Bullying the neighborhood bully

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him,
’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac.
He’s the neighborhood bully.

Neighborhood Bully – Bob Dylan

Scott Wilson writing on the web for the Washington Post posits that Israeli leaders are not likely to win diplomatic battles with the United States.

Next, think back to 1992. Picking a fight with the Bush administration cost Shamir his job. Who succeeded him as prime minister?

Rabin, who immediately pledged to cease construction of what he called “political” settlements in the territories. Perhaps he, too, remembered 1975.

Of course one could also point to Ehud Barak who did all he could to cooperate with the Americans to the point of making an unprecedented offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. Arafat rejected the offer and, two months later, launched a war against Israel. None of President Clinton’s goodwill towards Barak helped him as months later he went down to the worst electoral defeat in Israel’s history.

The two previous paragraphs, though, give a hint to Wilson’s premises and the limitations of his analysis.

First, it’s worth keeping in mind that opinion polls often show that a majority of Israelis supports the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. That is the Obama administration’s policy, which Israeli building in the territories severely undermines.

Moreover, secular Israelis view religious settlers as a drain on the national treasury and certainly not worth a fight with a superpower ally that provides the Jewish state with $3 billion a year in military aid.

Of course, building in Jerusalem is different from building in the territories. (And even Wilson’s unsupported assertion that building in the territories “undermines” a Palestinian state is dubious.) It was expected – even by the Palestinian Authority – that Israel would continue building in Jerusalem. It was only when the Obama administration made an issue of Israeli building in Jerusalem, that it became an issue with the PA. And in this way, despite Wilson’s finesse, that the Obama administration differs quite a bit from Israeli public opinion.

Daniel Pipes offers a number of reasons that he expects Netanyahu to survive this crisis, but the fifth one is the best:

A recent poll of American voters shows an astonishing 8-to-1 sympathy for Israel over the Palestinians, so picking a fight with Israel harms Obama politically – precisely what a president sinking in the polls and attempting to transform one-sixth of the economy does not need.

A point that Pipes does not make is that over the past 16 and a half years Israel has made concessions; nearly every single one of them was met with violence or greater intransigence on the part of the Palestinians. Analysts like Wilson have been preserved in amber going back to 1992. They forget this. But Israelis remember. If it wasn’t Camp David that was followed by the “Aqsa Intifada,” it was the withdrawal from Lebanon that led to the 2006 war with Hizballah or the withdrawal from Gaza that led to Operation Cast Lead. Israelis are skeptical of the peace process now and won’t be well disposed to an American President who shows sympathy to their foes and ignores Israeli sensitivities.

Similar to Wilson is Mark Landler of the New York Times who writes in “Opportunity in a fight with Israel.”

For President Obama, getting into a serious fight with Israel carries obvious domestic and foreign political risks. But it may offer the administration a payoff it sees as worthwhile: shoring up Mr. Obama’s credibility as a Middle East peacemaker by showing doubtful Israelis and Palestinians that he has the fortitude to push the two sides toward an agreement.

Pay attention to that opening paragraph. Note how he wrote “two sides.” Here’s what’s included in the rest of the “analysis”

Mrs. Clinton did keep up the pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to demonstrate that he was committed to negotiations with the Palestinians

A senior administration official said the harsh rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu, delivered in a phone call last week by Mrs. Clinton, was important “to demonstrate we mean what we say when we enter these talks.” The announcement of a housing plan, the official said, undermined trust just as the United States was trying to open indirect talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.
…
Taking a tough line with Israel helps the administration counter a perception that it folded last summer when Mr. Netanyahu rebuffed Mr. Obama’s demand that Israel freeze all construction of Jewish settlements. When Mr. Netanyahu countered with an offer of a 10-month partial freeze on the construction on the West Bank, Mrs. Clinton praised the offer as “unprecedented.”

That soured the Palestinians and left much of the Arab world wondering whether Mr. Obama would ever deliver on the promise in his speech in Cairo of a new approach to the Muslim world. American officials worried that this credibility gap could hinder their campaign to rally support from Persian Gulf countries for new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
…
That message was echoed by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the military’s Central Command, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the lack of progress in the Middle East was a large challenge to American interests.

