Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By MJ Rosenberg

It is customary for Congress to pass resolutions commending Israel on the anniversary of its founding in 1948. Once these resolutions were innocuous with references to “making the desert bloom” and “ingathering” Jewish refugees. Standard “pro-Israel” boilerplate. No more.

In recent years Congress, with the Israel lobby’s eager assistance, has coupled salutations and congratulations with increasingly strident language about terrorism, Palestinians, and now, Iran. (For an excellent analysis on how the concept of being “pro-Israel” has degenerated in recent years, see this smart piece by Michael Koplow, program director of the Israel Institute at Georgetown University.)

One such anniversary resolution now being considered in the Senate and, with 79 cosponsors, certain to pass is Senate Resolution 65, introduced by Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), two lobby stalwarts. It cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today.

The resolution begins with five clauses of standard rhetoric, noting that “since its establishment nearly 65 years ago, the modern State of Israel has… forged a new and dynamic democratic society including “freedom of speech, association, and religion; a vigorously free press; free, fair, and open elections; the rule of law; a fully independent judiciary; and other democratic principles and practices….” The usual fare.

Then, with no transition, it segues into 14 clauses condemning Iran with citations of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ugly language about Israel, his repeated Holocaust denials, the Islamic Republic’s human rights violations and then the threat ostensibly posed by its nuclear program.

That is followed by 13 clauses citing President Obama’s repeated promises not to permit Iran to attain a nuclear weapon, along with Congress’ own, which are even more aggressive.

These 32 clauses are just the windup for the pitch which says that if Israel goes to war with Iran, the United States should join the fight. The resolution states:

that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.

On the surface, this doesn’t sound that terrible. After all, it specifically limits our commitment to a situation in which “Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense….”

But the “self-defense” limitation is no limitation at all. The United States has deemed all major Israeli military actions as “self-defense” (most recently two Gaza wars) with the oft-repeated statement that the United States is “fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.” Couple that with President Obama’s language ruling out containment of a nuclear Iran and it’s pretty clear that any attack by Israel on Iran will be deemed self-defense by the United States.

In short, the Graham-Menendez resolution is telling Israel that if it goes to war, we will have their back.

The problem here is not that Congress is saying that the United States would support Israel if there was any chance that it might be defeated in a war with Iran or anyone else. That is obvious and has been since 1973 when the United States military was placed on its highest alert following the joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel.

No, the point of this resolution is to tell Israel that it can go to war with Iran, with the assurance that if it gets into trouble, the United States will step in and finish the job. Israeli hawks need that assurance because it is generally understood that Israel cannot take out Iran’s nuclear facilities alone. It can only try if it knows that the United States is right there just in case.

The intent of this resolution is to eliminate any Israeli hesitancy about getting into a war it cannot win. Israelis won’t do that. Menendez, Graham and company are telling them not to worry. Just do it, and we are in too.

Here is AIPAC press release patting itself on the back:

SENATE COMMITTEE ADOPTS STRONG, BI-PARTISAN RESOLUTION STANDING WITH ISRAEL AGAINST IRANIAN NUCLEAR THREAT

WASHINGTON – AIPAC praises the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for adopting today Senate Resolution 65 – a strong bi-partisan statement that the United States will stand by Israel if our ally feels compelled to take military action in its own legitimate defense against the threat from Iran. The resolution specifies that the United States should provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to Israel “in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”

The resolution also reiterates that the policy of the United States is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and to take such action as may be necessary to implement this policy. The resolution urges the President to strengthen enforcement of sanctions on Tehran.

Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sponsored the resolution. Now ready for floor action, Graham-Menendez , has garnered broad bi-partisan support in the Senate with 79 co-sponsors. The Committee action comes at a critical moment when Iran has repeatedly rebuffed diplomatic efforts and has continued its march to attain nuclear weapons capability.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has sent a very clear and enormously important message of solidarity with Israel against the Iranian nuclear threat – which endangers American, Israeli, and international security. AIPAC urges the full Senate to act expeditiously to adopt the resolution.

Consistently ranked as the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, AIPAC is a bipartisan American membership organization that seeks to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Israel. For more than 50 years, AIPAC has been working with Congress to build a strong, vibrant relationship between the U.S. and Israel. With more than 100,000 members across the United States, AIPAC works throughout the country to improve and strengthen that relationship by supporting U.S.-Israel military, economic, scientific and cultural cooperation.

Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By MJ Rosenberg

In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker had basically had it up to here with the Israeli government. The (George H.W.) Bush administration had been trying to entice Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir into negotiations with the Palestinians but he kept adding new conditions to get the United States off his back.

To be acceptable to Shamir, any Palestinian interlocutors had to have no connections with the PLO, none with any associates of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and could not be from Jerusalem. Beyond that, the Israelis would decide which Palestinians were acceptable as negotiating partners based on their idea of merit (only pro-Israel Palestinians would do, apparently).

Baker was fuming but held his tongue until he went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss Middle East prospects. But then something happened and, for perhaps the last time ever, a top U.S. government official told the Israelis what he really thought.

First Baker said that he had intended to say that he was ready for a new start with the just re-elected Shamir government but he changed his mind on the way to the hearing. ”I have to tell you, that before I came to this hearing this morning, I was given a copy of some wire reports, one of which quotes one of the ministers in the newly formed government,” he said.

Those “wire reports” cited top Israeli officials announcing new conditions for negotiations. According to then-New York Times correspondent (now columnist Thomas Friedman):

Earlier today, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir added an additional condition: that Palestinian negotiators must formally embrace Israel’s idea that negotiations would be about autonomy for the occupied territories and nothing more, before talks could begin. The American position is that the talks should open with a discussion about autonomy, but then eventually move on to issues of final status.

In other words, negotiations would begin and end with discussions about “autonomy.” “Autonomy” would have meant that Israel could keep all the land but Palestinians would have the responsibility for municipal services like schools, sanitation and health. It was the perfect solution… for Israel.

Baker blew up. He told the committee (again from the Times):

If that is going to be the Israeli approach, said Mr. Baker, ”there won’t be any dialogue and there won’t be any peace, and the United States of America can’t make it happen.” He said: ”You can’t. I can’t. The President can’t….

He then said that until the Israelis changed their attitude, the Bush administration was going to disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian issue (a not happy prospect for Israel given that it was then embroiled in trying to suppress the first intifada.)

He concluded by telling the Israelis “when you’re serious about peace, call us.” To emphasize his point, he said that “the telephone number is 1-202-456-1414.”

And that was that. The Bush administration never reconciled with Shamir. Although Baker handed out Bush’s phone number, it was Shamir’s number that America now had. The administration then worked around him until it could help engineer his downfall at the hands of Yitzhak Rabin, who Bush and Baker very much wanted to see as prime minister. (Bush himself lost his bid for re-election due to the languishing economy, leaving Bill Clinton to work with Rabin on Middle East issues).

Shamir later admitted that he had no intention of ever accommodating the Palestinians in any way. In an interview after leaving office, he said:

I would have carried out autonomy talks for 10 years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].

Baker’s approach was totally vindicated.

And yesterday Shamir’s long-time protégé, Binyamin Netanyahu openly adopted the Shamir strategy. No one needs to wait until his retirement to understand that, like Shamir’s, it is designed to prevent negotiations not advance them.

Ha’aretz reported that the Netanyahu government has informed Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel is not interested in discussing land and borders right now.

A senior Israeli official, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the subject, expressed considerable skepticism regarding Kerry’s steps, and made cynical, slightly scornful comments regarding his attitude. “Kerry believes that he can bring about the solution, the treaty and the salvation,” he said. “He thinks that the conflict is primarily over territory…and that is wrong.”

Wrong? No, that is what the conflict has been about since the occupation began in 1967 and certainly since Israel and the PLO agreed that both sides have the right to peace and security.

So we are back to Shamir and the bad old days before Rabin.

The good news is that Netanyahu has made everything so clear. He has no interest in peace, negotiations, any kind of territorial withdrawal or even freezing settlements. Like Shamir, he just wants to buy time until it will be absolutely impossible to create a Palestinian state, if it isn’t already. As for the United States, Netanyahu is not interested in what it wants.

The only question left is what the Obama administration will do in response. It could follow Baker’s example and take a walk. Even better, it could tell Netanyahu that future aid from the U.S. will be linked to its occasional compliance with U.S. wishes regarding the occupation. Or it could say, it won’t keep following Israel’s dictates on sanctions or Palestine’s right to recognition by the United Nations. Or it could, as Bush and Baker did, squeeze the Israeli prime minister until the Israeli public dumps him.

