The Arab world is in turmoil, as the high promise of the “Arab spring” is everywhere descending—from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to (soon) Syria—into the triumph of the Islamists and Muslim Brothers. And meanwhile Abbas and the PA, rejecting negotiations with Israel and recognition of it as a Jewish state, continue their unilateral drive for UN recognition and seek to unite with Gaza’s overtly terrorist and rejectionist Hamas rulers.
Yet precisely at this moment of both great clarity and great peril for Israel, one further radicalized by Iran’s looming achievement of a nuclear weapon, the new American Secretary of Defense, Leon E. Panetta, angrily advises threatened Israel, America’s only reliable ally in the Middle East: “Get to the damn table!”
This is an expression of utter and final Administration bankruptcy, the absolute nadir of Obama’s failed Middle East foreign policy. Obama has—repeatedly and willfully ignoring all the evident realities—consistently disregarded Israel’s situation and instead played to the Muslim regimes and public. This failure runs from the outright lies of Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech to the precipitate abandonment of longtime ally Hosni Mubarak, from the failed efforts to negotiate with the Iranian mullahs to the (related) ignoring and abandonment of the Iranian people’s protest movement, and from the repeated attempts to appease the Syrian dictator to America’s muted response as he murders his own protesting citizens.
And now—in the face of the sustained refusal of Abbas to sit down with Israel, his vicious rejection of Israel’s historical claims in his specious UN speech, his attempt to reunite with a movement even Obama’s own government considers terrorist—what is America’s advice? A repetition of the old, stale, failed “two states living side by side in peace” mantra (rejected by Abbas), an assertion of Israel’s growing regional “isolation” clearly (and wrongly) implying it is Israel’s fault, and an angry injunction to sit down with those whose refusal of negotiations expresses a rejection of Israel’s very legitimacy.
If the U.S. had a parliamentary system, the Republicans would, pointing to his long record of Middle East incompetence and failure, no doubt be moving a non-confidence vote in President Obama, his Secretaries of State and Defense, and his government. As it is, Senate and House Foreign Affairs committees should demand that Panetta (and Hilary Clinton) appear at hearings on Obama’s failed Middle East policy, and the next Republican Presidential candidates’ debate should focus on this latest stunning example of Administrative incompetence and/or hostility.
Panetta’s deplorable remarks also indicate that it is high time that Jewish organizations go into high gear to point out that Israel faces not only an aggressive and untrustworthy Palestinian non-partner in the so-called “peace process”, and not only a rapidly deteriorating regional framework (cf. Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Iran), but also an objectively unfriendly U.S. Administration. Panetta and his friends seem unable, or unwilling, to grasp that, post-Mubarak, the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt—the key cornerstone since 1979 of Middle East stability—is gravely imperiled, and that, given Teheran’s functionally unimpeded nuclear drive, Israel’s very existence is threatened.
This politically tin-eared, morally blind, and politically passive (if not paralyzed) Administration, ideologically frozen into political and diplomatic immobility, cannot, and will not, change. The only remedy now for the deep harm, and great danger, its anti-Israel Middle East policy has created is to do everything possible to make sure that a Republican President and Administration occupies the White House after November, 2012.
(Prof. Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research,
and editor of CIJR’s Daily Isranet Briefing, ISRAFAX journal, and Blog.)