“The conflict foments anti-American sentiment due to a perception of U.S. favoritism toward Israel,” he said.

In all three instances, Landler writes (in different ways) that it’s necessary for the United States to pressure Israel – not “two sides” as he expresses in his opening paragraph. (And Gen. Petraeus, never said that line that’s attributed to him. It was in the briefing that was presented to the Armed Forces Services Committee, but it was not in his statement. For more on this point please see, JINSA, Barry Rubin and Max Boot.)

Landler does quote Rep. Ackerman on getting both sides to talk peace, but mentions no specific instance of putting pressure on the Palestinians.

Landler, like Wilson, is living in the past. Charles Krauthammer neatly shines a bright light on this willful ignorance:

Israel made peace offers in 1967, 1978 and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis. Why, Clinton’s own husband testifies to the remarkably courageous and visionary peace offer made in his presence by Ehud Barak (now Netanyahu’s defense minister) at the 2000 Camp David talks. Arafat rejected it. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered equally generous terms to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Refused again.

In these long and bloody 63 years, the Palestinians have not once accepted an Israeli offer of permanent peace, or ever countered with anything short of terms that would destroy Israel. They insist instead on a “peace process” — now in its 17th post-Oslo year and still offering no credible Palestinian pledge of ultimate coexistence with a Jewish state — the point of which is to extract preemptive Israeli concessions, such as a ban on Jewish construction in parts of Jerusalem conquered by Jordan in 1948, before negotiations for a real peace have even begun.

Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians; assisted West Bank economic development to the point where its gross domestic product is growing at an astounding 7 percent a year; and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called “unprecedented.”

What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.

So not only have the Palestinians refused to make any substantive concessions for peace, they are surrounded by a cocoon of sympathetic journalists, academics, diplomats and politicians who ignore every single step made by Israel and pretend that it’s Israel that’s intransigent. They then insist that Israel must do more for peace, which only convinces Israel’s enemies to sit tight.

Or worse.

Lee Smith writes in Slate (via memeorandum)::

When the Obama administration promised to engage the adversaries that the Bush White House had isolated, U.S. allies followed the strong horse’s lead and also changed course. Most notably, the Saudis patched things up with the Syrians after five years of intra-Arab discord. Riyadh pushed its Lebanese allies to reconcile with Damascus, and with Beirut’s pro-democracy and pro-United States March 14 movement now all but dead, Washington no longer has a Lebanese ally. When President Barack Obama indicated that the most important thing concerning Iraq was to withdraw U.S. forces, the Syrians and Saudis found a shared interest in attacking Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Even as Maliki, his Iraqi security officials, and Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, explained that the Syrians were behind a series of mega-terror attacks in Baghdad, the White House hushed them up for fear that identifying Syria as responsible for the attacks would jeopardize its efforts to engage Damascus. It is lost on no one in the region that Washington left two allies out on their own. But it gets worse.

Some U.S. commentators have praised the Obama administration’s recent condemnation of Israel for announcing, during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, that it intended to build 1,600 apartment units in East Jerusalem. The White House’s response, they argue, sends a strong message that Washington won’t be bullied. In the Middle East, however, there is nothing that reeks so much of weakness as beating up on an ally in public. Moreover, this tongue-lashing comes shortly after the White House swallowed the open taunts of its adversaries. At a recent Damascus banquet featuring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal, Syrian President Bashar Assad openly mocked Secretary Hillary Clinton. He joked that he had misunderstood her demands that Syria distance itself from Iran, so instead, said Assad, he was waiving visa requirements for visitors from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Of course, Washington shaming Israel will please the Arabs—even U.S. allies like Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Cairo, Egypt, that cheered on Jerusalem when it took on Iran’s assets Hezbollah and Hamas. Remember, the Arabs have been compelled by the American strong horse to swallow their pride for decades. But given that Arabs do not air their own dirty laundry for fear it will make them look weak, our public humiliation of an ally will earn us only contempt.

Smart diplomacy at work.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.