Loading ...Steps in the right direction
The division between American and Israeli Jews is growing nowadays, recently prompted by the publication of “Ally: My Journey Across the American Israeli Divide”, authored by the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, a close ally of the extreme rightist Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a member of the Israeli Knesset.
A severe slap in his face came from a former key assistant of President Barack Obama’s Middle East team, Philip Gordon, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.
The former White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region seemed stunned by Oren’s “surprisingly and maddeningly partial book” and wrote a sharply critical review of Oren’s book, published in The New York Times last Sunday.
Talking about US-Israel relations, Gordon underlined: “This unique partnership, based on shared history, common values, strategic interests and domestic politics, has become even more complicated in recent years as differences between the two countries have escalated.”
In other words, the headline on the jump page spells out the issue: “Oren tells only half the story — Israel’s half.”
According to Obama’s onetime top aide, “the value of the book is that it reflects a view genuinely held by many Israelis”.
Their point, according to Gordon, is “that the Obama administration, naively seeking to repair US ties to the Muslim world and failing to appreciate Israel’s value to the United States, broke with decades of US policy towards the region by systematically siding with the Palestinians and seeking a reconciliation with Iran”.
Oren’s view is that “Obama broke with a long-standing principle that there should never be ‘daylight’ in the relationship” between the US and Israel.
Here Gordon, probably to the surprise of many in the Middle East, cited several straightforward actions by all US presidents since the founding of Israel.
For example, Eisenhower “slammed Israel for the 1956 Suez operation and forced it in a humiliating retreat; Gerald Ford froze arms deliveries and announced reassessment of the relationship as a way of pressing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai; Jimmy Carter clashed repeatedly with prime minister Menachem Begin before, during and after the 1978 Camp David summit”.
He continued: “Ronald Reagan denounced Israel’s strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq and enraged [Israel] by selling surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia; George H.W. Bush blocked loan guarantees to Israel over settlements; Bill Clinton clashed publicly with Israel over the size of the proposed West Bank withdrawals; George W. Bush called for a settlement freeze in the 2002 roadmap for peace and afterward repeatedly criticised Israel for construction in the West Bank. In other words, Oren has a point — except in the case of virtually every Republican and Democratic US administration since Israel’s founding.”
Gordon highlighted in his lengthy essay the policies of presidents Obama, Clinton and George W. Bush that essentially supported territorial negotiations with Israel on the basis of the 1967 armistice lines, with mutually agreed swaps.
Oren was also criticised for his recent “blistering op-eds and interviews, replete with pop psychology and levelling the outlandish charge that Obama made ‘deliberate mistakes’ to damaged US-Israeli relations… .”
Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net, a popular website that does not hesitate to criticise Israel, noted that recent days have seen several “sharply negative reviews” of Oren’s book.
He pointed out the five writers who “latch onto Oren’s condescending criticism of American Jewish journalists as a group afraid of American anti-Semitism that they need to criticise Israel to the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted that Oren is not critical of Obama only, but also of American Jewish liberals; he mentions The New York Times writer Thomas Friedman and Leon Wieseltier, formerly with The New Republic and more recently of The Atlantic.
Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio, voted last Tuesday overwhelmingly to approve a resolution calling for concrete action towards a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The vote, 508 in favour, 124 against and 38 abstentions, the Jewish Voice for Peace pointed out, was “the culmination of a process that began in 2005 to end the church’s complicity in Israel’s nearly half-century-old occupation and other abuses of Palestinian human rights.
The resolution included divestments from specific companies that profit from the occupation, a boycott of products produced in illegal Israeli settlements, and advocacy to ensure that foreign aid to Israel does not violate US law regarding countries that engage in human rights abuses.
All this turnaround raises hope that the Obama administration would henceforth be more serious about starting the ball rolling in its last year in office, encouraging all parties to negotiate a final Palestinian-Israeli settlement.
The writer is a Washington-based columnist.
Source: www.jordantimes.com