Some of the stories are merely interesting anecdotes, such as Romney’s complaint that Britain was too crowded or his amicable meeting with former Polish president Lech Walesa. The most telling highlight of the trip, however, was his fundraising speech in Tel Aviv concerning Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.
Romney’s address was a cringe-inducing string of verbal missteps. In short order, he endorsed a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran, supported Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its national capital, and strongly implied that the reason the Palestinians were poor compared to the Israelis was due to Arab cultural inferiority. While the speech undoubtedly played well for certain audiences, on the balance it was an embarrassment. Its most grating element was Romney’s use of the pronouns “we” and “us” for the United States, as if he had already won the election and had the right to speak on behalf of the American people. Most irksome of all, however, was the underlying assumption that the U.S. will unconditionally support Israeli foreign policy regardless of Israel’s actions. Coming on the heels of the Obama administration’s $3.1 billion military aid guarantee for the coming year, Romney’s latest foot-in-mouth episode merely points up a long-running syndrome in U.S. foreign policy.
The alliance with Israel has proven an expensive and counterproductive one for the United States. Simply put, many of Israel’s hostile Muslim neighbors supply us with oil. However negatively Arabs, Persians, and other Muslim peoples are perceived in this country, a negativity which taps into the American view that certain cultures are superior or inferior, we are heavily dependent upon the strategic natural resource they control. One cause of this state of affairs is that American policy toward Israel is formed by the confluence of powerful lobbying groups such as AIPAC, the political preferences of frightfully ignorant red state Evangelicals who believe Israel’s reestablishment fulfills biblical prophecies of the Second Coming, and neoconservative policymakers who still believe the U.S. can remake the Middle East in its own image. An added dimension is the mirroring of Israeli and Americans' respective self-images. Israeli exceptionalism is a first cousin to American exceptionalism, at least in practice. When you are building a city on a hill, you don’t concern yourself with the rights of people who get in your way.
It's not hard to see, then, why the story of Israel resonates with American conservatives. European settlers, fleeing religious persecution, convinced they are on a divine mission, land on a foreign shore believing they have arrived in the promised land. Driving out the indigenous population, sometimes by guile, more often by force, the settlers come to consider any real or perceived opposition as further justification of the righteousness of their cause. The new nation’s self-identity becomes an ideology, any criticism of which, no matter how justified, brands the critic as disloyal or worse.
The events of the past decade have only served to further muddle the issue of human rights in Palestine. American politicians of all but the most progressive stripe accept without question the premise that the U.S.-Israeli alliance is a bulwark against Islamist militancy in the Middle East. Support for Israel has transposed the culture wars at home on the Middle East. One argument used by cultural conservatives to bolster their advocacy of stronger U.S.-Israeli ties is that Israel is essentially a European nation, an outpost of a culture much like ours sited in hostile territory. In other words, the courageous Israelis are holding back the barbarians at the gates.
Arguments centered on cultural essentialism are risky at best. And by no means is U.S. support for Israel the sole reason for anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. American backing of corrupt, oppressive regimes in the the Arab states, Iran, and Central Asia during the Cold War contributed heavily to Islamist militancy, along with decades of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern petroleum resources. The rest of the world does not share America’s historical amnesia, least of all in this most contentious of the world’s regions. When Romney accuses Iran of testing America’s “moral defenses” (whatever that means), he is pandering as much to the prejudices of Republican voters at home as he is trying to rally Israeli sentiment for a new Mideast war in furtherance of corporate interests.
The past record of the more extreme elements of the Palestinian independence movement often overshadow legitimate discourse over how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. While American memories are short, we can always count upon Israel and its advocates to refresh them. The decision last week to not include a commemoration of the 1972 Munich massacre in the opening of the London Olympic games stirred up a welter of controversy over whether we have forgotten this and sundry other anti-Israeli atrocities at Palestinian hands. However, history is used to further subjective, collective ends. Consequently, in the West Palestinian history is ignored while the heroic Zionists are lauded. Valorization of the Israeli experiment pushes aside fundamental questions concerning the nature of the experiment.
Israel faces an existential dilemma. It can be any two of the following but not all three: A Jewish state, a democracy, and Eretz Israel (a Greater Israel encompassing all of the Levant as defined in Israel’s declaration of independence). A solely Jewish democracy excludes non-Jews by definition. Likewise, so does a solely Jewish Eretz Israel. A democratic Ertez Israel would have to extend equal rights to its Arab majority, thereby obviating its Jewish character. The frequent claims of Israeli leaders that Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy fully equal social and political rights fail on the premise that Israel is the Jewish homeland. By definition, a non-Jew must be a second class citizen in a Jewish state.
Bearing in mind this last premise, of the numerous solutions proposed for the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the least-worst outcome is the two-state solution. Even this course of action has multiple variants depending upon the political proclivities of the advocate. The one that would provide a rough approximation of fairness is an Israel within its pre-1967 borders, a Palestine consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, and Jerusalem as a neutral corpus separatum as originally set out in the 1947 UN partition plan. A rough approximation of fairness, however, in no way translates into justice for displaced Palestinians after more than sixty years of being deprived a national homeland.
In any case, prospects for a fully sovereign Palestine are chancy if not unlikely. Any two-state plan accepted by Israel and the U.S. would surely place restrictions on the Palestinian entity’s ability to trade freely and provide for its self defense, essentially rendering it an Israeli dependency. Furthermore, it’s not as if the Israelis haven’t considered the two-state solution on their own. According to Tom Segev in his history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli leadership at one point considered a preemptive declaration of a Palestinian state led by hand-picked Arab notables. Under the right conditions, the United States and Israel could achieve a significant propaganda coup while preserving the status quo via creation of a dependent, co-opted Palestinian state.
It is unlikely any kind of equitable solution is viable in Palestine because, frankly, the two most influential players don’t want one. The long-term undercurrent of Israeli policy, particularly that of Netanyahu’s and of previous Likud governments, has been to marginalize and remove any vestige of Arab self-determination in the remaining Palestinian territories. This is a process that has been supported, albeit incrementally, by successive U.S. presidential administrations. Israel has been a third-rail issue in American politics for decades and any politician on the national stage must step carefully so as to avoid causing offense to the constellation of interest groups which advocate for Israel. It’s important for a non-incumbent presidential candidate to establish his or her positions early on while avoiding the appearance of policymaking from the rostrum. With this in mind, Mitt should keep any further promises to foreign leaders to himself until after he’s won the election.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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