Kissinger’s Promise and Obama’s Fulfillment (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Old realpolitiker Henry Kissinger was in the news recently when he sat down with Donald Trump, to give him the benefit of his experience. It brought to mind Kissinger’s numerous attempts to get Israel out of the territories it conquered in 1967, before, during and – especially – after the Yom Kippur War.

Kissinger went to Iraq in December of 1975 to try to wean the regime away from the Soviet Union and improve relations with the US. In a discussion with Sa’dun Hammadi, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Kissinger suggested that American support for Israel was a result of Jewish political and financial power, promised that the US would work to force Israel back to pre-1967 boundaries, and indicated that while the US would not support the elimination of Israel, he believed that its existence was only temporary. Here is an excerpt (the whole thing is worth reading):

I think, when we look at history, that when Israel was created in 1948, I don't think anyone understood it. It originated in American domestic politics. It was far away and little understood. So it was not an American design to get a bastion of imperialism in the area. It was much less complicated. And I would say that until 1973, the Jewish community had enormous influence. It is only in the last two years, as a result of the policy we are pursuing, that it has changed.

We don't need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world. You yourself said your objection to us is Israel. Except maybe that we are capitalists. We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel, but we can reduce its size to historical proportions. I don't agree that Israel is a permanent threat. How can a nation of three million be a permanent threat? They have a technical advantage now. But it is inconceivable that peoples with wealth and skill and the tradition of the Arabs won't develop the capacity that is needed. So I think in ten to fifteen years, Israel will be like Lebanon—struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world.  [my emphasis] …

Kissinger also promised that aid to Israel, which he presented as a result of Jewish political influence, would be significantly reduced. He indicated that legal changes in the US – he must have been referring to the creation of the Federal Electoral Commission in 1974 to regulate campaign contributions – would attenuate Jewish power and therefore American support for Israel. Naturally, he didn’t foresee the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, which permanently established a high level of military aid to both countries.

He further promised that the US would support a PLO-run Palestinian state if the PLO would accept UNSC resolution 242 and recognize Israel. This of course is what (supposedly) happened in the Oslo accords.

Kissinger insisted that “No one is in favor of Israel's destruction—I won't mislead you—nor am I.” But his hint that a smaller Israel might not survive is clear. Surely he understood that a pre-1967-sized Israel (within what Eban called “Auschwitz lines”) would have no chance of surviving, simply because of the strategic geography of the area. 

Kissinger was wrong about the Arabs developing the capability to challenge Israel, but their place has been taken by soon-to-be-nuclear Iran and its proxies, who are significantly more dangerous than the Arab states ever were. 

US policy, however, has kept more or less the same shape, except that the hypocrisy of insisting that the US supports the existence of Israel but in a pre-1967 size is even more glaring. The substitution of the PLO for the Arab states as the desired recipient of the land to be taken from Israel has barely made a ripple either in America or among the Arabs, suggesting that the policy is more about Israel giving up land than about the Arabs getting it.

The original motivation for Kissinger’s promises was supposedly the desire of the US to replace the Soviet Union as the patron of the Arab states. After the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in 1991, however, there was no change in policy. Although the Oslo Accords were initiated by left-wing Israelis, the US eagerly embraced them, and the so-called ‘peace process’ became a permanent stick to beat Israel with. 

President Obama is especially adept at emphasizing support for Israel’s existence while at the same time demanding that Israel make concessions that would make her continued existence impossible. Apparently agreeing with Kissinger about Jewish power, Obama has worked to reduce the pro-Israel influence of American Jews in numerous ways, such as by providing access to the White House for groups like J Street and the Israel Policy Forum, while marginalizing traditional Zionist organizations like ZOA. 

Kissinger’s almost antisemitic claim that US support for Israel is bought with Jewish money was probably untrue in 1975 and is even less so today, when a large proportion of American Jews, including wealthy ones, have chosen their liberal or progressive politics over Zionism. The coming struggle over the introduction of a pro-Palestinian plank into the Democratic platform is an indication that the party and with it, many of its Jewish supporters, is moving toward Obama’s position.

The Obama Administration’s program to extricate itself from the Middle East by empowering Iran as the new regional power has given a new impetus to the policy of shrinking Israel. Iran sees Israel as a major obstacle to its hegemony, for both geopolitical and religious/ideological reasons, and is committed to eliminating the Jewish state. Obama found it necessary to restrain Israel from bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities at least once (in 2012), and seems to be prepared to sacrifice Israel in order to achieve his goal of establishing Iranian regional dominance.

