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“AMERICA AND ISRAEL: THE END OF A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP”?

America and Israel: the end of a special relationship
The fall-out between America and Israel is a serious threat to world peace
By Benny Morris
The Sunday Telegraph
March 28, 2010

BENNY MORRIS explains why this is a threat to world peace. Without doubt, the Middle East’s rogue or terrorist leaders, from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah to Hamas’s Khalid Mashal, are rubbing their hands with glee.

The year-long rift between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations over Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is threatening to turn into a political rupture – just as Israel faces an existential threat which it needs every ounce of American support to counter.

In the first decades of Israel’s existence, when it fought and defeated Egyptian armies, the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations twice twisted arms in Tel Aviv to force Israeli forces to withdraw -– first from the Sinai Peninsula (1956-57), then from territory west of the Suez Canal which it had occupied during the October War (1973). But the Americans continued to provide Israel with strategic cover to counter Soviet threats of nuclear destruction and direct military intervention.

Today, Israel faces an Israel-hating Islamist coalition, of Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas, which may soon have nuclear weapons – but does so without any certainty about American goodwill and protection.

Barack Obama may say that the United States supports Israel and will not countenance a “nuclear Iran”. But most Israelis see Obama as lacking in that basic commitment to and sympathy for Israel that characterised American presidents from Truman through Kennedy to Clinton and George W Bush.

As recently as 2000 and 2005, Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon felt able to offer or make major territorial concessions to the Palestinians because they knew that Washington would make up any shortfall in security that withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza might entail.

Obama’s deliberate coldness toward America’s traditional ally has not been lost on the Israeli public. He spoke in Cairo last year to the Muslim world, while avoiding a “balancing” visit to Jerusalem. He pettily humiliated Netanyahu during last week’s visit to America (on the evening of their meeting, Obama left Netanyahu for more than an hour stranded in the White House while he dined without his guest). Nor will Washington’s overbearing tone be quickly forgotten.

And while, without doubt, Obama’s health care bill victory has bolstered his stature in American public opinion and enabled him to face off with Netanyahu, his Democratic Party may yet pay a price in the congressional elections in November.

The pro-Israel lobby in Washington remains powerful, despite recent knocks and the emergence of a small, Obama-supporting dissident Jewish lobby called J-Street.

While American Jews traditionally vote Democrat, Obama’s trouncing of Israel may well affect campaign contributions and votes (American Jews, who number more than 5 million, tend to contribute and vote disproportionately).

In the coming weeks, it will become clear whether Israelis interpret Obama’s behaviour toward Netanyahu as a personal issue or whether it reflects a deeper disaffection with Israel itself.

Israelis have recently been given grounds for feeling that Netanyahu is an incompetent (and unlucky) prime minister: the international political fallout from the assassination he authorised of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, including Britain’s expulsion of the Mossad head of station in London, is still reverberating.

And while most Israelis approve of the killing of a Hamas general and condemn Western and Arab hypocrisy in this regard (MI6 agents have never used non-British passports? Did Dubai’s rulers really support Hamas’s gun-running activities, in cahoots with Iran, on its soil?), many question the wisdom of the cost-benefit calculus.

Many Israelis have been wary of Netanyahu since his first tenure as prime minister in the late 1990s, when his relations with Clinton were poor. But they will not endorse American interference in Israel’s politics or with its vital interests.

Did the Obama administration embark on its confrontation with Netanyahu in order to force him to switch coalition partners from the two main Right-wing parties –Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas – to the more agreeable centrist Kadima Party? Or is it merely seeking to freeze the Israeli settlement enterprise, to pave the way for Palestinian re-entry into peace negotiations?

Either way, most Israelis resent Obama’s arm-twisting, and it is by no means clear that Israel will soften the widespread desire to retain East Jerusalem while opposing the settlement enterprise in the wider West Bank.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad speaks of the destruction of “the Zionist regime”, and Iran has spent a decade fashioning the tools with which to achieve this – nuclear weapons and the Shihab III rockets to deliver them.

Washington may still be beyond Iranian reach and the Arab Gulf states, while nervous about Iran’s bid for regional hegemony and atomic bombs, may rightly feel that they are not the intended targets. But Israelis are keenly aware that they are in Tehran’s sights.

Iran is an estimated one to three years away from building the bomb. And its local clients and proxies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Hamas in Gaza, have been equipped by Tehran (and Syria) with rockets with which to pound Israel’s cities and air bases.

