ISRAEL'S FALSE FRIENDS (Mearsheimer/Walt Op-ed in the Los AngelesTimes today)

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-mearsheimer6jan06,1,6831048.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Israel's false friends

U.S. presidential candidates aren't doing the Jewish state any favors

by offering unconditional support.

By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt

January 6, 2008

Once again, as the presidential campaign season gets underway, the

leading candidates are going to enormous lengths to demonstrate their

devotion to the state of Israel and their steadfast commitment to its

"special relationship" with the United States.

Each of the main contenders emphatically favors giving Israel

extraordinary material and diplomatic support -- continuing the more

than $3 billion in foreign aid each year to a country whose per capita

income is now 29th in the world. They also believe that this aid

should be given unconditionally. None of them criticizes Israel's

conduct, even when its actions threaten U.S. interests, are at odds

with American values or even when they are harmful to Israel itself.

In short, the candidates believe that the U.S. should support Israel

no matter what it does.

Such pandering is hardly surprising, because contenders for high

office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel's

staunchest supporters -- the Israel lobby, as we have termed it --

expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or

"Christian Zionists," two groups that are deeply engaged in the

political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even

well-intentioned criticism of Israel's policies may lead these groups

to turn against them and back their opponents instead.

If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel's friends

in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign

contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action

committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in

states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in

close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as

insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support.

And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the

Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP

base.

Indeed, even suggesting that the U.S. adopt a more impartial stance

toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can get a candidate into

serious trouble. When Howard Dean proposed during the 2004 campaign

that the United States take a more "evenhanded" role in the peace

process, he was severely criticized by prominent Democrats, and a

rival for the nomination, Sen. Joe Lieberman, accused him of "selling

Israel down the river" and said Dean's comments were "irresponsible."

Word quickly spread in the American Jewish community that Dean was

hostile to Israel, even though his campaign co-chair was a former

president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Dean had

been strongly pro-Israel throughout his career. The candidates in the

2008 election surely want to avoid Dean's fate, so they are all trying

to prove that they are Israel's best friend.

These candidates, however, are no friends of Israel. They are

facilitating its pursuit of self-destructive policies that no true

friend would favor.

The key issue here is the future of Gaza and the West Bank, which

Israel conquered in 1967 and still controls. Israel faces a stark

choice regarding these territories, which are home to roughly 3.8

million Palestinians. It can opt for a two-state solution, turning

over almost all of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians and

allowing them to create a viable state on those lands in return for a

comprehensive peace agreement designed to allow Israel to live

securely within its pre-1967 borders (with some minor modifications).

Or it can retain control of the territories it occupies or surrounds,

building more settlements and bypass roads and confining the

Palestinians to a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the

West Bank. Israel would control the borders around those enclaves and

the air above them, thus severely restricting the Palestinians'

freedom of movement.

But if Israel chooses this second option, it will lead to an apartheid

state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said as much when he recently

proclaimed that if "the two-state solution collapses," Israel will

"face a South African-style struggle." He went so far as to argue that

"as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." Similarly,

Israel's deputy prime minister, Haim Ramon, said earlier this month

that "the occupation is a threat to the existence of the state of

Israel." Other Israelis, as well as Jimmy Carter and Anglican

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have warned that continuing the occupation

will turn Israel into an apartheid state. Nevertheless, Israel

continues to expand its settlements on the West Bank while the plight

of the Palestinians worsens.

Given this grim situation, one would expect the presidential

candidates, who claim to care deeply about Israel, to be sounding the

alarm and energetically championing a two-state solution. One would

expect them to have encouraged President Bush to put significant

pressure on both the Israelis and the Palestinians at the recent

Annapolis conference and to keep the pressure on when he visits the

region this week. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently

observed, settling this conflict is also in America's interest, not to

mention the Palestinians'.

