Wednesday, August 10, 2022
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin: Why Jews don’t control America’s foreign policy
Jonathan Tobin: Why Jews don’t control America’s foreign policy
That ought to be painfully obvious, not least because, as (Walter Russell) Mead points out, the United States has not been consistently supportive of Israel. Indeed, it was not until after its astonishing victory in the 1967 Six-Day War when Israel was first perceived as a potentially important strategic ally for the West in the Cold War did the United States start to really help the Jewish state.Normalizing Relations Between Israel and the Arab World Continues Calmly in a Turbulent World
Even after the alliance became a reality, different schools of thought emerged to try to explain why America cared about Israel and usually provided the wrong answers to the question. So-called realists believed that Israel was an impediment to better relations with the Arab world and blamed it for American problems that had nothing to do with sympathy for Zionism. The American left, which had been supportive of Israel in its early years, eventually turned on it because it, too, came to view it in an ideological context that was equally detached from the reality of Israel. Meanwhile, Jacksonians liked Israel for the same reasons that others detested it: their tough response to terrorism and assertion of national rights. For those seeking simple explanations to complex questions, Israel and the notion of hidden Jewish power manipulating America to do things against its interests is an easy answer, yet always a wrong one.
Israel has a powerful and perhaps far more loyal non-Jewish constituency among evangelical Christians. It’s also true that the two most pro-Israel presidents with respect to policy—Richard Nixon, who provided crucial help to save it during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Donald Trump, who recognized Jerusalem and aligned himself very closely with the Jewish nation—were also the two presidents most despised by the majority of American Jewish voters.
Above all, successive American administrations took up the search for Middle East peace on the false premise that achieving it would solve a host of other problems. Belief in the peace process became, especially among the foreign-policy establishment of veteran diplomats, academics and journalists who are considered “experts” in the field,” a holy grail that took both Democrat and Republican presidents down a rabbit hole from which none emerged unscathed or successful.
Mead points out that the peace process was not only not a holy grail but actually a “MacGuffin,” the term filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock coined to describe a plot device that seems to motivate and drive the main character’s actions, but which is actually of very little intrinsic value. That ought to have been conclusively proven by Trump’s Abraham Accords in which Arab states essentially abandoned the Palestinian cause in favor of normalization with a Jewish state that is a valuable strategic ally and trading partner. Even after that, belief in the importance of the grail that’s really a MacGuffin persists.
Mead provides a valuable history of successive American administration approaches to the Middle East from the failures of the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama, and then Trump’s surprising partial success. It’s important to understand that America has always pursued policies that were the function of its leader’s beliefs—whether avowed realists like the first Bush, convinced that democracy could be spread like the second Bush, true believers in the peace process like Clinton and Obama or a Jacksonian like Trump—about what they thought was in America’s best interests, not Israel’s.
Yet despite the changing script in which America’s political parties have flipped their positions on Israel and the shifting geostrategic realities of the Middle East have been made apparent, credence in the existence of a “hidden Jewish hand” manipulating America continues to exist on both political extremes. That this is so is a testament to the fact that anti-Semitism remains a far more powerful force than most of those who think about America and the Middle East are prepared to admit.
Even in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, these moves elicited only a cursory response. The same scenes that played out in Arab cities were played out among Palestinians.It’s time to address the horrific injustice done to Jews from Arab lands
It is not surprising, then, that Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, in which they agreed to develop a joint economic hub near the King Hussein bridge where Israeli and Jordanian businessmen could meet, was met with calmness – in almost prophetic contrast to the reaction to Bourguiba fifty-eight years ago.
Neither the meeting nor the proposal demonstrated any bravery on the part of the Hashemite King. Jordan signed an agreement six years ago to purchase 45 billion cubic meters of Israeli gas for ten billion dollars over fifteen years.
There was so little opposition on the “Jordanian street” that security forces took no action against Hisham al-Bustani, the coordinator of “the Campaign Against the Enemy’s Gas,” who accused by name the Jordanian ministers involved in the agreement’s ratification. If the regime had felt threatened, it would have arrested him for incitement. They were correct: two years after the video in which al-Bustani appeared, only 145 people viewed it, with only one comment supporting the King.
Normalization with Israel is not met with equanimity in so many Arab states because of a love for Israel. Nor has the realization of Israel’s technological achievements changed public attitudes toward the Jewish state.
The transformation is far more fundamental and internal. Arab publics are engrossed by the challenges that they face in their states. For example, in Lebanon, there are economic burdens, growing animosity toward Hizballah, and the threat of renewed civil war that Hizballah control evokes. In Iraq, there is the danger of political and economic meltdown not as a result of the Shi’ite/Sunni divide as it was a decade ago, but more ominously, in the intra-Shi’ite conflict fueled by Iranian meddling. And in Egypt, there is the perennial concern of keeping Egypt above water economically, not to mention Tunisia.
In short, when the “Arab street” takes to the streets, they cannot add the burden of the Palestinians to their concerns. Last year, a Syrian opposition member who Palestinian students heckled at Hebrew University responded, “You live in paradise compared to what Syrians face!”
The Arab street’s lack of reaction allows Arab leaders to pursue their relations with Israel to benefit themselves and their constituents.
When addressing the defining moment of the 20th century in terms of man’s inhumanity to man, we often reflect on the sheer barbarism of the Holocaust. But throughout the blood-stained annals of Jewish history, many other anti-Semitic massacres have been committed.
Tragically, what is often neglected and summarily dismissed is the forced expulsion, evacuation and flight of 921,000 Jews of Sephardi and Mizrachi background from Arab countries and the Muslim world, primarily from 1948 to the early 1970s.
For over 2,500 years, Jews lived continuously in North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf region. The first Jewish population had already settled there at least 1,000 years before the advent of Islam.
Throughout the generations, Jews in the region were often subjected to various forms of discrimination—and in many cases, ranked lower on the status of society than their Muslim compatriots—but they were nevertheless loyal citizens who contributed significantly to the culture and development of their respective countries.
Despite the positive influence that Jews brought to the places where they lived, more than 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco and several other Arab countries in the 20 years that followed Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Another major forced migration took place from Iran in 1979–80 following the Iranian Revolution and the collapse of the Shah’s regime, adding 70,000 more Jewish refugees to this number.
In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League drafted an anti-Semitic law that violently oppressed the Jewish residents in all of its member states. In the international arena, Arab diplomats pretended to ignore the Arab League’s collusion in encouraging state-sanctioned discrimination against Jews, seeking publicly to attribute blame to the Arab “masses”—and even the United Nations itself—for any danger facing the Jews across the region. This covert move was part of the Arab states’ attempt to divert attention from the official discriminatory practices of their governments.
Between 1948-1951, 260,000 Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel, accounting for 56% of the total immigration to the newly-founded state. The Israeli government’s policy to accommodate 600,000 immigrants over four years, doubling the existing Jewish population, encountered mixed reactions in the Knesset, as there were those within the Jewish Agency and government who opposed promoting large-scale immigration by Jews from Arab lands.