The White House and State Department still speak about mobilising the world community for sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear programme. But Russia and China are not on board for effective sanctions, while Obama and the American military have manifestly no stomach for a military confrontation with Iran.

Indeed, Netanyahu by now may suspect that the Americans have resigned themselves to a nuclear-armed Iran and are relying on deterrence to fend off an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. But many Israelis fear that the anti-Semitic mullahs may prove less rational than the ageing apparatchiks who ran the Kremlin during the Cold War nuclear stand-off.

The only action that could halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry is a strike by Israel. Whether Israel can do so effectively without a green light and some assistance from Washington is unclear.

At a minimum, Israel would need American permission to overfly Iraq and perhaps landing rights, for refuelling and repair, in regional U.S. air bases. Israel may also need additional equipment and weaponry. After an air assault, Israel would need American political backing to prevent Security Council condemnation and sanctions resolutions, and a promise of support and supplies if a wider Middle East war ensued.

While many Arab and Western governments would no doubt privately welcome the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities, their public posturing would be different.

So far, Obama – like George W Bush before him – has vetoed an Israeli pre-emptive strike. The Americans are fearful of the chaos that might engulf the Middle East and are aware of their vulnerability in the region. They assume that the Iranians would charge them with complicity, whether or not they were complicit.

It is possible that Netanyahu hoped to reach an agreement with Obama based on a trade-off – Israeli concessions on the Palestinians in exchange for America agreeing to an attack on the Iranian installations. But Obama apparently offered Netanyahu nothing, while demanding everything on the Palestinian front.

Washington believes that Palestinian-Israeli friction helps fuel Muslim antagonism towards the U.S.. In its view, the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations or, better still, an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord would reduce this antagonism.

Which brings us to Netanyahu and the problem of Jerusalem. In December 2000, Clinton called for a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would have the Gaza Strip and about 95 per cent of the West Bank. The Arab-populated neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem would constitute the Palestinian state’s capital.

Ehud Barak, prime minister at the time, accepted the Clinton parameters, including on Jerusalem. The Palestinians rejected them. And while Netanyahu, under pressure from Obama, may have agreed to the principle of a two-state solution and to limit construction around the West Bank, he has never accepted the principle of dividing Jerusalem. Hence his insistence that Israel continue constructing housing.

For Obama, this means that Netanyahu is not serious about peace and a two-state solution. He is right to the extent that there can be no two-state solution without Palestinian sovereignty over Arab East Jerusalem.

A the same time, Obama has ignored evidence that the Palestinians are averse to a two-state solution. How else to explain the majority Palestinian vote in 2006 for Hamas, which advocates Israel’s destruction? Or the rejection by Yasser Arafat (with his colleagues, including Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian “president”) of Clinton’s two-state proposals six years before? Or Abbas’s effective “no” to the peace proposals in 2008 of Ehud Olmert? Or Abbas’s refusal to recognise Israel as “a Jewish state” while insisting on the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” (which would give Israel an Arab-majority)?

In short, Netanyahu has given Obama ample grounds for frustration and anger – and Obama has given Netanyahu ample grounds for suspicion about his real sympathies. And this has happened at a crucial moment in Middle Eastern history, when a nuclear cloud looms over the region.

“TRUST BETWEEN THE TWO SIDES SEEMS TO BE AT A LOW EBB”

With U.S.-Israel ties strained, Obama may make bold move
By Warren P. Strobel
McClatchy Newspapers
The Miami Herald
March 28, 2010

WASHINGTON -- After 14 months of frustration over the moribund Mideast peace process and nearly three weeks of open confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama shows no sign of backing down – and may be about to double his bets.

The clash began when Vice President Joe Biden visited Jerusalem on March 9 and Israel announced construction of 1,600 new apartments for Jews in disputed East Jerusalem. Biden condemned the decision, and Obama’s top aides publicly dressed down Netanyahu for a step they called “insulting.”

Hoping to capitalize on Israel’s embarrassment, the administration sought concessions on Jewish settlements and other issues to set the stage for renewed talks with the Palestinians.

That, too, didn’t work. This past week, first Obama, then his aides held closed talks with Netanyahu at the White House for two days running. No reporter was allowed near the talks, no joint appearances were made and no statements were released afterward.

An Israeli newspaper commented that Netanyahu had been treated as if he were the leader of Equatorial Guinea.