Some would go even further and say that Obama’s primary ideological goal is to eliminate Israel and the Iranian gambit is a means to this end, but that is highly speculative! Or maybe it’s a matter of two birds with one stone.

Henry Kissinger didn’t do us any favors, but I think the anti-Israel thread in American policy would have been strong enough without him, running from Truman’s Secretary of State George C. Marshall all the way to Obama’s stable of anti-Zionists like Rob Malley and Ben Rhodes.

Today Israel is long gone from the Sinai, more recently from Gaza, and probably only thanks to the disintegration of Syria, still holding the Golan Heights. I would like to believe that PM Netanyahu was correct when he said that Israel will never leave the Golan. Regarding Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, I expect that we are about to begin a very difficult time, as the Obama Administration is likely to mount a campaign in its last days to fulfill Kissinger’s promise to the Arabs at long last.

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Goodbye, Diaspora (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

I had the good fortune to meet Tuvia Tenenbom, author of Catch the Jew and I Sleep in Hitler’s Room the other night.

He’s writing a book about America. I haven’t read it since he hasn’t finished it, but I think I can safely say that it is going to be a painful experience, because what he found isn’t pretty. To compress it into a single sentence, the American experiment of creating unity from diversity is crashing and burning.

One thing he noted was a recent explosion of hatred against Israel and Jews, coming from both the left and the right. I think he’s quite correct. 

Let’s dispose of the red herring that anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred are different. Oh, they are different concepts, but the group that hates Israel generally hates Jews, and vice versa. A distinction without a difference. And that especially includes Jewish anti-Zionists. 

It’s only natural that someone who dislikes Jews would dislike a Jewish state. And objecting to the Jewish state’s stubborn refusal to lie down and die despite the world’s protestations that the tiny enclave of Jewish sovereignty is unacceptable, just naturally leads a person to wonder what it is about these Jews that makes them so stubborn.

Stubborn is what they are, refusing the True Religion (whether Christianity or Islam) for millennia. Refusing to return to Europe after the Holocaust, and demanding – demanding – to be allowed to enter the land that had been promised to them by the international establishment, not to mention other promises from a higher authority, despite the inconvenience for His Majesty’s government. Refusing to give up the idea of a Jewish state and return to a Diaspora in which their existence would be conditional on the whims of the non-Jewish majority.

Jew hatred is sweeping the world again today, even, as Tenenbom noted, the US. The US is especially interesting, because it is the home to about half the world’s Jews. With the exception of the 10% of American Jews that are Orthodox, many of them – especially the younger ones – are embarrassed by Jewish stubbornness and believe that their liberal morality compels them to join with the ‘oppressed Palestinians’ and help them to end the Jewish state. In fact, they lead the anti-Zionist crusade there, even in Jewish organizations like Hillel.

But we have to excuse them. They are far from the action, they don’t have the facts, they are subjected to a constant bombardment of anti-Zionism in their media and from their government, their teachers, their peers and even liberal synagogues. In the universities they are intimidated by Muslim students and hard-left faculty, while receiving little or no support from administrators when faced with anti-Jewish racism. And as Diaspora Jews, they need to ‘go along to get along’ as Jews learned for centuries under Christian and Muslim rule.

On the other hand, we don’t have to excuse Israelis, even the highest IDF officers, when they react to the waves of Jew-hatred like Diaspora Jews. The recent remarks of Maj. Gen. Yair Golan were not only explicitly political – and therefore broke IDF rules – but by drawing a comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany, validated the most hateful anti-Zionists for whom such comparisons are stock in trade. 

In part, he was referring to an incident in which a young soldier, Sgt. Elor Azaria, shot and killed an already ‘neutralized’ Palestinian who had just stabbed another soldier, and to the outpouring of public support for Azaria as the Army tries him for manslaughter. Azaria is accused of violating the IDF’s principle of ‘purity of arms,’ which forbids harming prisoners of war, although he argues that he believed the terrorist had a suicide vest on. Whether or not he was justified, his action was as different from Nazi genocide as day from night.

