreign policy dignitary in Washington’s think tank circuit, dropped an article on Wednesday headlined ‘Israel as a strategic liability,’ he made sure to open with a plethora of qualifications.

First, he noted, America’s commitment to Israel is motivated by morality and ethics — a reaction to the Holocaust, to western anti-Semitism and to American foot-dragging before and during World War II that left European Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. Second, Israel is a democracy with the same values as the United States. Third, the US will never abandon Israel, and will help it keep its military edge over its neighbours. And America will guard Israel against an Iranian nuclear threat.

But once Cordesman had dispensed with what in the newspaper world is called the ‘to-be-sure’ paragraphs, he laid out a dispassionate argument that has gained increased traction in Washington — both inside the Obama administration  and outside, during forums and policy breakfasts. Recent Israeli governments, particularly the one led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Cordesman argued, have ignored the national security concerns of its biggest benefactor, the US and instead have taken steps that damage American interests abroad.

“The depth of America’s moral commitment does not justify or excuse actions by an Israeli government that unnecessarily make Israel a strategic liability when it should remain an asset,” Cordesman wrote, in commentary for the centrist Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The list of recent moves by the Netanyahu government that potentially threaten American interests has grown steadily, many foreign policy experts argue. The violence that broke out when Israeli commandos stormed aboard a Gaza flotilla last week chilled American relations with a key Muslim ally, Turkey. The Gaza fight also makes it more difficult for America to rally a coalition that includes Arab and Muslim states against Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Netanyahu’s refusal to stop Jewish housing construction in Arab east Jerusalem also strains American ties with Arab allies. It makes reaching an eventual peace deal, which many administration officials believe is critical to America’s broader interests in the Muslim world, even more difficult.

Both President Barack Obama and Gen David H Petraeus, who oversees America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have made the link in recent months between the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict and American security interests. During a press conference in April, Obama declared that conflicts like the one in West Asia ended up “costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure”; he drew an explicit tie between the Israeli-Palestinian strife and the safety of American soldiers as they battle Islamic extremism in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

All of this has led to deep soul-searching in parts of the American Jewish community, alongside a fierce debate among officials from past and present administrations. Obama’s mere characterisation of the acts that led to the deaths in the Gaza flotilla as ‘tragic’ unleashed a withering response from Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president. “There is no middle ground here,” she said. “Either the US stands with the people of Israel in the war against radical Islamic terrorism or we are providing encouragement to Israel’s enemies — and our own.”

Cheney’s remarks reflect some of the alarm among Israeli officials and some American Jewish leaders, who preferred the Bush administration’s steadfast support, no matter which Israeli government was in office and no matter what actions that government took.
Drawback for democracy

Some foreign policy experts say the new willingness to suggest that the Israeli government’s actions may become an American national security liability marks a backlash against the Bush-era neoconservative agenda, which posited that America and Israel were fighting together to promote democracy in an unstable region.
The new concern is also, paradoxically, a consequence of commitments made during the Bush years, when the lives of American soldiers, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, became tied to the state of Arab and Muslim public opinion.

Obama has de-emphasised democracy promotion. He is pulling American troops out of Iraq, and has promised to begin doing so in Afghanistan next year. Meanwhile, he has reached out to the Muslim world and emphasised, in his new national security strategy, that the US needs to act in concert with other nations.

“The prior administration’s worldview lined up more with the Israeli government,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of J Street, a liberal Jewish lobbying group. “Now we’re seeing a reflection of a different worldview that gives you a completely different set of policies and priorities.”

Ben-Ami says he represents Jews who support Israel, but not all of its policies. Some of them are raising the issue of Israeli government actions as a strategic liability for the US, and that question animated a seder held in April by influential officials and advisers in Bethesda. A debate broke out there over where to draw the line when considering American support for Israel’s government.

Within the Obama administration, there are gradations of how to even talk about that issue. At the seder, one Jewish adviser to the administration invoked concerns that ordinary Americans might get so frustrated with Israeli government actions that they will begin to question America’s support for that government. He asked that his name not be used because of the sensitivities surrounding the issue.

More recently, Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and a member of J Street, said: “America has three choices. Either say it’s politically too hot a potato to touch, and just pay the consequences in the rest of the world. Or try to force through a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, so that the Palestinian grievance issue is no longer a driving force or problem.” The third choice, he said, “is for America to say, we can’t solve it, but we can’t pay the consequences, so we will distance ourselves from Israel. That way America would no longer be seen, as it has been this week, as the enabler of excesses of Israeli misbehaviour.”

Unsurprisingly, Levy advocates the second choice. But he warns that the third may become more palatable to Americans if Netanyahu’s government stays on its present course.

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, author of one of the most well-read blogs in the American Jewish community, put it this way: “I don’t necessarily believe you solve all of America’s problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen by freezing settlement growth. On the other hand, there’s no particular reason for Israel to make itself a pain in the tush either.”