Israel and the U.S. elections: Dirty politics drives out good policy
By
Max J. Castro Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com
You
knew that the Republican smear campaign against Barack Obama had to
begin in earnest some time soon. But who would have predicted the
setting or the character that would fire the first shot?
Speaking
before the Israeli parliament, George W. Bush himself delivered a
thinly-veiled and vicious attack against Barack Obama, in the process
evoking memories of the Holocaust and equating those who would talk
to leaders such as the president of Iran — as Obama has said he
would be willing to do — with those who sought to appease the Nazis.
Thus,
even before the nomination has been formally decided, the GOP attack
machine, personified by the president, delivered one of the most
dastardly, demagogic, and divisive political attacks in recent memory
— and from foreign soil.
The
viciousness of the attack corresponds to the desperate situation the
Republicans find themselves in — or should find themselves in given
their disastrous performance. That is, if only race and
hyper-nationalism did not still play a huge role in American
politics.
The
divisiveness of the attack is an essential component of the
Republican strategy to achieve a seemingly unlikely victory in
November. It relies upon playing on fear and prejudice to grab
vulnerable segments of the Democratic constituency, especially
conservative Jews and working-class white voters.
One
might think that the Holocaust is too grave a matter and war and
peace in the Middle East to important for these things to be turned
to mere partisan fodder. But Bush has always proved both utterly
incapable of making good policy when it comes to the Middle East and
completely willing to play politics with the subject.
On
the policy side, seven months from the end of his term, George W.
Bush is still claiming that he can settle the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict and preside over the creation of a Palestinian state by the
end of this year. In fact, no American president with anywhere near
such a one-sided outlook as Bush — as reflected in the president’s
speech in Israel, which dismayed U.S. allies in the region — can
have any hope of brokering a peace between Israel and the
Palestinians.
Birds
of a feather flock together; no president has supported Israeli
hard-line policies as staunchly as Bush. But then the entire U.S.
discourse regarding relations between the United States and Israel
has an almost surreal quality. Nowhere is this more evident than in
the way the media tests the candidates’ unwavering and virtually
unconditional support for the state of Israel except, perhaps, in the
lengths candidates are willing to go to in order to toe the line. A
prime example: John Roberts of CBS News asked Hillary Clinton what
she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. In
response, Clinton said the United States would “obliterate” Iran.
That
this is not in any way a reasonable journalistic question or policy
response but rather a litmus test given and passed is clear in the
following facts. Iran does not have nuclear weapons. Moreover, U.S.
intelligence has found that Iran does not have a program to build
nuclear weapons. If Iran began such a program, it would be many years
before it would have a viable bomb, and probably not before Hillary
Clinton served out a hypothetical second term. Israel, in contrast,
already has a significant number of nuclear weapons.
Thus
a reasonable question might have been what the candidate might do if
Israel were to attack Iran with nuclear weapons, for instance to
prevent or dissuade that country from building its own nuclear
weapons. Indeed, it might even have been reasonable to ask what the
United States would do if an extreme faction won the elections in
Israel and used a nuclear weapon to attack Gaza. After all, Iran has
never launched a military attack on Israel while Israel has attacked
Gaza repeatedly.
As
to Clinton’s response, Israel has all the nuclear weapons needed to
annihilate Iran, and in the unlikely event this did not deter an
Iranian leadership, Israel no doubt has the capacity and disposition
to obliterate Iran in retaliation — all on its own and well before
the United States could react.
The
absurdity of the question and the bellicosity of the response are
reflective of a mind-set that is anything but conducive to bringing
peace between the two contending sides in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. That would require an honest appraisal of the reality of
the situation, something no American politician running for office is
capable of giving.
Yet
not everyone is swayed by political opportunism, bias, or fear. Henry
Siegman, a former executive director of the American Jewish Congress
and of the Synagogue Council of America, and currently a professor at
University of London, has written words (“Tough Love for Israel,”
The
Nation,
May 5, 2008) that no American candidate or even Western leader would
be willing to utter:
“The scandal of the
international community’s impotence in resolving one of history’s
longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does
not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. . .
That problem is that for all the sins attributable to the
Palestinians — and they are legion, including inept and corrupt
leadership, failed institution-building, and the murderous violence
of rejectionist groups — there is no prospect for a for a viable,
sovereign Palestinian state, primarily because Israel’s various
governments, from 1967 until today, have never had the intention of
having such a state come into being…
“It would be one thing
if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state
until certain security concerns had been dealt with. But no
government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would
have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of
Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian
statehood impossible.”
One
cannot expect this kind of honesty from a presidential candidate in
the United States. Instead, the bar is set so high in terms of
unquestioning support for Israel that the Republicans can be expected
to attack Obama for merely making the most minor of gestures in the
direction of even-handedness or for expressing the slightest degree
of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. That process has
already started.
The
irony is that the domestic political dynamic which drives American
leaders to indulge Israel makes American presidents fundamentally
incapable of acting with the kind of fairness that would help Israel
achieve what it needs the most: a lasting peace.
