You screwed Israel over Bushehr but want to play linkage politics?

...America is not the only party that can play linkage politics. Netanyahu should now be saying to Obama: If you’re not going to protect Israel and the region from the Iranians, expect less cooperation from me on other files. You screwed Israel over Bushehr, so don’t expect me to give you Yitzhar.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
01 January '14..

From the first day, the Obama administration has suggested to Israel that resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would help the administration “line up its ducks” across the Arab world to confront Iran.

In other words, the administration implicitly, and at times explicitly, created linkage between the Palestinian and Iranian diplomatic issues. The pressure was on Israel to concede and compromise with the Palestinians so that Washington could “better” tackle the Iranian nuclear threat.

Now that the administration is seeking detente with Iran — a detente that explicitly includes American acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program to a certain degree — the linkage argument has lost its force.

Not only does Washington no longer “need” Israeli concessions to the Palestinians to draft moderate Arab countries into a coalition against Iran, but the U.S. has lost the support of the same Arab countries it wished to draft, such as Saudi Arabia. Without connection to anything Palestinian, President Barack Obama has pushed Israelis and Saudis into a coalition more than ever before, against both Teheran and Washington.

At the Saban Forum in Washington last month, Prime Minister Netanyahu reverted to a linkage argument of his own. Netanyahu said the efforts to negotiate a peace arrangement between the Palestinians and Israel “will come to nothing if Iran succeeds in building atomic bombs. A nuclear-armed Iran would give even greater backing to the radical and terrorist elements in the region. It would undermine the chances of arriving at a negotiated peace. I would say it would undermine those peace agreements that we have already reached with two of our neighbors.”

Stuck in the 70′s - Obama, Hagel and the State Department

Fresnozionism.org..
05 February '13..

The very first post that I wrote in this blog back in 2006 was about the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group and its non-sequitur assertion of the “linkage theory.” You will recall that the war in Iraq was going badly at the time, with Sunni and Shiite ‘insurgents’ killing large numbers of each other’s people as well as American soldiers. Here’s part of what they said:

Iraq cannot be addressed effectively in isolation from other major regional issues, interests, and unresolved conflicts. To put it simply, all key issues in the Middle East—the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq, Iran, the need for political and economic reforms, and extremism and terrorism—are inextricably linked. In addition to supporting stability in Iraq, a comprehensive diplomatic offensive—the New Diplomatic Offensive—should address these key regional issues. By doing so, it would help marginalize extremists and terrorists, promote U.S. values and interests, and improve America’s global image…

The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

This was followed by a series of specific recommendations to “solve” the conflict, by forcing Israel to give up all territory it took control of in 1967, including the Golan, Judea and Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. Of course this didn’t happen, and the bleeding in Iraq was stanched by the ‘surge’, the temporary deployment of additional troops plus the strategy of buying the support of indigenous Sunni elements in Iraq.

The opportunistic invocation of the linkage theory during the Iraq war crisis was yet another example of its persistence, despite the fact that even before the “Arab Spring” there was no reason to believe that it was true. Today it has been further falsified by events, as Jeffrey Goldberg made clear recently in a discussion of Chuck Hagel, another linkage theory advocate:

Ceren - Final Blow to Anti-Israel Linkage Myths?

Omri Ceren..
Commentary/Contentions..
28 March '12..

Of the two pivots in debates about Middle East geopolitics – which side is responsible for continued Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, and in which direction does the “linkage” between those hostilities and Iranian-driven instability run – the Obama administration entered office taking an anti-Israel position on both.

The White House immediately identified the Israelis as the intransigent party. The president put the onus for new concessions on Jerusalem, established “daylight” between the U.S. and the Jewish State, and demanded that Israel implement a full construction freeze beyond the Green Line. Built as it was on shrill ideology rather than sober analysis, that diplomatic offensive failed to the tune of detonating the peace process. The White House eventually grudgingly reversed course.

