I shall be ever admiring of the Jewish people, even if being "God's chosen" has been far from easy. The Jewish people have survived with faith, intelligence and courage the world's worst manifestation of hate and inhumanity. By virtue of that survival, it is impossible for a reasonable mind not to be sympathetic to Israel's legitimate and continuing interest in peace and security. The United States has not been hesitant to affirm Israel by meeting her various needs through substantial appropriation, nearly $120 billion since 1948, including a new $3.1 billion for this fiscal year -- an astounding sum in light of the still fragile nature of our own economic circumstance.
Despite this generosity, the United States is being "rewarded" with pettiness and insult. The ad hominem and unjustifiably harsh criticism of Sec. Kerry by the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, is insulting and hurtful to US-Israeli relationship. In particular, Yaalon's denunciation of the Secretary's hard work in favor of the peace in the Middle East as "obsessive and Messianic" is a criticism so outrageous in content that it warrants diplomatic apology and change of view. One of the reasons I am standing for election as an independent to Congress in California in a district that historically has been neither consistently Democrat nor Republican is to highlight the many ways it is important for "we the people" to take back the places of decision in government and not leave governing to those who succumb to the pressure of corporate donation or the brow-beating of an ally used to getting its own way, but who should know better.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been slow to rein in his defense minister -- in all likelihood to shore up his own domestic political position. Aloof and bullying with President Obama from the beginning, Netanyahu has tried to excuse his ungracious colleague by suggesting that any disagreement Israel has with the United States is always substantive, not personal -- a statement that bears no relationship to international law, and on its own terms, and on its own terms possesses a rudeness that is more Orwellian than not.
But all right, let us indulge the personal side for a moment. I have always held dear the memory of my grandfather who at the end of the 19th century emigrated from his native Poland to the United States, forgoing a promising career as a young historian because of his unremitting, and unapologetic, denunciations of anti-Semitism and the early ghettoization of the Jews in Kraków and elsewhere. The name "Kmiec" itself has been declared to be "righteous among all the nations" in view of the heroic actions of Peter (Piotr) Kmiec laying down his own life in order to save Jewish citizens from an almost certain death in Auschwitz..
More than a few American descendants of families that emigrated from Eastern Europe have this in their history in America. Moreover, in the vast majority of American homes, there is the very personal, life-saving memory of playing the part of the "greatest generation," as Tom Brokaw has called our parents and grandparent. My late father's B-17 "flying fortress" World War II military service readily brings to mind his empathetic and sensitive appreciation for the hardships the Jews have endured for no reason other than their own humanity.
When I took up diplomatic service as ambassador to the Republic of Malta, I had not anticipated how much these personal memories would affect my work. Indeed, it turns out they may have ended it prematurely. Four years ago this month, at the request of then-special envoy George Mitchell, I was slated to give the keynote address to an Arab-Israeli conference sponsored by the United Nations under the coordinating assistance of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean. This would be one of the Obama administration's first formal overtures to restart the Middle East negotiations that had all but disappeared during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Absurdly, Mitchell met resistance at every turn -- from the Israeli side and their minions in the State Department. Frustrated, Mitchell was leaving the post before the Malta conference could take place, and he delegated to me the responsibility to underscore his words calling for a two-state solution premised upon carefully crafted land swaps and that were reflective of pre-1967 boundaries.
Given our family history, given my appreciation for Pres. Obama's sincerely expressed desire to kick-start negotiations, and the sensitivity for Sec. Clinton's ingenious pursuit of proxy negotiations as a way of moving things along, I readily undertook the assignment.
Most of the things to be said on the first day of the UN conference had been said many times before. From the Palestinian side, the illegality of Israeli settlements since the 1967 war has been a constant irritant to peace, limiting personal movement of Palestinian citizens, blocking medical care and supplies and even turning back food for a Palestinian population that at times has been near starvation. The staggering losses of the Holocaust certainly give Israel every right to be suspicious of neighboring states or sub-state entities like Hamas that refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. That political statement is too frequently given reminder by seemingly random and often deadly disruptions of Israel's civil order. All this, the United States has and would denounce; yet, there were passages in Sen. Mitchell's draft that became my own that Israel needed to stop its illegitimate settlement activity. Israel didn't like these reminders, even as they were reflective of the views of the President and Secretary Clinton.
Clearing remarks within the State Department is about as easy as convincing God that the Ten Commandments ought to be whittled down to five. Nevertheless, the remarks were approved and importantly in calling for negotiations to resume, President Obama did something few American political figures have been willing to do: namely, he proclaimed, in support of a two-state solution with appropriate land swaps, that the United States should not be understood to be anything other than an honest broker -- neither the agent of Palestine nor the lawyer for Israel. Various snubs followed including new settlement activity that seems to follow an Israeli tradition of being announced the day after a presidential or vice-presidential trip to the Holy Land; sometimes announced in their presence.
Secretary Clinton understood the value of this U.S. approach.
Oddly, as in all bureaucracies, the word took a while to filter down to the assistant secretary level, who were accustomed to taking instruction from the hardliners in Israel, or at least anticipating that ultimately a new Secretary would yield to the great variety of Israeli political pressures to look the other way at a settlement practice in clear violation of international law. Indeed, in an era when the red and the blue cannot agree on the time of day, both political parties blocked repeated efforts by the UN to admonish Israel for its settlement practices.
And so I should not have been surprised on the first morning of the UN conference, when mention of Israeli settlement illegality was mentioned by the Palestinian delegation, that the Israeli delegation made for the exits, and fully expected the U.S. tail on the Israeli dog to follow. I didn't and I took a middle-of-the-night tongue lashing from a mid-level State Department functionary. I listened, dissented, and then said: "Look, if you can call me back by daybreak and truthfully represent that your direction is concurred in by the secretary or the president, I will stand down." Without that, I told my bureaucratic friend that I fully intended to make the presentation as George Mitchell had intended, and as it had been approved with one addition: I planned on framing President Obama's and Secretary Clinton's reaffirmation of Middle East even-handedness with the inspirational words of Nobel Peace prize advocates.
No surprise: neither the president nor the secretary reaffirmed the State Department bureaucrat. No one phoned me back. Israeli settlement activity would be called illegal and that assessment of illegality, joined in formally by virtually all the nations of the world, would be identified by as the key reason for the elusive nature of peace in the Middle East.
Bureaucrats have a way of finding ways to get even when it is least expected. In my case, the revenge came wrapped up in a governmental review a year or more later that would paint another presidential directive given to me, the promotion of inter-faith dialogue, as not within my job description. When I decided to return home a tad earlier than my own timetable, the bureaucrat left to make the report was the very same midnight caller. "Any final thoughts?," he asked. "Yes," I said, "please tell Secretary Clinton how much I admire her efforts to bring peace in the Middle East." My interlocutor was surprised, but he should not have been. Secretary Clinton's careful assessment of the entire region and willingness to challenge the Israeli strait-jacket that too often has choked the pursuit of peace deserved as much praise and support then as Secretary Kerry's determined peace efforts do now.
Here's hoping that the president will be successful in finding members of Congress in either party who will have enough spine to stay the Clinton-Kerry course even when the PM of Israel and his agents descend upon official Washington and lobby for a new tighter set of Iranian sanctions that might get an individual legislator re-elected here or there, but that will once again set back the cause of peace.