The bully came to Washington. The American president told him in no uncertain terms that the United States would not support a military attack on Iran at this moment. The bully met with 13,000 of his U.S. supporters in an effort to pressure the White House. It didn’t work. The bully went home empty-handed.
This is the conventional news analysis of Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington, his discussion with President Barack Obama, his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and his consequent loss of face. Many elements of this analysis are true. So, for instance, it’s certainly true that the Israeli hawk failed to convince the Obama administration to green-light an attack during the so-called zone of immunity before Iran achieves its putative desire of membership in the nuclear club. It’s certainly true that Netanyahu’s hard-line speech on Iran quite nearly brought down the house at the AIPAC shindig, where the audience included more than half the members of Congress. And finally, the Obama administration did indeed hold to its position of “diplomacy backed by pressure.”
For many observers, Obama has gone at least a pawn up in the intricate chess game with Israel. The president “established a position his critics may find hard to assail,” concluded The Guardian’s Chris McGeal. “He forced those many members of Congress and beyond who have conflated America's interests with Israel's on to the back foot by saying that on Iran there are differences -- and he will serve U.S. interests first.” James Fallows in The Atlantic agreed: “The question is whether this tone genuinely buys Obama more time and freedom of action, rather than constraining his next decisions. I am betting we will look back on this as a chessmaster move. I am hoping that, too.”
But this story of Obama the diplomat standing up to Netanyahu the bully omits some important information. During Netanyahu’s visit, the Obama administration reportedly offered Israel a package of advanced military technology, including bunker-busting bombs and long-range refueling planes, as long as it postponed any attacks on Iran until 2013. In other words, Obama wasn’t only buying time, he was bribing Israel to prevent the kind of October surprise -- or even July surprise -- that might derail his reelection bid. And he was doing so with precisely the weapons that Israel could use to execute an attack on Iran.
Bribery is deeply embedded in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Half of all U.S. overseas military assistance, after all, goes to Israel. That’s $3 billion a year. And it will continue to rise every year until 2017, thanks to an agreement worked out under the Bush administration. And military assistance to Israel is unlike assistance to other countries in quality as well as quantity. “Israel’s $3 billion is put almost immediately into an interest-bearing account with the Federal Reserve Bank,” explains Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. “The interest, collected by Israel on its military aid balance, is used to pay down debt from earlier Israeli non-guaranteed loans from the United States. Another unique aspect of the assistance package is that about 25 percent of it can be used to buy arms from Israeli companies. No other country has that privilege.”
That Israel has been cutting its military spending -- an otherwise admirable decision -- means that the United States is increasingly picking up the slack. It also means that Israel, in theory, has increased its dependence on the Pentagon, which should translate into more U.S. political leverage over Israel. But with rare exceptions, the United States has not exercised this leverage. Israel, as I have argued elsewhere, is to the United States what North Korea is to China. These client states take everything from their putative benefactors except advice. Indifferent to international law, armed to the teeth, and isolated in their respective regions, Israel and North Korea dance to their own tune, however discordant it might be for everybody else.
Believe it or not, Obama’s “betrayal” of Israel has become a powerful meme in right-wing circles. Yes, this is the same president who went immediately from his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention in 2008 to speak with AIPAC, the same president who pushed the United States to veto a UN resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlement policy in the Occupied Territories, the same president who has continued to lavish military aid on the country.
In an article that labeled me as “pro-jihad” for an earlier World Beat column, Queen of the Islamophobes Pamela Geller writes of Obama’s “alienation of Israel.” In fact, Obama has the firm support of an Israeli intelligence and military elite (as neatly summarized by J.J. Goldberg in The Forward) that is deathly afraid of the consequences of an attack on Iran. As for Israelis themselves, their approval rating for Obama rose to 54 percent at the end of 2011, and only 19 percent of Israelis support an attack on Iran without U.S. backing. Even when it comes to Netanyahu, there’s been precious little alienation. “The story of Obama’s relationship to Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies is, fundamentally, a story of acquiescence,” concludes Peter Beinart in a Newsweek article that traces Obama’s evolution from a progressive Jewish position to something considerably more Likud-friendly.