“Linkage” is an analytic disagreement over direction and a pragmatic question of sequencing. Meeting with Obama in 2009, Netanyahu insisted no progress could be made on Israeli-Palestinian peace as long as Iran had a free hand regionally, since the mullahs would always use their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies to spoil negotiations. Obama answered by explicitly declaring “if there is a linkage… it actually runs the other way,” and that Israeli-Palestinian negotiations built on Israeli concessions were necessary for mobilizing a regional coalition against Iran.

It used to be that these competing theories were up for debate, with at least coherent arguments on both sides and insufficient evidence to choose one over the other. Not so much any more.

The Israel Pathology

Evelyn Gordon
Commentary/Contentions
08 February '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/evelyn-gordon/389180

When the Egyptian uprising began, many commentators hoped it would finally put paid to the theory that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of the region’s ills. John made that point here; Herb Keinon did it in The Jerusalem Post; even The New York Times’s Roger Cohen, formerly an advocate of this theory, wrote a column titled “Exit the Israel Alibi.”

But these hopes were soon dashed. This weekend, the Quartet proclaimed Israeli-Palestinian talks essential; Quartet member Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-policy czar, even declared that events in Egypt mustn’t “distract us” from this goal.

Heaven help us. One of the Middle East’s most important countries, the lynchpin of the entire Israeli-Arab peace process, is in turmoil — something even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admits has “serious implications” for the process — and the EU’s top foreign-policy official thinks that “shouldn’t distract us” from Israeli-Palestinian talks?

And yesterday, Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, James Jones, similarly asserted that regardless of what Egyptian protesters say is driving them, what really “drives nearly everything, everything else that threatens us, everything that happens in this region” is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To understand why these presumably intelligent people can’t see that the unrest sweeping the Arab world isn’t about Israel, consider a completely unrelated article: Peter Baker’s New York Times magazine piece last month about Obama’s economic policy.

In late 2009, Baker wrote, Obama’s team thought the recession was ending. “Then came a string of episodes that [Rahm Emanuel] and others believe sidetracked the economy: the European financial crisis triggered by Greece, the gulf oil spill, conflict over Gaza and the concurrent gyrations in the stock market.”

Are they joking???

First, the Israel-Hamas “conflict over Gaza” didn’t happen in late 2009, but a year earlier, ending before Obama even took office. Yet even if the date had been correct, the idea of that war affecting the U.S. economy is ludicrous. The European crisis, sure: Europe is America’s biggest trading partner. But the U.S. has no trade with Gaza, while its trade with Israel, at $28 billion in 2009, is negligible compared to its total trade of $3.4 trillion. Nor was oil production affected: Other Middle Eastern countries weren’t involved in the war at all.

In fact, even Israel’s economy was virtually unaffected: while the 2008-09 financial crisis sparked recession throughout the West, Israel’s GDP fell by far less than that of its two major trading partners, the EU and U.S., during both quarters affected by the war (Q4 2008 and Q1 2009). So we’re supposed to believe a war that barely affected even the country that fought it caused an economic crisis in a superpower half a world away?

Only a pathological obsession with Israel could lead administration officials to blame America’s economic woes of late 2009 on a minor war fought by a marginal trading partner a full year earlier. And curing such pathology lies more in the realm of medical science than political science.

Nevertheless, it’s vital to understand just how deeply it runs. For it is shaping, or rather misshaping, the West’s foreign policy every day.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same

Fresnozionism.org
30 January '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/01/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same/

When the unrest — the revolutionary activity, really — in the Arab world began, some of us thought: well, at least this will put and end to the crazy ‘linkage theory’ — the idea that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is somehow the root of all the troubles of the Mideast.