It could do any of those.

Will it? I’m taking bets.

But here is a sure one. There is no possibility of serious negotiation so long as Binyamin Netanyahu is prime minister of Israel.

None.

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Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

By Ralph Seliger

I’ve signed this petition, as have a wide array of public figures, artists and academics from across the political spectrum and of a variety of faiths — including such accomplished historians as Israel’s Yehuda Bauer, Canada’s Irving Abella, and David S. Wyman in the U.S. Israel’s initial welcome reception of African refugees has become unwelcoming and even ugly, as their numbers have grown precipitously. I begin with a note from Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, who initiated this petition (email him or contact the Wyman Institute to add your name):

As you know, Israel has been at the center of international controversy over its handling of African refugees who have been arriving at its border.

The interfaith petition below is intended to be signed by religious leaders of all faiths, scholars in all fields, organizational leaders, and political and cultural figures from around the world–we seek a broad cross-section of distinguished individuals to demonstrate the breadth of support for this effort. Once we have a sufficiently large and impressive body of signatories, we will present it to individual governments and press for its adoption.

The Hebrew University-Hadassah Genocide Prevention Program, and the Israeli Association to Combat Genocide, have endorsed this initiative. Would you do us the honor of allowing your name to be added to the list below?

With all best wishes,

Rafael Medoff, rafaelmedoff@aol.com

THE EVIAN DECLARATION
Israel and the African Refugee Crisis:
A WORLD SOLUTION FOR A WORLD PROBLEM

Significant numbers of African men, women, and children are fleeing genocide, political persecution, or economic hardship, and many have been seeking refuge in Israel. We note that the people of Israel have an impressive record of assisting African and other underdeveloped countries, and sheltering refugees from around the world. At the same time, we acknowledge the Israeli public’s legitimate concern over expectations that Israel should shoulder all or most of the burden of caring for the new refugees.

We urge the international community to address this crisis in the spirit of the appeal made by U.S. Vice President Walter F. Mondale at the United Nations Conference on Indochinese Refugees, held in Evian, France, in 1979. He said the countries attending the infamous 1938 Evian conference “failed the test of civilization” by refusing to help Europe’s Jewish refugees, and he urged the 1979 attendees to cooperate in resolving the crisis of “boat people” fleeing Indochina: “We face a world problem. Let us fashion a world solution.” Those words moved governments to act. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

We call on the nations of the world to accept their responsibility to share the burden of resolving the African refugee crisis. We hope Israel will play an appropriate role in such an effort alongside other nations that are committed to doing their fair share. With the approach of the 75th anniversary of the original Evian conference, in July 2013, we urge men and women of good will to come together in a partnership of humanity to face this crisis.

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By Ira Chernus

Crossposted on Tikkun Daily

The real Barack Obama was clearly on display in his quick trip to Israel and Palestine. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, he always gives you something you want with one hand, while he takes away something equally important with the other hand.

When Obama spoke in Jerusalem, I cheered as loudly as the audience of liberal Jewish students who shared my views, which the president voiced so eloquently: The occupation is really bad for Israel; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must lead his nation to a just peace with an independent, viable Palestinian state.

I cheered most when I heard Obama say words that I never thought I’d hear an American president say in Israel: The occupation is not merely harmful to Israel’s national interests, it’s downright immoral: “It is not fair that a Palestinian child … lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. … It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands … or to displace Palestinian families from their home.” Bravo!

But Obama is no starry-eyed idealist. He crafts such idealistic words for practical political purposes. In this case he was pushing Israeli liberals and centrists further toward the peace camp, widening the gap between them and the Netanyahu-led right wing. Down the road, he can use the political tensions he stirred up to move Israel toward the kind of peace agreement he wants.

The pundits who declared him finished with the peace process were obviously wrong. (Even Thomas Friedman can make mistakes.) The president gave me something I want very much: A promise of more American pressure on Israel to make a just peace, for moral as well as practical reasons.

Predictably, though, at the same time Obama took away something equally important: his demand that Israel stop the main roadblock to peace, its expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Instead he fell back on the vague language we’ve heard from many presidents before: “We do not consider continued settlement activity to be constructive, to be appropriate”; “Settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace.”

