[Obama] also scores 55 percent approval on how he handles U.S.-Israel relations, which is virtually unchanged since last September, when his handling of the relationship scored 54 percent approval.
General American opinion on how to handle the regional conflict shows solid support for president Obama's insistence that Israel stop building settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank:
52% of Americans support, and 31% oppose, the Obama administration’s demand that Israel stop all settlement-building. 62% of those polled said the growth of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory will only lead to greater hostilities. 52% of respondents support, and 31% oppose, the Obama administration’s demand that Israel stop all settlement-building. 53% thought the US should be ready to get tough with both sides in peace negotiations if necessary, while only 33% disagreed.
So 31 percent of Americans oppose their president's handling of Israel, but 75 percent of Senators and Congressmembers do. 52 percent of Americans back their president in a tough negotiation with a foreign leader, but 75 percent of the Congress back the foreign leader against the president.
What explains this remarkable discrepancy?
Their position is basically the same as the Dish's - and I think that really does represent a shift in the mainstream of American opinion, given real credibility by David Petraeus's Senate report.Money quote:
[Palestinian] blundering is not cause for the Israelis to deliver a gratuitous poke in the eye, particularly one that undercuts Palestinian moderates and damages U.S. interests.
Supporting Israel will never be costless or risk-free. But this country should expect the Israelis not to act in ways that make it even harder and more dangerous to be their friend.
Public backing for Israel is strong in the U.S. — 63% in the most recent Gallup poll. But if Americans whose own family members' lives are at risk every day in Iraq and Afghanistan come to believe that Israel's actions needlessly increase that risk, support would be jeopardized. The administration is right to warn the Israelis of that danger.
So USA Today is now a hotbed of anti-Semitism?
...
Marshall exploded. “Mr. President,” he said, “I thought this meeting was called to consider an important, complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here.” Truman attempted to calm Marshall, whom he admired — but Marshall was not satisfied. “I do not think that politics should play any role in our decision,” he said. The meeting ended acrimoniously, though Truman attempted to placate Marshall by noting that he was “inclined” to side with him. That wasn’t true — the U.S. voted to recognize Israel and worked to support its emerging statehood. Marshall remained enraged.
When Marshall returned to the State Department from his meeting with Truman, he memorialized the meeting:
I remarked to the president that, speaking objectively, I could not help but think that suggestions made by Mr. Clifford were wrong. I thought that to adopt these suggestions would have precisely the opposite effect from that intended by him. The transparent dodge to win a few votes would not, in fact, achieve this purpose. The great dignity of the office of the president would be seriously damaged. The counsel offered by Mr. Clifford’s advice was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem confronting us was international. I stated bluntly that if the president were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice, and if I were to vote in the next election, I would vote against the president.
Put more simply, Marshall believed that Truman was sacrificing American security for American votes.
The Truman-Marshall argument over Israel has entered American lore – and been a subject of widespread historical controversy. Was Marshall’s opposition to recognition of Israel a reflection of his, and the American establishment’s, latent anti-Semitism? Or was it a credible reflection of U.S. military worries that the creation of Israel would engage America in a defense of the small country that would drain American resources and lives? In the years since, a gaggle of historians and politicians have weighed in with their own opinions, the most recent being Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Writing in the Washington Post on May 7, 2008, Holbrooke noted that “beneath the surface” of the Truman-Marshall controversy “lay unspoken but real anti-Semitism on the part of some (but not all) policymakers. The position of those opposing recognition was simple – oil, numbers and history.”
But that’s only a part of the story. In the period between the end of World War Two and Marshall’s meeting with Truman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had issued no less than sixteen (by my count) papers on the Palestine issue. The most important of these was issued on March 31, 1948 and entitled “Force Requirements for Palestine.” In that paper, the JCS predicted that “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” The JCS speculated that these objectives included: initial Jewish sovereignty over a portion of Palestine, acceptance by the great powers of the right to unlimited immigration, the extension of Jewish sovereignty over all of Palestine and the expansion of “Eretz Israel” into Transjordan and into portions of Lebanon and Syria. This was not the only time the JCS expressed this worry. In late 1947, the JCS had written that “A decision to partition Palestine, if the decision were supported by the United States, would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East” to the point that “United States influence in the area would be curtailed to that which could be maintained by military force.” That is to say, the concern of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not with the security of Israel — but with the security of American lives.
In the wake of my March 13 article in these pages (“The Petraeus Briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story”) a storm of outrage greeted my claim that Israeli intransigence on the peace process could be costing American lives. One week after that article appeared, I called General Joe Hoar, a former CENTCOM commander and a friend. We talked about the article. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s the news here? Hasn’t this been said before?” If history is any guide, the answer is simple: it was said sixty years ago by one of America’s greatest soldiers. George Marshall wasn’t an anti-Semite. But he was prescient. ,,,
The US love fest with Israel appears to have run into a spot of trouble. In a reversal of its previous policy, the US is insisting that Israel suspend new settlement construction in East Jerusalem to pave the way for ‘peace’ talks with the Palestinian Authority. For a change, the US is countering Israel’s ‘No’ with tough talk not heard in a while.
