Is Netanyahu ‘Apologizing to the Obama Administration’?

Part II of a two-part interview with Moshe Arens — former Israeli defense minister, foreign minister, and ambassador to the U.S. (Read Part I here.)


Ruthie Blum Leibowitz
Pajamasmedia.com
04 April '10
Posted before Chag
The concluding half of Ruthie Blum Leibowitz’s interview with Moshe Arens — former Israeli defense minister, foreign minister, and ambassador to the U.S.

Q: Are the Obama administration’s policies towards Israel a total about-face from the position of the Bush administration, which maintained there was a global struggle going on between the West and radical Islam, and that the Palestinian conflict belonged to that struggle? The current administration seems to be asserting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not only a phenomenon in and of itself, but that solving it is necessary to dealing with the rest of the world.

A: The major difference, again, is that this administration is taking its disagreements with the Israeli government public. If we look back at the history of U.S.-Israel relations, the last time we can discern this kind of a breach in the discourse was during the Eisenhower years. That was right after the Sinai Campaign, when Secretary of State [John Foster] Dulles publicly pressured Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion into moving the Israeli army out of the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, though Ben-Gurion was initially hesitant. The Eisenhower administration made no bones about its views on that subject, and hinted at additional pressures that might be forthcoming if Israel did not accept. That was in 1957. Here we are 53 years later.

Q: Why didn’t you mention the Carter administration in this context, as so many commentators have been doing of late?

A: Well, I don’t think we had a serious rift with the Carter administration, though we certainly might have had one, had Prime Minister Menachem Begin not accepted the terms that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat insisted on during negotiations at Camp David. President Carter might very well have come down on Sadat’s side. But we never got to that point, and in the final analysis, Carter was quite happy with the fact that Begin, after some convincing and maybe a little bit of discrete pressure, accepted the condition that there be a total withdrawal of Israeli forces and removal of Israeli settlements from the Sinai.

Q: Can Netanyahu be compared to Begin in this respect? After all, at the time, Begin seemed to be the least likely prime minister to give away territory. Netanyahu, today, is considered by many to be “intransigent.” Will the upshot in this case be similar? Will Netanyahu ultimately agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders?

A: It’s very unlikely. And the analogy is not entirely apt. Begin was quite doctrinaire, and what made it possible for him to agree to a total withdrawal from the Sinai was his view that it was not really part of the land of Israel. The fact is that he was not prepared to give an inch of the Gaza Strip, because he said it was part of the land of Israel.

(Read full interview)
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