Increasingly, Israel has come under mainstream media criticism for its domestic human rights as well. It’s not just the ghastly treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It’s not just the second-class citizenship accorded to non-Jews inside Israel proper. It’s also the rampant extremism that is rising like bile in the Israeli body politic. “These days, emboldened fundamentalists flaunt an increasingly aggressive medievalism,” writes David Remnick in The New Yorker. “There are sickening reports of ultra-Orthodox men spitting on schoolgirls whose attire they consider insufficiently demure, and demanding that women sit at the back of public buses. Elyakim Levanon, the chief rabbi of the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, says that Orthodox soldiers should prefer to face a ‘firing squad’ rather than sit through events at which women sing, and has forbidden women to run for public office, because ‘the husband presents the family’s opinion.’ Dov Lior, the head of an important West Bank rabbinical council, has called Baruch Goldstein -- who, in 1994, machine-gunned twenty-nine Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs, in Hebron -- ‘holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.’”
Obviously you don’t need to be living in Afghanistan or fighting with the Taliban to have an aggressively medieval approach to women and martyrs.
Let’s conclude with one last observation about Israel, North Korea, and the role of bribery in U.S. foreign policy. The right wing here has been up in arms over the Obama administration’s recent deal with North Korea in which the latter has promised a moratorium on missile and nuclear tests as well as on its uranium enrichment program. As part of the deal, though technically not a quid pro quo, the United States will provide 240,000 metric tons of nutritional assistance. The opponents of this deft display of diplomacy are aghast …at what? Feeding hungry children and pregnant mothers? “Four separate international nutritional assessments in 2011 found chronic malnutrition that, according to the UN, affects one in three children under five,” I write in Beyond the Golden Couples of Pyongyang. “Pyongyang has been unable to wean itself from dependence on Beijing’s food and energy assistance, and, out of necessity, has negotiated lopsided deals with China over access to mineral wealth and ports.”
For its part, North Korea has offered U.S. negotiators a significant threat reduction. The bribery of Israel, meanwhile, consists of guns, not butter: more weapons to add to the disgraceful arms race in the region. And what we get in return is a dubious pledge that Israel will not attack Iran for the next 12 months. Since such an attack would benefit from the element of surprise, Israel might simply be lulling Iran into complacency. Yes, of course, I support virtually any diplomatic initiative that prevents a cataclysmic war. But honestly, when it comes to bribing Israel, we should at least be demanding our money’s worth -- no unilateral military strikes, no illegal settlements, no human rights abuses -- or else, as China has occasionally threatened to do with North Korea, we simply turn off the tap.
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Nathan Gonzalez: How Sanctions Against Iran Could Backfire
Sure there are similarities to North Korea in terms of their respective relationships to their powerful allies (USA & China), but the difference is North Korea has no friends or allies in the USA to dictate policy towards them. Israel has hundreds of congressmen, numerous senators, countless others in top positions all over the country (especially in DC), etc...
Egypt is setting itself on a collision course with Israel, using the
Palestinian issue in all its aspects - including Israeli military
operations against Palestinian terrorism as well as Israeli policy in
Jerusalem or the West Bank - as an excuse for direct Egyptian
intervention.
Defining Israel as a "major enemy" means building a military capability
to deal with the "Israeli threat," including an attempt to deny Israel
any advantage in the nuclear field and/or the development of Egyptian
nuclear weapons.
Do you think Egypt will try to reannex Gaza? Just opening the border and rolling in from their end would set something off. Is Netanyahu anticipating that?
I guess concentration camps and murdering people is fine when you are in power.
Racism is accepted from Israelis.
One can be critical of Israel without being hysterical. Imagine, in the US, if a Mexican congressmen openly stated that the US should give back the entire South West to Mexico. It's a reasonable assertion, as America quite deliberately took control of the area, forced people out, and settled it. But if the congressman said such things, he'd be labeled a traitor. I'm afraid you'd really see racism then.
In Israel, there are six KMs who argue that Israel should cease to exist--and if any Israeli lays a finger on them, they go to jail just like anyone else. Arabs do not have to serve in the military (and most of them don't), whereas Druze and Jews do. With any working definition of racism, on the level of political institution or demonstrable aspects of society, you have a difficult case to make without either (1) occlusion of context or (2) shameless equivocation. It's possible to do it, and it's important that real racism is encountered and dealt with. It does exist in Israel, and it corrupts people's perspectives. But what you're trying to do is inadequate, and causes more harm than anything else.
But, as is clear, Judea and Samaria were not lands of a HCP at the time of the war because Jordan’s annexation of same was not recognized by the world, it follows that they are not “occupied territories” pursuant to the FGC.