Obama, fresh from his legislative victory on health care, is planning an attempt to turn the current disaster into a diplomatic opportunity, according to U.S. officials, former officials and diplomats.

The administration is said to be preparing a major peace initiative that would be Obama’s most direct involvement in the conflict to date, and would go far beyond the tentative, indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks that were torpedoed earlier in the month.

“It is crystallizing that we have to do something now. That this can’t go on this way,” said one of the officials who, like the others, wouldn’t speak for the record because of the issue’s sensitivity.

Because of the U.S. political calendar, Obama has limited time to press Israel before it becomes a major domestic political issue during midterm elections. Netanyahu, who this weekend confers with his closest allies, has limited political space in which to operate, if he wants to stay in power.

His coalition at home is populated with Israeli politicians who support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, oppose any concessions on Jerusalem and are skeptical of an independent Palestinian state next door.

One irony of the current confrontation is that the administration, which had laboriously organized indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians, had planned to use Biden’s visit to provide “strategic reassurance” to Israel, in hopes of improving relations with the closest U.S. ally in the Middle East after a year of strains.

Now, trust between the two sides seems to be at a low ebb.

“There’s not a great deal of trust that he believes deeply in the two-state solution,” a former senior U.S. official in touch with the White House said of Netanyahu. “There’s a belief that he’s a reluctant peacemaker here.”

The Obama administration is said to believe that Netanyahu has more control over Jewish settlements than he admits, and political flexibility to dump his right-wing partners and form a government with the moderate Kadima party if he chose.

“Fundamentally, he’s going to have to decide between his coalition and his relationship with the United States,” the former official said.

From the day of his inauguration and his first major appointment - former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine as his special Middle East envoy - efforts by Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mitchell have been a study in frustration.

Netanyahu turned aside a U.S. demand last year for a comprehensive settlement freeze, offering a 10-month moratorium that excluded East Jerusalem. Even under President George W. Bush, whose interest was episodic, Israeli and Palestinian leaders held direct talks. Obama has struggled just to start “proximity talks,” in which U.S. mediators would shuttle between the two sides.

So American anger was white-hot when the March 9 announcement left the proximity talks stillborn.

Mitchell, who labored for months during frequent Mideast shuttles “is a patient man. ... but this has to be aggravating,” one State Department official said.

Senior U.S. officials are said to debate whether the unveiling of the 1,600 new apartments at Ramat Shlomo was a deliberate attempt by Netanyahu to avoid peace negotiations, or merely symptomatic of his tenuous control over his own government. The Interior Ministry is run by the ultra-orthodox Shas party.

Either conclusion bodes poorly for Obama’s attempts at diplomacy. Israeli officials say Netanyahu was as blindsided by the announcement as Biden was.

On Friday, March 12, Clinton and Netanyahu spoke by phone in a tense conservation, in which the secretary of state relayed U.S. anger at the move in Ramat Shlomo. She demanded that Israel take steps to revive hopes for peace.

The U.S. government has declined to list them, but they’re said to include an end to provocative moves in East Jerusalem; removing checkpoints and otherwise easing conditions on the West Bank; and agreeing to immediately negotiate core disputes with the Palestinians.

Clinton and Netanyahu were both keenly aware that they were scheduled to speak on March 22 in Washington at the annual conference of the powerful Jewish-American lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Netanyahu called Clinton, who was in Moscow, on March 18 and delivered his response to the American demands. Israeli officials say he insisted that the Palestinians had to make concessions too, not just Israel.

Publicly, the administration moved to tone down the rhetoric, and meetings were arranged with Clinton and Obama, who had canceled an Asia trip to be in Washington for the health care vote.

Netanyahu’s speech at AIPAC gave no ground. He declared, “Jerusalem is not a settlement; it’s our capital,” and described a limited U.S. role in the peace talks. The next morning, he went to Capitol Hill, where Democrats and Republicans alike showered him with promises of support for Israel.

It looked for a moment like the Israeli prime minister had weathered the storm.

At the White House, however, distrust of Netanyahu ran deep. Maps were prepared, showing how Israel had all but encircled Jerusalem’s Old City with Jewish settlements and even religious theme parks - “facts on the ground” that would preclude a peace deal. Palestinians also claim the city as their capital.

By all accounts, the White House meetings went badly, both in substance and tone, as the Obama team pressed Netanyahu to make concessions on Jewish settlements and other issues. Netanyahu balked at some of the requests, which the administration hasn’t made public.

Now, the ball is in his court.