THE INDEPENDENT, Sunday, 5/17/98:
IN MAY 1948, President Harry Truman ignored the
misgivings of the State Department and recognised the sovereignty of Israel
which had just been declared. In May 1998 President Bill Clinton finds
himself dealing with that legacy, and with what has been one of the most
curious and fraught relationships of our time.
Clinton enjoyed a moment of brilliant reflected glory
when Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn
in September 1993, the first fruits of the peace process which had begun
in Oslo. Now Israel's 50th anniversary finds that process painfully stalled,
as Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to yield to American urgings.
Appropriately enough, the anniversary also found
the Israeli prime minister in America. While he was there, the worst violence
between Arab and Jew in almost two years erupted, with eight Palestinians,
including two small boys, killed by Israeli troops. "Bibi" Netanyahu's
reaction was to condemn the demonstrations as a "pressure tactic", adding
that "It's very simple and very easy to whip up a frenzy of hatred and
to whip up violence".
To which one might say, he should know. However he
may be as a national ruler or international statesman, Netanyahu has few
rivals at pressure tactics and whipping up emotions. So his American visit
showed, once again. He was in Washington partly to talk to the Secretary
of State, Madeleine Albright, who now scarcely conceals her loathing of
him, while the Clinton administration scarcely conceals its view that the
Israelis are the miscreants.
Like all Israeli prime ministers, Netanyahu is nevertheless
able to whip up the emotions of Jewish America, and to exert pressure tactics
through Congress. That was the real purpose of his visit to the country
where he first established his political reputation, as Israel's ambassador
at the United Nations and a fluent television performer.
The glad-handings in Washington illustrated again
what has been called "the triangular relationship", between the United
States, Israel and Jewish America. But behind the appearance of amity lurks
one of the great secrets of our time: the hatred which all American presidents
develop for Israel, or at least for its political leaders.
In public, any American politician with the faintest
presidential aspirations has to learn his lines by rote: "Israel, our truest
friend in the Mid-East .the only democracy . Judeo-Christian tradition",
not to mention the Israeli achievement in "making a once-barren desert
bloom".
In private, it's another story. Running for re-election
in 1980, President Jimmy Carter told close colleagues that "If I get back
in, I'm going to fuck the Jews." He lost, but the following year his successor,
Ronald Reagan, tried to win Congressional approval for an aircraft sale
to Saudi Arabia despite Israeli objections. An earlier president, Gerald
Ford, once said to a senator: "Are we going to let the fucking Jews run
American foreign policy?" Ten years later, President George Bush's Secretary
of State, James Baker, said to a colleague: "Fuck the Jews. They don't
vote for us anyway," words said in private which became public and were
blazoned as a headline in an Israeli paper.
These profanities (all related by reliable sources)
might look like evidence of that ineradicable anti- Semitism which Zionism
claimed to answer. A simpler explanation is that every American administration
since Truman's has been hamstrung in its Middle Eastern policy by Israeli
intervention in American domestic politics, and presidents resent this
with a bitterness all the stronger because it can't be expressed publicly.
In 1957, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster
Dulles, told a senator: "I am aware how almost impossible it is in this
country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews . I am going
to try to have one. This does not mean that I am anti-Jewish, but I believe
in what George Washington said in his Farewell Address that an emotional
attachment should not interfere." He spoke for his successors. But all
of them have come up against the most formidable lobby Washington has known.
Over and again, the same thing has happened. There
has been a clash of wills between the US administration and the Israeli
government, both trying to win congressional favour. It happened in a startling
fashion in 1991. Israel wanted loan guarantees from Washington, which the
Bush administration said would be conditional on a halt to Jewish settlements
in the occupied territories.
Yitzhak Shamir's government veered between refusing
to halt settlements, and promising that it had halted them, which the Americans
knew to be untrue. The loan guarantees were held up - and yet Shamir told
his cabinet to budget on the assumption that they would come through: which
is to say on the assumption that, in such a clash of wills, Congress would
take the Israeli side against its own president.
It has just happened again. Netanyahu did not want
Clinton to go public with his plans for Israeli withdrawal. Those plans
are technical and abstruse, and an awful lot of heat and light has been
generated by the precise details of how much territory Israel should hand
over to the Palestinian Authority - 13 per cent, 9 per cent, or, as some
Israelis would prefer, nought per cent.
Once more, what really matters was not the rights
and wrongs, if any, at issue, but that contest of wills, and how biddable
Congress is. Sure enough, more than half of the House of Representatives,
and more than four out of five senators, were induced by Israeli lobbyists
to sign a letter telling Clinton not to publish his plan.
This time it is just possible that the worm will
turn. That congressional missive has only served further to vex Clinton
and Albright, who do not in any case believe that Netanyahu is acting in
good faith, though they are also aware that he is himself hamstrung by
domestic difficulties.
Absurdly enough, Netanyahu sometimes seems to pull
more weight, and exert more control over political events, in the US than
in Israel. Two years ago, he became prime minister in succession to Shimon
Peres, the Labour leader, who had himself succeeded when Yitzhak Rabin
was assassinated. The way Netanyahu won the election partly explains his
predicament.
Israel suffers from a pure system of proportional
representation, which has led to a multiplicity of parties and to weak
governments. When I talked to Peres in Tel Aviv a few months ago and asked
him if he would prefer our own maligned first-past-the-post electoral system,
I was amused by the vehemence of his reply: "Absolutely." Half of his country's
political woes could have been avoided, he said, by the "Westminster system",
an ironical reflection on Roy Jenkins's endeavours to get rid of that system
here.
The last Israeli election was made more complex still,
with a direct personal election for prime minister held simultaneously
with parliamentary elections. This was meant to strengthen the premier's
hand in relation to the parties, but it has not worked as intended. Netanyahu
beat Peres, albeit in a photo finish, by less than a percentage point;
but he still needs a parliamentary majority, which is at present precarious.
That means that he has to keep on board hard-liners
like Ariel Sharon. Now implausibly cast as infrastructure minister, Sharon
is the man directly responsible for the calamitous Lebanon adventure in
1982, and at least indirectly responsible for the appalling Beirut massacres
which ensued.
And he thinks a 9 per cent withdrawal is 9 per cent
too much. More alarming still, Netanyahu has discussed offering a cabinet
post to a representative of the extreme right-wing Moledet party, which
advocates the "transfer" or expulsion of all Arabs from the lands controlled
by Israel.
Although Netanyahu won the election on the slogan
"peace with security", his position was not so straightforward. He could
honourably have said that he was opposed to the whole peace process,
and would abandon it. But he didn't say that. He said that he was suspicious
of the Oslo process, but that he would honour it if he was elected.
Since the election, he has shown little sign of keeping
that promise, and Uzi Benziman of the Ha'aretz newspaper expresses a widespread
belief in Israel that all of Netanyahu's manoeuvring "is nothing but a
tactical means of ridding himself of the burden of the Oslo process. He
just doesn't want to get blamed for it." But he will be blamed: by the
Palestinians, by many Israelis, and by the White House.
And the most important single factor in the equation
may be that Clinton is in his second term. For all the platitudes about
the blooming desert and our truest friend, he has a huge investment of
personal prestige in the peace process; and, since he cannot run again,
he has nothing to lose by strong-arming Israel. Come to me, my melancholy
Bibi, croons the President, or you may be more melancholy still before
Washington sees the next presidential inauguration.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's latest book, 'The Controversy
of Zion: How Zionism Tried to Resolve the Jewish Question', has won an
American National Jewish Book Award.