On March 9, when the US Vice President was greeted in Tel Aviv with news of new settlements in East Jerusalem, he was furious. Privately, he told Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel’s settlement activity “undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”
This is not a message right-wing talk artists could shout down. Joe Biden was echoing the message delivered by General Petraeus, commander of US troops in the Middle East, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Armed Services Committee. Hillary Clinton too reiterated this message in her speech to AIPAC.
What has occasioned this open rift between two spouses in a heavenly marriage? There have been tiffs before between them, but never before has a US administration told Israel that its policy endangers American troops or American interests in the Middle East? This talk is serious. It belies decades of rhetoric that has boosted Israel as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East.
It appears that its past is beginning to catch up with Israel. Adversaries it had long suppressed, forces it had harnessed for its expansionist policy, blowbacks from decisions made in hubris have now converged to limit Israel’s options. Is the Zionist logic that had brought endless successes in the past now working in the opposite direction? Is Israel running out of its fabled resourcefulness?
Israel’s stunning victory in June 1967 had produced two destabilizing results. Having solved its native problem in 1948, Israel had created it anew in 1967 by its decision to retain the West Bank and Gaza. The June War also swelled the ranks of extremist Jews who began to colonize East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. Unable to drive out the Palestinians, this new round of colonization would turn Israel into an apartheid state.In the 2000s, international civil society started taking notice. Movements were launched to divest from, boycott and sanction Israel. Activists began to use Western legal systems to prosecute Israelis for war crimes. Israeli leaders visiting Western campuses are now heckled routinely. Slowly, Western publics are turning away from Israel.
In 1982, in a bid to extend Israel’s northern border, Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ites responded by creating Hizbullah, a multi-layered grass-roots resistance, the most formidable adversary Israel had ever faced. In 2000, they forced Israel to withdraw unilaterally, and in July 2006 repulsed a fresh Israeli invasion, giving Israel a bloody nose.
No more was Tehran a distant threat for Tel Aviv: it was now positioned right next to Israel’s northern border. Although Hizbullah spoke to the grit and discipline of Lebanese Shi’ites, it could not have grown without Iranian support. ...
As I listened to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu address an animated crowed of supporters on March 22, I felt physically sick. The man has already displayed time and again a complete lack of moral sense or ethical framework in his words and actions. In his recent arguments, he once again twisted history, manipulated facts and fabricated his own selective, self-interested and highly questionable narrative. Netanyahu, a colonialist from a faraway land, also had the audacity to convince himself and a few others that he had legal, moral and historic rights over my land. While I am the son of a Palestinian family rooted in Palestine since time immemorial, Netanyahu is the son of an immigrant from Lithuania. While he giddily robs more Palestinian land in Jerusalem, I live in exile.
Netanyahu was addressing the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The ‘powerful’ lobby group encompasses a large conglomerate of rightwing Zionist politicians and lobbyists and is seen by many as the most instrumental platform that influences – and, to a large degree, controls - US foreign policy regarding Palestine, Israel and the entire Middle East.
AIPAC is dangerous for many reasons. For one, it’s not a lobby group in the conventional sense - meaning a group of well-paid lobbyists harassing US Congressmen with telephone calls with the hope of advancing the agenda of their benefactors (in this case, the state of Israel). The pro-Israel lobby has actually grown and morphed into a political body that is embedded within all branches of the US government, as well as the media, academia and elsewhere. It is no secret that the neo-conservative cliques of politicians who engineered, steered and to an extent continue to influence US war policy are in fact a mere component of the same ‘lobby’.
While Jewish communities in the US may not be united in their support of the largely rightwing and hawkish Zionist lobby groups, both major political parties in the US and all branches of the government stand in complete support of Israel. The AIPAC annual conference is almost mandatory for them. Sadly, Netanyahu’s speech before AIPAC is of equal, if not of greater import to some of them than the State of the Union address. Following Obama’s address in 2010, many US politicians openly voiced criticism of his take on many issues. But few dare challenge Netanyahu on much of the malice he spewed on March 22.
Americans need to realize that this is no longer about Palestine and Israel. It is now about their own country, their own sovereignty and the future of their own democracy. They must ask hard questions and refuse to settle for sentimental answers. How could America be so divided on so many issues, yet so united on the ‘cause of Israel’? Where does a feeble politician like Netanyahu find the courage to defy the president of the very country that supplied his own with many billions of taxpayer dollars? Of course, we know that much of the fund was used to occupy, torment and wage war on Palestinians for many years. This is the atrocious fact that Americans need to understand fully: Israeli war crimes were made possible because of American funds, weapons and political cover. America is not an outside party to the conflict. It has done more than its fair share in the ongoing Palestinian tragedy. ...
No big surprise in Laura Rozen's new piece that Dennis Ross, a central figure in the pro-Israel lobby, a protege of Paul Wolfwitz, the co-founder of the AIPAC-founded, Washington Institute For Near East Policy, and a fervent believer in Israel's eternal control of all of Jerusalem (meaning a two-state solution will never happen), is the main pro-Netanyahu voice in the Obama administration:
“He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu's coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn't seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this Administration.”
