How can Israel survive without growing up?

“Which prosperous ally gets $3 billion a year in aid, and a veto power over America’s entire Mid-East foreign policy? Which ally refuses to cooperate with its military and political protector – even to the point of humiliating a duly elected American president? Which ally violates the Non-Proliferation treaty and manages to get its super-power protector to maintain total silence on this glaring fact? Which ally is threatening conventional warfare if its own nuclear monopoly in the region is in any way threatened?” asks Andrew Sullivan.

“Israel is the exception to every rule. And its intransigence is beginning to force the US toward a horrible choice between allying ourselves with the tectonic democratic forces in the region, or backing a fundamentalist-dominated state bent on expansion and war.”

Sullivan hasn’t turned into a fringe anti-Zionist blogger. He’s merely echoing views that are expressed much more freely in Washington than mainstream media reports generally reveal.

Robert Gates, having served as defense secretary for both presidents Bush and Obama, clearly wasn’t a political maverick when he ran the Pentagon, yet his assessment of Israel was no less blunt than Sullivan’s.

As Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg recounted last week:

In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee held not long before his retirement this summer, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security — access to top- quality weapons, assistance developing missile-defense systems, high-level intelligence sharing — and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.

Senior administration officials told me that Gates argued to the president directly that Netanyahu is not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank. According to these sources, Gates’s analysis met with no resistance from other members of the committee.

Gates has expressed his frustration with Netanyahu’s government before. Last year, when Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel was marred by an announcement of plans to build new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem, Gates told several people that if he had been Biden, he would have returned to Washington immediately and told the prime minister to call Obama when he was serious about negotiations.

Even so, having thoroughly alienated himself from the Obama administration, who does Netanyahu turn to in a desperate situation?

Former Director of the Mossad Efraim Halevy, speaking in New York on Monday night, described the predicament the Israeli prime minister found himself in on Friday as protesters in Cairo were storming the Israeli embassy and six Israelis remained trapped inside.

[Netanyahu] turned to one man, to the President of the United States, and he spoke to him. And the president of the United States, without having much time to consult with Congress, and with the media, and with the analysts and with all of the other people who have to be consulted on major and grave decisions. He took a decision to take up the telephone and get on the line with the powers that be in Egypt, and get them to order the release of these six people, and the detail of the Egyptian commando forces entered and saved them.

I think that this decision by President Obama was a unique decision in many ways. Because I don’t have to tell you, and this was just said time and time and over again this afternoon/this evening, that the United States is not in a position the way it was many years ago in the Middle East, it has its problems, it has its considerations, and rightly so. But I believe the leadership that the President of the United States showed on that night was a leadership of historic dimensions. It was he who took the ultimate decision that night which prevented what could have been a sad outcome—instead of six men coming home, the arrival in Israel of six body bags.

And I want to say to you very openly and very clearly that had there been six body bags, there would have been a much different Israel today than we have been used to seeing over recent years. This would not have been one more incident, one more operation, one event. And the man who brought this about was one man and that was President Barack Hussein Obama.

And I believe it is our duty as Israelis, as citizens of the free world, to say, not simply thank you President Obama, but also we respect you for the way and the manner in which you took this decision.

Note first the ominous way in which Halevy says that had these Israelis died this would not have been “one more incident” — unlike, say, the deaths of six Egyptian border guards shot by Israelis in late August, or the deaths of nine Turkish activists killed by Israeli commandos on board the Mavi Marmara just over a year ago.

But note also that Israel, while pursuing what a senior Israeli official describes as a “porcupine policy” to defend itself, when caught in this particular corner found its prickles of no use and instead was compelled to turn to its only reliable protector, the United States.

As Tzipi Livni, the head of the Kadima Party, told Goldberg: “For Israelis, when they wake up in the morning and ask themselves, what is the general situation today, the litmus test for them is the health of the relationship between Israel and the United States.”

And thus we see the contradiction which is Israel — forever pumping itself up, flexing its muscles and showing its neighbors that no one should risk messing with the mighty Zionist state, yet all the while knowing that without the protection of the United States, Israel’s survival would depend on a revolutionary transformation.

Absent American protection, Israel, for the first time, would have to seriously take on the challenge of getting along with its neighbors and not, as it has for the last two decades, simply use diplomacy as a facade behind which it can pursue its policies of territorial expansion.

