Matti Friedman: There Is No ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’
To someone here in Israel, there isn't an Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the way that many outsiders seem to think. In the Israeli view, no peacemaker can bring the two sides together because there aren't just two sides. There are many, many sides.
Most of Israel's wars haven't been fought against Palestinians. Since the invasion of five Arab armies at the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948, the Palestinians have made up a small number of the combatants facing the country.
Today Israel's most potent enemy is the Shiite theocracy in Iran, which is more than 1,000 miles away and isn't Palestinian or Arab. The gravest threat to Israel at close range is Hizbullah on our northern border, an army of Lebanese Shiites founded and funded by the Iranians.
A threat of a lesser order is posed by Hamas, which is Palestinian - but was founded as the local incarnation of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and is kept afloat with Qatari cash and backed by Iran. There are also Islamic State-affiliated insurgents on our border with Egypt's Sinai.
By framing it as only an "Israeli-Palestinian" conflict, Israelis seem stronger, more prosperous and more numerous.
But many in Israel believe that an agreement signed by a Western-backed Palestinian leader in the West Bank won't end the conflict, because it will wind up creating a power vacuum destined to be filled by intra-Muslim chaos or Iranian proxies. That's exactly what has happened around us in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.
Reining in Saudi's prince of the blood
The United States has close security partnerships with many leaders who abuse and mistreat people like Samar Badawi. Yet the responsibility of global power requires striking a balance between our interests and ideals and those of our partners, while at the same time not ignoring flagrant human rights abuses.
This is a balance that the Trump administration appears to have little ability to strike. Whether it is the crown prince in Riyadh, the Sisi regime in Egypt that has detained thousands of political prisoners, or U.S. partners such as Bahrain, where a tweet or blog post leads to extended jail time, the United States has remained purposefully silent. The president’s pandering to the Saudis and the broader Arab world, despite the corrosive actions of many of these partners, appears to be a mixture of ideology and practicality.
The Trump administration believes the national interest is served by disengaging from the Middle East and relying on local proxies to advance U.S. interests. The Saudi crown prince was key to the administration’s efforts to further a desired peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as reducing the American footprint in the Middle East. When Trump announced he was withdrawing troops from Syria, he argued his election came, in part, as a result of promising to get out of “endless & costly foreign wars.”
The administration’s national security policy documents embrace a framework of great-power conflict focused on Russia and China, while deprioritizing American engagement in the Middle East. In a late 2017 trip to Israel, the officials and experts I met with spoke openly of an emerging “post-American Middle East.” Obama started the trend, and the Trump administration was accelerating it. Israel has experienced the consequences acutely, with Russia and Iran now on their northern border preparing to fill the void.
Yet it was just such a void that led the Saudis to enter into the Yemeni civil war in the first place. The Obama administration withdrew from Iraq, “led from behind” in Libya, and watched while hundreds of thousands of Syrians were slaughtered in a civil war that destabilized the region and eventually threatened Europe and the United States. Despite differing approaches toward Iran, the assumption by both the Obama and Trump administrations was that Arab partners would bear most of the burden in dealing with the consequences of U.S. policy toward Tehran. On the surface, drawing back from the Middle East and handing off to local proxies appeals to Americans tired of fighting a war for over 17 years with no end in sight. But the Obama experiment in “leading from behind” in favor of “nation-building at home” has repeatedly shown that U.S. partners are wholly incapable of addressing the region’s core challenges.