My friend Chris asked via email whether I think that Hillary Clinton’s recent 43-minute phone call to Netanyahu, in which the latter was apparently rebuked for the embarrassing authorization of over 600 new housing units for Israelis in East Jerusalem, represents an important turn in US-Israel relations. My answer is that I doubt it. My suspicion is that what the Obama Administration was most upset about were the optics and timing of the authorization, coinciding as it did with Biden’s visit to Israel. There is as yet no evidence that Obama is prepared to stand up to America’s Israel lobby, and, until that happens, nothing is likely to alter Israel’s intransigence or apparent intention to annex ever more territory in Jerusalem and on the West Bank.
I remain puzzled about what advantages the US derives from its “strategic alliance” with Israel. This is the question raised by the intervention of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt into the debate about America’s relations with Israel. Robert Wright missed a golden opportunity to address this question while talking to prominent neo-con David Frum recently on bloggingheadstv.
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/266…7:49&out=40:36
I am as puzzled by Wright’s failure to address the Realpolitik of America’s relations with Israel as I am by the question of what the calculations actually are which lead America to support Israel so unfailingly, once one leaves the outsized influence of the Israel lobby to one side.
Here, in slightly edited form (edited primarily to remove things specific to the forum, but also to add the value of Israeli intelligence to the US), is what I had to say about this discussion in the bloggingheadstv forums.
“Frum contends that the reason the US should not pressure Israel to concede more to the Palestinians than the relative strength of military forces of Israel v. Palestinians would dictate is that the US has nothing to gain from the application of such pressure. But wait. A lof of people think that the US has much to gain in the Mideast from getting this dispute off the table, more or less. What advantage does the US get from the status quo, or from having Israel as an ally? The most I can come up with is the military advantage of the use of Israel’s air bases and air capability in a future resource war, coupled with intelligence sharing. Frum asserts that such advantages exist, he does not say what they are, and Wright did not press him on this. But that’s a terrible oversight by Wright. The whole point of the Mearsheimer-Walt point of view is that `the strategic alliance’ between the US and Israel is probably no longer in the US interest. Instead of engaging the Realpolitik question, Wright allows the discussion to divagate into the muddy waters of legality, morality, and history of the conflict.
On the question of what happens to the West Bank in the absence of a mediated two-state solution in the near term, it seems to me that a two-state outcome is de facto still more likely than one state, one ends up with two-state by default, that the international community says enough is enough, they prevent wholesale genocide on the West Bank, they cannot disarm Israel, they create a Palestinian state, and so on. In a showdown between Israel’s nuclear capacity and that of the rest of the world, Israel will back down, that’s my bet. It’s just two-state deferred, the only salient point being that the US could never broker a deal because it was prevented by domestic politics from doing so. And the only thing standing in the way of this `inevitable’ outcome, which strikes me as more inevitable than one state, is that there could well be a serious military cataclysm that precedes the solution imposed by the exhausted international community.”