Furthermore, the U.S. Definition of “Occupied Territory” is:
“Territory under the authority and effective control of a belligerent armed force. The term is not applicable to territory being administered pursuant to peace terms, treaty, or other agreement, express or implied, with the civil authority of the territory.”
Currently Judea and Samaria are being administered according to the Oslo Accords. Thus the Oslo Accords trumps the provisions of the FGC.
In no way can it be argued that the lands are “illegally” occupied. Res 242 of the Security Council gave Israel a licence to remain there until she had “secure and recognized borders”. This licence continued as a fundamental part of the Oslo Accords.”
PS and why in Hades can't jews live where they choose to Christians and Muslims do- in great numbers in Israel actually!
The fact that people disagree with Israeli actions does not mean ‘hatred’. It means that they see NO justification for Israeli’s self-possessed rights to take what they want when they want claiming that they alone should own every square inch of Palestine.
You can never provide justification that Israel is at a “disadvantage” in an area where everyone hates Israel. Israel has caused this hatred by the infringement on agreements and the encroachment beyond the partition.
Funny you forgot they won it back in 1967 off Jordan
It's Israel now and free and open to all religions
Got a problem with that?
"In 2005 Israel decided to dismantle all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern West Bank....the government won the case by noting the settlements were in territory whose legal status was that of 'belligerent territory'.....
The Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, cited a case involving Gaza and said that "The Judea and Samaria areas are held by the State of Israel in belligerent occupation. The legal representative of the state in the area is the military commander. He is not the sovereign in the territory held in belligerent occupation. His power is granted him by public international law regarding belligerent occupation. The legal meaning of this view is twofold: first, Israeli law does not apply in these areas.... Second, the legal regime which applies in these areas is determined by public international law regarding belligerent occupation."
[wikipedia]
An occupying power may not transfer parts of its population into occupied territory, and it may not alter the characteristics of that territory (for example by construction) other than in the case of military necessity in the narrowest sense of the term. That is why Israelis cannot simply decide to live in the West Bank.
[Geneva Conventions]
Unlike Israel which has not transferred one person into a war zone. NOT ONE PALLY
Conservatively places Total U.S. aid to Israel at 114 billion dollars.
That's $20,000.00 for each an every Jewish Israeli of American Tax dollars.
About France they were of 2 minds about their liberation. They welcomed Hitler in the same numbers as welcomed the liberators. The true Maquis were so few and so insidious that they more feared than helpful. After their liberation by, mainly, American troops, they showed their gratitude by spitting in our face at every turn.
"The UN Security Council has uttered zero words of condemnation of these attacks. There is something wrong with this equation. It is time for the Security Council to speak with one voice against the terrorism that continues to flow from Gaza. The situation is grave. If one rocket lands in the wrong place at the wrong time, Israel will be forced to respond in a completely different manner."
What was the agreement between both sides? This is a part of history of which I am unaware and I really want to know.
1. Muslims don't kill, and 2. (Jews) know well how to kill
Remember folks Turkeys don't vote for Christians
Israel has been stalling with negotiating since Netanyahu came to power without any results. Israel loves to talk without getting anything accomplished. Why? So they can continue to solidify their grip on seized West Bank land they have no intention to return to Palestine. There is no negotiation as long as Israel builds illegal settlements in the West Bank. What part of Illegal don't these pin heads in Washington get? Even Hillary Clinton: Israeli Settlements 'Illegitimate'
If Israel started to suffer from our loss of support, The nationalist Likude Party would fall.
America is broke morally and financially.
----------------
1. Can you provide sources that Israel stalled negotiations? So far since 1948, Israel has offered three 2 state solutions which were all denied by the arabs and Palestinians. These consists of Resolution 181, Olmert, Barak, and Netanyahu offerings. The two official binding agreements are the Osslo Accords and Resolution 242, which the Palestinians violated several times.
2. The West Bank is considered "Disputed" since its last foreign occupier Jordan had no official claims to the land and relinquish its illegal imperialism after the Six Day War. So this "illegal" settlements you make are false, considering some of these settlements were jewish pre-1948. There is only one solution to fix the West Bank and that is through the Oslo Accords to negotiate a peace agreement and agree on mutual borders through 242. Israel is accepting this offer, Palestine rejects it. Its that simple.
See my response to "Britback" above.