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By: Morton A. Klein; Daniel Mandel January 31, 2014 |
Under Obama’s pressure, Israel’s Netanyahu government accepted in-principle a Palestinian state
The
Obama pattern is clear. The respect for sovereign decisions and
deference to security concerns that apply to other U.S. allies are
absent when it comes to Israel.
Last week, it leaked that Israel’s Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, had privately described
Secretary of State John Kerry as “obsessive and messianic” in his quest
to broker an Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement. The Obama
Administration angrily rejected
Ya’alon’s words as “offensive and inappropriate,” demanding and
receiving an apology. Yet, only weeks earlier, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a
close adviser to Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud
Abbas, also excoriated
John Kerry as possessed of “dangerous” proposals and seeking to
“appease Israel by fulfilling its expansionist demands in the Jordan
Valley under the pretext of security. He wants to buy Israeli silence
over the Iran deal.” But for these grave, personal PA allegations
against Kerry, the Obama Administration has said nothing.
Why this startling discrepancy in the
Administration’s response? Why has it ignored blatant anti-peace
statements from the PA, such as the call
by the PA Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash for Syrian
jihadists to cease murdering each other and wage war against Israel? Or
the PA’s Abbas Zaki reaffirming that the PA’s public demand for a state
alongside Israel is merely a device aimed at eventually removing Israel
from the map –– a policy supposedly repudiated over 20 years ago?
Because the Administration will not
assimilate evidence that invalidates its public formula that the
Palestinians are willing to conclude a genuine peace with Israel. So it
ignores or finesses PA anti-peace words and deeds, while stridently
criticizing Israel on disagreements and reluctance to make unilateral
concessions.
“…the
Administration will not assimilate evidence that invalidates its public
formula that the Palestinians are willing to conclude a genuine peace…”
Under Obama’s pressure, Israel’s Netanyahu
government accepted in-principle a Palestinian state and
unprecedentedly froze Jewish construction in the West Bank for 10 months
in a bid to bring the PA to the negotiating table. The PA refused to
come until the very end and broke off talks shortly after, but it was
Israel whom Obama singled out in a January 2010 TIME interview for failing to make any “bold gestures” for peace.
When in March 2010, during a visit to the region by Vice-President Joseph Biden, the PA’s named a public square
in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, the leader of the 1978 coastal road
bus hijacking, in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were
slaughtered, the Obama Administration was silent for days. When Clinton belatedly criticized the Mughrabi event, it was only to whitewash the PA by falsely claiming “a Hamas-controlled municipality” had initiated it.
In contrast, a mere Israeli announcement
of building program in a Jewish neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem that
also occurred during the Biden visit led the Obama Administration to
immediately condemn it and describe it as “destructive,” an “insult” and an “affront.”
No other state, let alone ally, attracts
the same ire, even when policy divergence is massive. When in April 2010
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in the words
of journalist Joel Brinkley, made “delusional criticism of the United
States and its allies” and threatened to “join the Taliban” –– this, in
the midst of U.S. soldiers fighting and dying shoring up his regime ––
the Administration found it merely “troubling” and “frustrating” and asserted that Karzai needed to be “treated with respect.”
When in June 2010, Turkey voted against a
new US-supported U.N. Security Council sanctions bill on Iran, there was
no talk of destructiveness, insults or affronts –– the U.S. was merely “disappointed.” And when in October 2011, the Abbas’ Fatah brazenly demanded U.S. taxpayer aid as “a political and moral right,” Obama took no notice, let alone curtail or withhold aid to the ingrate PA.
When Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressing a mass rally, called the U.S. a “Great Satan” and an “enemy who smiles,” and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani boasted
that “the U.S. and world powers surrendered to the Iranian nation’s
will,” Obama said nothing. Only when the Iranian Foreign Minister,
Mohammad Zarif, laid a wreath at the tomb of a Hizballah terrorist
leader, who in 1983 murdered 242 U.S. marines in Lebanon, did the
Administration permit a low-level National Security Council official to condemn it is a short statement.
Israel is expected to do things neither the U.S. nor its other allies would do. This month, the Obama Administration was critical
of Afghanistan’s Karzai releasing of scores of Islamist “dangerous
criminals against whom there is strong evidence linking them to
terror-related crimes.” But last year, the Administration pressured
Israel into releasing scores of convicted Palestinian killers of Israeli
civilians –– although it did express concern
when one of those released, Al Haj Othman Amar Mustafa, turned out have
also murdered an American. Actions unacceptable elsewhere were
positively demanded of Israel.
The Obama pattern is clear. The respect
for sovereign decisions and deference to security concerns that apply to
other U.S. allies are absent when it comes to Israel. Israel is
expected to bow to the Administration’s policy without demur, run
security risks the U.S. itself would not abide, and ignore the
extremism, non-acceptance and bad faith of its Palestinian interlocutor,
just as the Obama Administration does. This is just the unseemly
underside of the disconnect between the Administration’s public words of
support for Israel and the reality of its coolness and indifference to
the realities it faces.
Morton A. Klein is National President
of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). Dr. Daniel Mandel is
Director of the ZOA’ s Center for Middle East Policy.
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