When Ben-Gurion said no to JFK

The "don’t ask, don’t tell" compromise served both Israel and the US well.


Gerald Steinberg
Op-Ed/JPost
28 March '10

It’s official – there is a major crisis in relations between Jerusalem and Washington. This is not an emotional response or passing tiff over the timing of Jerusalem building announcements, but a full-blown dispute on issues effecting vital Israeli and American interests. And although the personalities of Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu may influence the conflict at the margins, the real clash is over policies and goals.

In these situations, both the president and the prime minister are aware of the huge asymmetry in the relationship. America is Israel’s only reliable ally, and while there is some reciprocity through military technology and anti-terror intelligence, there is no balance. No other country – certainly not any European one – provides the sophisticated and costly weapons platforms needed to protect Israeli lives. As a result, the White House holds most of the cards, particularly with a majority in Congress (as is the case now).

But history shows that some issues are so critical that even the president of the United States cannot force Israel’s hand. Important examples include Menachem Begin’s rejection of Jimmy Carter’s demand for an indefinite settlement freeze in the 1978 Camp David summit, and Ariel Sharon’s refusal to accept George W. Bush’s demand to end anti-terror operations in March 2002, following the Passover attacks, including the Park Hotel. The sharpest example took place almost 50 years ago, when John F. Kennedy demanded that David Ben-Gurion end Israel’s nuclear deterrent program, deemed necessary to ensure Jewish survival in a very hostile world.

THE CLASH began in 1960, when the outgoing Eisenhower administration sought an explanation for the mysterious construction near Dimona. It was told that this top-secret activity in the middle of the desert was a harmless textile plant, and no, it could not come and visit. Classified spy photos were then published on the front page of The New York Times (yes, the CIA spied on the Jewish state, with or without forged passports).

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Prelude to Suez?

Emmanuel Navon
For the Sake of Zion
24 March '10

Abba Eban used to quip that the Six Day War was the first war in History after which the victors asked for peace while the vanquished demanded unconditional surrender. This pattern still characterizes Middle East peace negotiations, but it seems that it is now being applied to other regions.

Hillary Clinton recently advised the UK and Argentina to begin talks about the Falklands Islands. What is there to talk about, for goodness’ sake? Those islands are British since 1833, and Britain won the Falklands War in 1982. Whenever Argentina makes claims over the Falklands, the island’s inhabitants reply that they have a right to self-determination and that they have no wish to be part of Argentina. Britain’s sovereignty over this far-away island off Argentina’s coast is indeed a historical oddity, but so is France’s regime in Guyana or America’s in Puerto Rico. The list is longer. Yet one wonders what America’s reaction would be if it were “advised” to “begin talks” with Spain about Puerto Rico. Incidentally, Mrs. Clinton has not “advised” Russia to “begin talks” with Japan about the South Kuril Islands.

It is not hard to understand why. If Japan were to press its case on the Kuril Islands, it would likely be ignored by America. The Obama Administration is unsuccessfully trying to convince Russia to vote for tougher UN sanctions against Iran, and aggravating the Russians with the almost-forgotten territorial dispute over the Kuril Islands would not be helpful.

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The Lessons of 1956: Nostalgia for a Betrayal of Israel

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
23 March '10

If you want an object lesson as to where contemporary Israel-bashing in the United States is headed, you can do no better than read an article published today in the Daily Beast by Kai Bird, the former Nation staffer, MacArthur Foundation “genius,” and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The title, “Time to Talk Tough with Israel,” promises the familiar tiresome refrain about how America must slap the Israelis around for their own good and doesn’t disappoint. But Bird’s frame of reference isn’t just the usual slander about AIPAC running American foreign policy. Instead, he writes from the perspective of an important event in his childhood: the 1956 Sinai campaign, which took place while Bird’s father was serving in the American consulate in East Jerusalem. At that time, about half the city was illegally occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan. Jews were forbidden entry into the Old City, and Jewish holy places such as the Western Wall were abandoned and desecrated.

In 1956, Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser massed his army in the Sinai and allowed Palestinian terrorists to use Egyptian-occupied Gaza as a terrorist sanctuary. Acting in conjunction with Britain and France, who were angry about Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal, Israel cleaned out both Gaza and the Sinai, dealing a serious blow to Nasser’s aggressive ambitions. But the United States, which hadn’t been consulted, wound up backing Nasser against the former colonial powers and their Israeli ally. In the end Nasser wasn’t compelled to make peace with Israel. Instead, Israel was forced to withdraw from the Sinai. All it got in exchange was the presence of a United Nations observer force on the border.

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Why is Ahmadinejad Smiling?

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
15 February '10

Sprightly Ahmadinejad tours nuclear facilities, having stolen an election he marches on, as his police batter protesters. And everywhere he goes, he smiles his trademark loopy smile. The smile of a psychopath or a saint.

Why is Ahmadinejad smiling? The answer is not a terribly complicated one. With every step he takes and every day that he remains in power, he discredits the most deeply held ideas of Western liberals about the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts and internal civil disobedience to achieve peaceful regime change. Despite years of diplomatic and hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets-- Ahmadinejad's grip on power remains as secure as ever.