So an official in the US administration is claiming that Ross is more concerned with Israel's side of the story than with America's. This is not that surprising given that his position on Israel's holding Jerusalem as its eternal and undivided capital is well-documented. From an interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2008:
Ross does not mention that he helped write Obama's speech. But he concedes that he omitted from the speech the fact that the final status of Jerusalem would be resolved by negotiations. I also note a remarkable use of words: "It's also a fact that the city should not be divided again. That's also a fact." How can a "should" be a "fact"? If this is something to be decided by future negotiations, how can it be a fact? And why is someone framing an argument as something that simply cannot be questioned? ...You raised the issue of Jerusalem. That was at the AIPAC speech. And what [Obama] said, he said the following: "Jerusalem is Israel's capital." He said the city should never be divided again. And it's true that in that speech he didn't make the third point, which is, the final status of the city will be resolved by negotiations. Before the speech he said that, after the speech he said that. The American position has been those three points.
The fact of the matter is, Jerusalem is Israel's capital. That's a fact. It's also a fact that the city should not be divided again. That's also a fact. The position of the United States since Camp David, the position, by the way, adopted in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, signed by [prime minister] Menachem Begin, was that the final status of Jerusalem would be resolved by negotiations. Those are the three points. That's what his position is.
The prime minister leaves America disgraced, isolated, and altogether weaker than when he came.
Instead of setting the diplomatic agenda, Netanyahu surrendered control over it. Instead of leaving the Palestinian issue aside and focusing on Iran, as he would like, Netanyahu now finds himself fighting for the legitimacy of Israeli control over East Jerusalem.
At the start of his visit, Netanyahu was tempted to bask in the warm welcome he received at the AIPAC conference, at which he gave his emotional address on Jerusalem.
Taking a page from Menachem Begin, he spoke not on behalf of the State of Israel, but in the name of the Jewish people itself and its millennia of history.
His speech was not radical rightist rhetoric. Reading between the lines, one could spot a certain willingness to relinquish West Bank settlements as long as Israel maintains a security buffer in the Jordan Valley.
But at the White House, the prime minister's speech to thousands of pro-Israel activists and hundreds of cheering congressmen looked like an obvious attempt to raise political capital against the American president. ...
Biden's riposte -- that Israel's actions threaten U.S. interests in the region and possibly endanger U.S. military forces there -- was a rare public admission that U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. And the predictable accusations that followed the diplomatic slap heard 'round the world have exposed a growing rift in the pro-Israel community in the United States, between supporters of a two-state solution and defenders of the status quo.
On one side stands the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose annual policy conference begins Sunday, along with other hard-line groups such as the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League. Over the past week, they've questioned the Obama administration's handling of the dispute and portrayed the president as insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state.
On the other side groups such as J Street and Americans for Peace Now, which have defended the administration's position and called for firm U.S. leadership to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
In this case, it is the latter organizations and President Obama who have Israel's and America's true interests at heart. Whatever you think of its strategy or its tactics, the Obama administration is genuinely committed to achieving a two-state solution, which is hardly an act of hostility toward Israel. On the contrary, for Obama to keep this difficult and time-consuming issue on his already crowded agenda is an extraordinary act of friendship -- especially when friendship means speaking difficult truths.
...
A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the United States' strategic interest as well. "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel," Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. "Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples . . . [and] al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world."
A two-state solution wouldn't solve all U.S. challenges in the region, but it would make it easier to address most of them. It is also the best guarantee of Israel's long-term future. By showing real backbone this time and explaining to the American people why his approach is the right one, Obama could advance U.S. interests and be a true friend to the Jewish state.
AIPAC and the other groups supporting the status quo disagree. They think it is acceptable for Israel to continue expanding its control over Palestinian lands and believe that the United States should back Israel's actions unconditionally. And Christian Zionist organizations go further: They want Israel to control these lands forever because they think that will hasten the Second Coming.
Such groups are false friends of Israel, because the actions and stances they prefer will keep Israel on its dangerous path. They are also poor judges of U.S. interests, because the policies they favor aid terrorist recruitment, enhance Iran's influence in the region and make it harder to build effective coalitions with other Mideast states. ...
For Jewish liberals under 40, the entire mindset of previous generations seems to be cracking open. Jake Weisberg:
If the stupidity of the settlements is obvious to most American Jews, it is not to the majority of Israelis, who have chosen a prime minister who represents the rejection of a two-state solution. At the same time, American liberals have recoiled from the pattern of miscalculation and inhumanity—there is no other word for it—in Israel's attempts to protect itself from Hezbollah and Hamas.
Last week, I saw the journalist Lawrence Wright perform a moving and disturbing monologue entitled "The Human Scale," based on his time reporting in Gaza. Whether or not one accepts the judgment of the Goldstone Report that Israel's bombing and reinvasion of the strip involved war crimes, Wright's piece (at New York's Public Theater this weekend) is a persuasive case that it constituted a wildly disproportionate response. Like the second invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the reoccupation was immensely destructive and counterproductive, sowing new seeds of hatred that will bloom for generations.
