Dec. 1, 2008
Prez-elect Obama just announced his cabinet picks a few hours ago - a slightly unnerving selection of candidates who make Hillary suddenly look like the darling of the right wing.
Approaches to the Middle East and the war on terror are broadly divided into two camps: Those who believe the Palestinian-Israeli issue is at the heart of all problems Middle Eastern vs. those who say militant Islam is the root of terrorism and causing uprisings, including the Palestinian intifadas.
Not only has Obama stacked the foreign affairs team with the former, most of them have confessed opposition to Israel and shown disdain to Jews and Christians who support Israel. I subscribe to the latter. Look at Mumbai: Terror with no connection to Palestine, albeit with the typical hatred of Jews, Israelis, and Westerners laced into it.
Sen. Hillary Clinton will be well received by Israelis as secretary of state. Israel had a swooning love affair with the Clinton administration and most Israelis wanted Hillary to win the elections this year.
“Sen. Clinton is a friend of the State of Israel and the Jewish People and I am sure that – in her new position – she will; continue to advance the special Israel-US relationship," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said.
But that's where the niceties end. Samantha Power, who called Clinton “a monster,” then resigned from the Obama campaign earlier this year is back, as a senior foreign policy advisor who will have to work with Clinton.
Let's deal with Samantha Powers first:
From the American Thinker: The problem for those who favor a strong US-Israel relationship is that Power seems obsessed with Israel, and in a negative way. Much like the authors of the Baker-Hamilton report, she believes resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to solving other problems in the Middle East. And it is clear that her approach to addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be for the US to behave in a more "even handed" fashion, which of course means withdrawing US support for Israel, and instead applying more pressure on Israel for concessions.Retired Marine Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser
...Power also advocates that America send armed military forces, "a mammoth protection force" and an "external intervention", to impose a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. This directly contradicts her criticism of the invasion and "occupation" of Iraq and her call for the removal of American forces from that nation. On the one hand, Power abhors American efforts to remake an Arab nation, but takes the contrary view when it comes to inserting American forces in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to impose a settlement. These troops, if sent, would be seen as occupiers and be sitting targets for Arab extremists. The colonial image of America and charges of imperial overstretch would echo throughout the Arab world.
If America sought to avoid being so tarnished -- which is presumably what Samantha Power would desire -- then the alternative would be for the United States to take a confrontational attitude toward Israel, so as to be seen as standing up for the Palestinians. Given her inclination to view Israel as guilty of war crimes she would probably look favorably on such an approach towards the Israelis and Palestinians.
Power's views on the problems caused by the US-Israel relationship also place her in the same camp as Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Soros (an influential supporter of Barack Obama's), who also oppose the so-called "Israel lobby" and reject the participation of American supporters of Israel, including Christians, in the foreign policy discussion. Power writes of her willingness to: "alienat[e] a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing...billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine."
She says more regardin Lebanon: "Israeli forces refused to comply with the spirit of international demands to withdraw and the major powers on the Security Council were not prepared to deal with the gnarly issues that had sparked the Israelis invasion in the first place: dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity".
The "spirit of international demands" to withdraw? Aside from wondering what that means and the enforceability of such a spirit, how about that phrase "dispossessed Palestinians and Israeli insecurity"? The dispossessed Palestinians had left Palestine mostly at the behest of calls by their Arab brethren to step out of the way as armed forces invaded Israel upon its founding. They and their descendants were denied rights by Lebanon and were unable to assimilate -- unlike the 600,000 Jews who were stripped of their possessions in Arab lands and whom Israel welcomed. The term "Israeli insecurity" makes it seem as if the Israelis were suffering from an emotional or psychological condition. In fact, it was not insecurity, per se, that the Israelis suffered from. It was Palestinian terrorism that the Lebanese government refused to prevent.
She quotes the subject of her book, about Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian diplomat with the United Nations who spent years tackling various humanitarian crises, until he was killed in Iraq in 2003, calling the Israelis "bastards."
From The New Republic by Eli Lake: Jones, the retired commandant of the Marine Corps, has significant experience in the Middle East. Last November, Condoleezza Rice appointed him as her special envoy for Middle East security, with a particular emphasis on working with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian security services. Last August, he drafted a report on security in the Palestinian territories that is said to have been highly critical of Israel's policies in the territories and its attitude toward the Palestinian Authority's security services. The White House and State Department opted not to publish the report.
In August, Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, reported that the draft report challenged Israel's conception of its security interests in the West Bank as being overly broad, and that the IDF in particular was too dismissive of the Palestinian security services. The newspaper quoted one IDF officer as saying he expected the report would be "very harsh, and make Israel look very bad." Steve Rosen, the former director of foreign policy for AIPAC who was dismissed from his post after the federal government charged him and a colleague with leaking classified information to the press and a foreign official, told me, "In my experience, when you take a 'deep dive' into security issues in the territories, you very quickly come to tradeoffs between Israeli security and Palestinian rights. Successful counter-terror preventive and pre-emptive measures require highly intrusive intelligence collection that is onerous for the population of the area under surveillance. ... A third party tries to balance Israeli security and Palestinian rights with a different valence than an Israeli security agency."
In his interview with Inside the Pentagon, Jones said that the Palestinians should be granted increasing degrees of local sovereignty over the West Bank until an independent state is born--with an emphasis on giving the Palestinians experience with governance. On Sunday, Ha'aretz reported that Jones favors dispatching a NATO force to keep the peace in the interim. That's a plan that the Israeli government would likely fiercely resist on the grounds that the Jewish state's defense doctrine has always spurned the presence of foreign troops on its territory and that it could be a reprise of the disasters of the U.N. mission to Lebanon.
No comments:
Post a Comment