What motivated Golan to make such a comparison? You’d have to ask him, but I think he is harkening to a typically European, non-Jewish, even Christian morality, in which love for all humanity, including enemies, is the highest value. Tribalism is the first step to Nazism. Possibly he believed that if he just beat his country up enough, the ones that hate us would realize that we are human after all.

This is Diaspora thinking. Nothing we do will ever be enough for the anti-Zionists. Their irrational hatred is not our problem and we can’t solve it for them. Psychiatrist and historian Kenneth Levin called the belief that we can fix things by accepting the criticism of those who hate us and being better according to their principles the ‘Oslo Syndrome’. As the expression suggests, it is pathological.

The Diaspora Jew is used to being powerless, so he has to beg the non-Jewish authorities to protect his community. Of course, the more we abase ourselves before them, the more they hold us in contempt. An analogy today would be an Israeli leader begging Obama to protect Israel from Iran. How did that work out for us?

Diaspora Jews worry a lot. What will the goyim think? Don’t make the goyim mad. Flatter them, pretend that we believe that they don’t hate us, and they will pretend in return. Maybe.

It is becoming harder and harder for us to pretend. And they aren’t hiding their feelings so much either. When an anonymous Obama Administration official called our Prime Minister “a chickenshit,” the statement barely made sense. Literally, the official was calling Netanyahu a coward because he didn’t attack Iran when the US pressured him not to do so. But the emotional message was as clear as a slap in the face. Take that, Jew. 

And how did our PM respond to the contempt poured on him from the White House? “The friendship between the US and Israel is stronger than ever,” and “my Congress speech [was] not intended to show disrespect to Obama or the office that he holds,” said Netanyahu in his best Diaspora diction.

But Israel isn’t powerless and doesn’t have to play this game, especially since the goyim have problems of their own. The West is losing in its battle with Islam and the forces of chaos. The Roman Empire may have taken hundreds of years to collapse, but today’s West will go down much more quickly. 

For Israel to survive the ensuing cataclysm, we have to become a successful Middle Eastern nation instead of trying to be an outpost of Western power and Western morality. And that implies that we will have to defeat our enemies decisively, not pull our punches for fear of the reaction of the hypocritical Western powers. We will need to make alliances with Arab countries and others like India and China, not with the increasingly anti-Zionist US, the traditionally anti-Jewish Europe, or our bitter enemies, the PLO.

We need to implement a truly Jewish moral system which is suitable for survival in the Middle East, and not adopt the European Christian one (which the Europeans and Americans themselves fail to live up to while trying to impose it on us). This doesn’t mean that we ought to behave like Bashar al-Assad, but it does mean that – for example – the life of a Palestinian terrorist must be counted as worth infinitely less than that of a Jew. 

Mostly, we need to stop thinking like Diaspora Jews. Western leaders increasingly can’t and won’t help us, and we don’t live or die by their favor. 

Our leaders need to come to understand this. The Israeli in the street – most of whom want Elor Azaria freed – already does.

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Israel’s dangerous addiction (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

On this 68^th anniversary of the independence of the modern Jewish nation-state, my thoughts naturally turn to the question of how long we will be able to keep that independence, purchased at such great cost.

It’s not an issue that occupies citizens of most other states to the same degree. Although the US has major problems in several areas, I don’t hear Americans talking about losing their independence. They settled that back in the 18^th century.

For us, it is never settled, despite international law and despite our successful defense of our homeland. Most of the world does not think that the Jewish people should have an independent state, in many cases because they don’t agree that there is a Jewish people (on the other hand, a ‘Palestinian’ people makes sense to them, or at least they pretend it does).

There is more than one way a sovereign nation can lose its independence. It can be conquered in war, as happened to Carthage in the 2^nd century BCE, its people killed, enslaved or dispersed, its wealth carried off and its land sown with salt. It can be invaded and then made into a colony or satellite, its people allowed to live but without self-determination, as happened to the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union after WWII. And it can allow its decisions to be influenced by a more powerful state or states, little by little giving up its independent volition to economic and political pressure, until it finds itself so dependent on its ‘patron’ that it has lost the ability to control its destiny. 

Israel is threatened militarily today primarily by Iran and its proxies. It would be wrong to minimize the direct threat to our existence that they represent, and our government and the IDF do take it seriously and prepare for conflict. 