One would certainly expect Hillary Clinton to be leading the charge

here. After all, she wisely and bravely called for establishing a

Palestinian state "that is on the same footing as other states" in

1998, when it was still politically incorrect to use the words

"Palestinian state" openly. Moreover, her husband not only championed

a two-state solution as president but he laid out the famous "Clinton

parameters" in December 2000, which outline the only realistic deal

for ending the conflict.

But what is Clinton saying now that she is a candidate? She said

hardly anything about pushing the peace process forward at Annapolis,

and remained silent when Rice criticized Israel's subsequent

announcement that it planned to build more than 300 new housing units

in East Jerusalem. More important, both she and GOP aspirant Rudy

Giuliani recently proclaimed that Jerusalem must remain undivided, a

position that is at odds with the Clinton parameters and virtually

guarantees that there will be no Palestinian state.

Sen. Clinton's behavior is hardly unusual among the candidates for

president. Barack Obama, who expressed some sympathy for the

Palestinians before he set his sights on the White House, now has

little to say about their plight, and he too said little about what

should have been done at Annapolis to facilitate peace. The other

major contenders are ardent in their declarations of support for

Israel, and none of them apparently sees a two-state solution as so

urgent that they should press both sides to reach an agreement. As

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security advisor and now a

senior advisor to Obama, noted, "The presidential candidates don't see

any payoff in addressing the Israel-Palestinian issue." But they do

see a significant political payoff in backing Israel to the hilt, even

when it is pursuing a policy -- colonizing the West Bank -- that is

morally and strategically bankrupt.

In short, the presidential candidates are no friends of Israel. They

are like most U.S. politicians, who reflexively mouth pro-Israel

platitudes while continuing to endorse and subsidize policies that are

in fact harmful to the Jewish state. A genuine friend would tell

Israel that it was acting foolishly, and would do whatever he or she

could to get Israel to change its misguided behavior. And that will

require challenging the special interest groups whose hard-line views

have been obstacles to peace for many years.

As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami argued in 2006, the

American presidents who have made the greatest contribution to peace

-- Carter and George H.W. Bush -- succeeded because they were "ready

to confront Israel head-on and overlook the sensibilities of her

friends in America." If the Democratic and Republican contenders were

true friends of Israel, they would be warning it about the danger of

becoming an apartheid state, just as Carter did.

Moreover, they would be calling for an end to the occupation and the

creation of a viable Palestinian state. And they would be calling for

the United States to act as an honest broker between Israel and the

Palestinians so that Washington could pressure both sides to accept a

solution based on the Clinton parameters. Implementing a final-status

agreement will be difficult and take a number of years, but it is

imperative that the two sides formally agree on the solution and then

implement it in ways that protect each side.

But Israel's false friends cannot say any of these things, or even

discuss the issue honestly. Why? Because they fear that speaking the

truth would incur the wrath of the hard-liners who dominate the main

organizations in the Israel lobby. So Israel will end up controlling

Gaza and the West Bank for the foreseeable future, turning itself into

an apartheid state in the process. And all of this will be done with

the backing of its so-called friends, including the current

presidential candidates. With friends like them, who needs enemies?

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the

University of Chicago. Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international

affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. They are the

authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published last

year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional on Mearsheimer and Walt:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=49800

Obama and the Jews:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=83419

Jewish NBC News programming head censors root cause of 9/11

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=83306

Video that gets to the Israel question:

http://www.IRmep.org/jm.wmv

The Gorilla in the Room is US Support for Israel

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/08/gorilla-in-room-is-us-support-for.html

SCANDAL: 9/11 Commissioners Bowed to Pressure to Suppress Main Motive

for the 9/11 Attacks:

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/09/reviews-of-without-precedent-inside.html

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/07/why-declare-jihad-against-us_10.html

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/09/no-other-motivation-no-other.html

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/05/dishonesty-about-911-motives-robs.html

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/07/msms-continuing-game-serving-israel.html

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2006/08/cnn-continues-to-downplay-and-omit.html

Additional at following URL:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=39590