Is the West’s spoiled child ready to grow up? And is the United States ready to see that its own patronage is what has allowed the Jewish state to trap itself in such a prolonged adolescence?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Facebooktwittermail

5 thoughts on “How can Israel survive without growing up?

  1. Ian Arbuckle

    “And thus we see the contradiction which is Israel — forever pumping itself up, flexing its muscles and showing its neighbors that no one should risk messing with the mighty Zionist state, yet all the while knowing that without the protection of the United States, Israel’s survival would depend on a revolutionary transformation.”

    This whole scenario and this bit especially reminded me of a different allegory:

    The story of the macho mouse wondering the African savannah, in his delusion that there was nothing he could not seduce to his will, when suddenly he comes across an old girl elephant grazing beneath the canopy of a thorny acacia. The mouse seeing this as just another great challenge of conquest quickly runs up the hind quarters of the female elephant and starts “forcing himself upon” this unsuspecting victim. Just then a small breeze rises and unbeknown to the mouse at the other end, a broken thorny branch falls upon the sensitive trunk of the elephant, who immediately reacts by letting out a loud trumpeted roar of surprise and pain.

    The mouse looks up from his intense efforts and says : “Suffer baby, suffer!”

    In fact what Israel is doing to America, I think, is hurting it much more than the mouse or the branch, even if the members of Congress and the House can ignore the pain by just closing their eyes and loving the rewards.

  2. omop

    The Jews/zionists have been able to make Americans believe in absurdities and therefore have made it easy for them to allow atrocities. In the end we Americans will end up paying the bigger price.

  3. Renfro

    The Mossad director’s account isn ‘t quite the same account in Haarezt..it wasn ‘t Obama who called Egypt. It was SOD Leon Panetta.
    And , heheheh…it took over 2 hours for the Egyptian Military commander to come to the phone for him…’so sorry Tantawi is tied up call back in a hour or two’. LOL

    Haarzet..

    “The United States told Egypt’s military rulers during an attack on the
    Israeli embassy in Cairo that they must act quickly in order to prevent
    Israeli personnel from being attacked by Egyptian protesters, Haaretz
    learned on Saturday.
    According to senior U.S. source that were involved in the attempt to resolve
    the Cairo incident, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called Supreme
    Military Council head Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, conveying what the source
    called a forceful message concerning the need for speed in Egypt’s ending of
    the embassy attack.
    “There’s no time to waste,” Panetta reportedly told Tantawi in the 1 A.M.
    call, warning of a tragic outcome that “would have very severe
    consequences.”
    The U.S. source also said that Tantawi failed to answer incoming calls from
    U.S. officials throughout the evening, finally answering after more than two
    hours of attempts.
    These reports came after earlier Saturday, a senior Israeli source indicated
    that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak
    attempted repeatedly to reach the head of Egypt’s Supreme Military Council,
    to no avail.
    According to the Israeli source, the “Egyptians said every time that they
    were not able to track him down in order to connect the call.” After failing
    to locate Tantawi himself, Netanyahu called head of Egyptian intelligence,
    Gen. Murad Muwafi.
    Barak, in turn, called U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, asking him to
    discuss the issue with Tantawi, which Panetta was able to do shortly after.

  4. dickerson3870

    RE: “Is the West’s spoiled child [Israel] ready to grow up? And is the United States ready to see that its own patronage is what has allowed the Jewish state to trap itself in such a prolonged adolescence?” ~ Woodward

    SEE: Overprotecting Parents Can Lead Children To Develop ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’, ScienceDaily (May 3, 2007)

    (excerpt) The ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ affects people who do not want or feel unable to grow up, people with the body of an adult but the mind of a child. They don’t know how to or don’t want to stop being children…
    …Some characteristics of the disorder are the inability of individuals to take on responsibilities, to commit themselves or to keep promises, excessive care about the way they look and personal well-being and their lack of self-confidence, even though they don’t seem to show it and actually come across as exactly the opposite…
    …Robles points out that the only solution for this disease is the right psychological treatment, not only centered on the person who suffers from the disorder but also on his/her partner and family [a/k/a his enablers – JLD].

    SOURCE – http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070501112023.htm

Comments are closed.