Walking over the bodies of student protesters, of political dissidents, of the thousands killed by the wars he has touched off, he continues to taunt the rest of the world to do anything about it. And the rest of the world has done nothing except talk. And as Ahmadinejad has demonstrated, talk counts for nothing at all.

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be detached from ordinary reality, living in an Islamic version of Charles Manson's fantasies about touching off a spectacular war in order to bring on a new age, he understands his enemies well enough to call them out on their weakness. Like every other Islamic terrorist and warlord, Ahmadinejad sees diplomacy as weakness behind a mask of civility. And like just about every strongman in the world, he laughs at it.

Ahmadinejad may be a monster, but there are no shortage of monsters in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein was just as bad, yet much of the American and European left proved eager to shut their eyes to the rape rooms, to Uday's horrors of mangled limbs and broken fingers, to the ethnic cleansing and gassing-- while demanding that we respect Saddam's sovereignty. Today those very same people pat themselves on the back, as if defending the right of a tyrant to keep killing his own people were some great act of moral courage.

But even Saddam and Ahmadinejad are not particularly unique, because monsters proliferate in the Middle East like mushrooms after a rainstorm, growing off the oil money that their enemies send them, which they exchange for weapons and payments to their own loyalists to secure their base of power. Every petrodollar sent to the Middle East means death of a certain kind, whether it's the death of a passerby by a suicide bomb in Basra funded by Iranian or Saudi money, the death of an imported Indian contract worker in Dubai or the murder of an African Sudanese in Sudan. Either way oil money is death money, and the world knows it, and yet does nothing. No wonder Ahmadinejad keeps on smiling.

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The Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem: An End to the Arabs’ Wars of Limited Liability?

There Are Consequences for Choosing Aggression

By Lenny Ben-David

Published by The Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2009

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s resolute response to a State Department official’s objection to a Jewish building development in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem may actually close a 90-year-old chapter of the Arab-Israeli conflict and bring about a measure of justice. "We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and buy (homes) anywhere in Jerusalem," Netanyahu said.

For way too long Arab states, terrorist groups and the Palestinian Arabs believed that they could wage “wars of limited liability” first against the Jews of Palestine and then against the State of Israel. They embraced a fantasy that they could unleash attacks with impunity in an attempt to wipe out Israel, convinced that if they were defeated they could return to a status quo ante, or even achieve diplomatically what they couldn’t win on the battlefield. Territories captured by Israel would be returned and not annexed, terrorist leaders would be honored and not condemned, and Jews/Israel would be blamed and never indemnified. Tragically, that fantasy became reality.

In 1920, the Balfour Declaration, written three years earlier, was a very pertinent and relevant document in Palestine. The Turks were gone from Palestine after 400 years, and the British were attempting to establish their authority. Jews who had fled the Turkish regime began to return, and they were joined by other Jews – “Zionists” from Russia and eastern Europe -- eager to build the promised “national home for the Jewish people.”

Arab clans and local groups began to coalesce and compete to fill the vacuum left by the Turks. They found sympathetic British authorities who opposed the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine and sought to rescind the Balfour Declaration. Together, they opposed the Jewish immigration into Palestine and the Jewish purchase of large tracts of land. The British authorities placed limitations on the formation of Jewish self-defense groups, some of whom included veterans of the British army’s Jewish Legion and Zion Mule Corps.

The Jewish settlement of Tel Chai in the Galilee was overrun by local Arab marauders in early 1920, and within months, riots and pogroms against Jews erupted across Palestine. According to witnesses, the ax and sword-wielding mobs, emboldened by their perception of supportive British authorities, yelled, “Addowlah ma’anah! The government is with us! Itback el yehud! Slaughter the Jews!” as they attacked Jewish communities. They were led by the nephew of Jerusalem’s mayor, a young rabble-rouser named Haj Amin el Husseini. Rather than throw Husseini in prison or hang him, the British chose an appeasement policy and appointed him as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti would later incite more bloody pogroms against Jewish communities in 1929 and launch the Arab Revolt (1936-1939) against the British, Jews and fellow Arabs. The anti-Semitic terrorist leader used his position to garner a following and a status that he would wield for the next 25 years, culminating in his collaboration with Adolf Hitler in World War II.

[Santayana’s admonition, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” was tragically proved true. Britain’s policy of appeasement in Palestine was copied years later when Chamberlain met Hitler at Munich in 1939. And the honors and adulation bestowed upon Haj Amin al-Husseini were later granted to his cousin Abdul Kader al-Husseini, a leader of the attacks against Jews in the 1940s. Similar tributes were paid to another terrorist cousin, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, AKA Yasir Arafat.]

When the British attempted to arrest the Mufti in 1937 he fled Palestine, and the British made do with confiscating his property. The Husseini clan owned several well-known buildings in Jerusalem, among them the Palace Hotel on Mamilla Street (later Israel’s Ministry of Trade, and now being rebuilt as a hotel), the Orient House (the site of Palestinian Authority attempts to establish its rule in east Jerusalem), and the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah on a plot of land known as Karam al Mufti, named for Husseini.

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