In Ramallah, standing alongside Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Obama called the settlements merely an “irritant.” He urged Abbas not to use settlements as an “excuse” to refuse direct negotiations.

There’s some evidence that the PA had already received and perhaps accepted this message from Washington. Talking points prepared for Abbas suggested that he should agree to negotiations after getting only private assurances from Netanyahu on stopping settlement expansion. How much could those assurances be worth?

Back down on moral principle and tolerate an evil for the sake of a greater good: That seems to be Obama’s message now on the settlements. As usual, the president gives and at the same moment takes away. Does it make him just another crass politician, maneuvering to score the next victory, bereft of any principle?

Not necessarily. Biographies of Obama suggest that, from his college days, he has been a devotee of a consistent set of principles: the script laid out over 80 years ago by the famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic book, Moral Man and Immoral Society — though Niebuhr supposedly said, years later, that he should have called it “Immoral Man and Very Immoral Society.”

Indeed. Because Niebuhr’s basic point is that we are all doomed to tolerate and even embrace evil. We are all selfish, always out to get more than the other guy, simply because we are human. It’s the old story of original sin — the myth of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, expelled forever from paradise — dressed up in 20th century clothing.

If individuals are bound to be nasty and brutish to each other, it’s worse in relations among nations, Niebuhr argued. Never expect anything from a nation except greed and lust for power. Even on the rare occasion that a nation pursues a relatively good aim, it’s bound to use evil means. And that includes Niebuhr’s homeland, the good old US of A.

It pained him to see his theology become the dominant narrative of cold war America with one huge twist: U.S. presidents and policymakers exempted America from the universal stain of sin — at least in public, where they insisted that America would, and could, do no wrong.

In private, the cold warriors acted upon (and occasionally admitted to each other) the principle that Niebuhr said all nations will inevitably use: accepting evil means to pursue even the best goals. The 21st century warriors against terrorism, Democrats as well as Republicans, have followed the same Niebuhrian script. Now Obama has brought it to the Middle East.

In fact Americans have always practiced such hypocrisy, Niebuhr argued, although they generally denied it and claimed that their nation was as pure as Eden. That’s The Irony of American History (as he titled his other most famous book).

Obama surely understand this irony very well. He never quite comes out and admits that he is embracing evil for the sake of a greater good. But he doesn’t boast of America’s perfect purity in the way the early cold warriors, or his predecessor George W. Bush, did.

Obama addresses almost every issue in the Niebuhrian way he spoke of the settlements: “The politics there are complex … It’s not going to be solved overnight,” because there is no absolute good or evil; we always deal in shades of gray; we all make compromises; sooner or later, we all become hypocrites.

But I wonder whether Obama ever stops to think about the other irony of American history, since Niebuhr became a guiding light of its foreign policy.

When he wrote Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr thought he was showing a better path toward hope and change than the idealistic Christian liberalism of the Progressive era. You’ve got to get your hands dirty in the political process if you want to improve the world: That was the essence of the myth that he intended to create.

History played a trick on him, though — just as his own theory predicted. The main message that American readers and leaders took from his book is that the world is a dangerous place; everyone is out to get us; self-protection is the name of the international game; so do evil unto others before they do it unto you.

This is the foundation of what I call the American mythology of homeland insecurity. It’s the narrative that dominates U.S. foreign policy — and Israeli foreign policy too, though the Zionists didn’t need Niebuhr to teach them. They developed their own myth of insecurity before he ever wrote a word.

The same narrative dominated Obama’s rhetoric in Israel. He wrapped his calls for peace in endless recitation of the supposed dangers that Israel faces, dangers that are largely imaginary. He may have meant it as a pragmatic move, to convince Israeli Jews that he really does care about their fate.

But irony always wins in the end, Niebuhr taught. So Obama’s powerful reinforcement of Israel’s insecurity is likely, in the end, to undermine his call for Israel to compromise and take risks for peace. As long as the Israeli Jews, and their supporters here in the U.S. (mostly gentile conservatives), believe that they are as endangered as Obama says, they are not likely to take any risks at all. They are more likely to do evil to others, because their fearful imaginings tell them that others are about to do evil to them.

Myths of insecurity always block the path to hope and change. Barack Obama, the faithful Niebuhrian, always gives hope and change with one hand and takes it away with the other.

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