But we are also at risk of a ‘soft conquest’ by another enemy, this one an alliance of supposedly friendly nations, led by one massively powerful country that is considered our greatest friend and supporter. And our leaders seem blind to this danger.

How does a soft conquest work? Here are some of the tactics:

1.       Create economic dependence by damaging the target’s relationships with rival partners.

2.       Create military dependence either directly by ‘protecting’ the target or indirectly by locking it in to you as a sole supplier of arms, ammunition or spare parts.

3.       Strengthen its enemies and weaken the target’s own self-defense abilities so that it will have to depend upon you when threatened.

4.       Take advantage of conflicts the target is involved in to demand further concessions that will weaken it. Prevent it from decisively defeating its enemies.

5.       Support politicians in the target who are friendly to you financially, and hint that if they come to power the relationship between the countries will improve. Attack less compliant politicians in the media, blame them for problems, and suggest that unless they are replaced you will lose patience and downgrade the relationship. Influence local elections.

6.       Support organizations working to destabilize the target and create internal and external conflict. The more problems it has, the more easily you can replace its government with a puppet regime; until then, the more leverage you will have with the existing government.

7.       Influence other nations to withdraw support from the target to increase their dependence on you.

8.       Work to weaken popular support for the target in your own country, so that when you apply pressure or withdraw support from the target, objections will be minimized.

9.       Support enemies of the target in your own country. They will do much of the work for you.

Does this sound familiar? It should, since every one of these tactics is or has been employed against Israel by the Obama Administration and its European allies. 

Israel’s addiction to US aid is dangerous to our independence. One of the interesting things about our army is that it has perhaps the least hawkish General Staff in the world. Army brass have recently called for turning over security control in parts of Judea/Samaria to the PA and for increased aid to Gaza. In 2012, PM Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak wanted to launch an attack on the Iranian nuclear program, something the US was dead set against. The top generals were opposed. They may or may not have had good arguments, but I’m sure they were aware that going against the US might get the IDF’s budget brutally slashed. It is not surprising that they often tend to agree with the American point of view.

The US attempts to control Israeli military strategy with its aid. Money is available (at least it has been until now) for defensive weapons like Iron Dome, but not for the bunker busters or tanker aircraft that would enable an attack on Iran. The F-35 fighter aircraft presents a whole collection of problems, with performance and range issues, software/hardware bugs and dependence on US-based computer system. There are concerns that its non-transparent software might hide a backdoor that would allow the US to keep track of what Israel does with the planes or even force the abortion of a mission that the US didn’t like. Israel would prefer to buy more F-15s, but the Pentagon is saying that it is the F-35 or nothing.

I rarely hear mainstream Israeli politicians, either in the government or the opposition, taking the position that our dependence on the US is a bad thing or that the US is not wholeheartedly supportive of Israel. The opposition, in fact, generally claims that insofar as the relationship is less than perfect, it is the government’s fault for being insufficiently compliant on issues like settlements. And the government says that things have never been better, even while the US president’s spokesperson calls our PM “a chickenshit.”

Perhaps in private they understand the situation better, perhaps not. But the correct assessment must be that while Iran and Hezbollah pose a direct military threat, the US administration and Europe are also dangerous, even though their hostility is not expressed in the form of missiles aimed at us. 

If this sounds like exaggeration to you, consider the effects on Israel of the release of billions of dollars to Iran, the inability to enforce the limitations on Iran’s nuclear program, and the acquiescence by the administration to almost any Iranian behavior in order to keep them from abrogating the entire (unsigned) deal. Are the Western powers’ actions more or less dangerous to Israel than Hamas?

The American people, by and large, are our friends. But this administration is decidedly not on our side, and we don’t know what the American political future will bring.

We can’t entirely prevent diplomatic pressure and attempts at subversion from our ‘friends’, and we can’t stop them from empowering our overt enemies. But we can reduce their leverage on us by maximizing our independence.

If defense against Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah is our top priority, then independence must also be near the top. We are investing 160 million shekels in a system to detect Hamas tunnels, but how much are we investing to become independent from US military assistance? 

It’s always a temptation to put off dealing with long-term, complicated problems when you are facing immediate dangers. Try telling a combat soldier that if he doesn’t stop smoking, he’ll ultimately die from it. But Israel’s addiction to US aid can also be fatal in the long run.

Time for us to kick the habit.

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