Do you remember the Iraq Study Group Report of 2006? It sounds quaint now, but here is some of what it recommended:

Iraq cannot be addressed effectively in isolation from other major regional issues, interests, and unresolved conflicts. To put it simply, all key issues in the Middle East—the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq, Iran, the need for political and economic reforms, and extremism and terrorism—are inextricably linked. In addition to supporting stability in Iraq, a comprehensive diplomatic offensive—the New Diplomatic Offensive—should address these key regional issues. By doing so, it would help marginalize extremists and terrorists, promote U.S. values and interests, and improve America’s global image…

The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. — Iraq Study Group report, pp. 44-54

Hard to believe, today, that anybody could still believe that when they can see both reformers and Islamists struggling to overthrow dictatorial conservative regimes (not that the reformers are likely to win, or that the Islamists won’t also be dictatorial). Well, believe. The obsession with Israel is so strong that the obsessed will manage to twist reality to whatever degree necessary. Here is ‘Mideast expert’ Robert Malley, interviewed on NPR yesterday:

Mr. ROBERT MALLEY (Program Director for Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group): I think what we’re seeing in Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen and elsewhere is not just protest about living conditions, about poverty, about…

[NPR host Guy] RAZ: Regimes.

Mr. MALLEY: …about regimes. It’s also the symptom of a sense of powerlessness, of impotence, of humiliation, lack of dignity that the Arabs have felt now for a long time. But in particular over the last period where you’ve seen the war in Iraq, we have seen the dismantlement of the Palestine Authority during the Second Uprising Intifada. You now see the humiliation, the Palestinians are not able to get anything from Israel. — NPR

To which my response has to be: “huh?”

You might also think that the nefarious ‘Israel Lobby’ can take a rest as well. But M. J. Rosenberg blames it for keeping Mubarak in power:

Few would argue that the imminent collapse of the Mubarak regime (and other Middle East dictatorships) derives from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Neither Egyptians nor Tunisians are risking and losing their lives for Palestinians. They are doing it for themselves. They want freedom.

But the hatred for America that the revolutionaries feel stems in large part from our support for the occupation and the regional dictators who help enable it. And that support stems entirely from the lobby’s power to intimidate policymakers. — TPM Café

It’s true that the average Egyptian cares little about ‘The Occupation’. He just plain hates Israel, Jews and the US, thanks to the antisemitic Egyptian media, which have been waging war on them since the days of Nasser and which were encouraged to continue to do so by the Mubarak regime. You’d think that if Mubarak was kept in power by the Lobby, it would have found a way to get him to end the incitement, wouldn’t you.

As a matter of fact, most likely the only thing the reformers, ‘moderates’, Islamists, and everybody else in the Arab world can agree on is that Israel is the Devil and needs to be destroyed. A good argument can be made that as a matter of fact, it’s this attitude that prevents peace between Israel and the Arab states and Palestinian Arabs.

And it’s not been very helpful to the Arab in the street either, who finds his regime using the conflict with Israel as an excuse for repressive measures against opponents, especially reform-minded ones, and for funneling money into military buildups instead of improving the general welfare. Of course then the regime turns around and blames Israel for everything from high prices to inadequate electrical service.

Here’s a bright spot: the Mubarak regime has weakened the Egyptian military by appointing political cronies to all the high positions. Despite the American weapons, you still need competence to fight a war, and you won’t find much of that in Egypt today.

Oh well, the new Arab regimes may turn out to be greater or lesser threats than the old ones (my money is on ‘greater’, I’m sorry to say). But some things never change. It’s almost comforting in this time of upheaval that they’ll still continue to hate us as before, and that their spokespeople in the West will continue to invert reality and twist the truth to come up with the same old conclusions.

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The Broken Link: What Peace Won't Fix

James Kirchick
World Affairs
July/August '10

Posted before Shabbat

About a year ago, I joined a small group of journalists in Beirut for a meeting with Fouad Siniora, then the prime minister of Lebanon. Siniora had held the position since the middle of 2005, when Syria ended its almost three-decade-long military occupation of its much smaller neighbor following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri—a crime many assume was perpetrated either by Damascus or its allies in the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah. At the time, the withdrawal was seen as a possible paradigm-changing victory for Lebanon. But if the Lebanese believed that the end of nearly thirty years of subjugation to the Syrian military and intelligence apparatus would put an end to the violent instability that has characterized their country’s politics for so long, they were in for a rude awakening. Syria simply left behind Hezbollah as its placeholder. In the summer of 2006, following incessant Hezbollah rocket attacks on its territory, Israel invaded southern Lebanon and bombed targets in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of Beirut. The war led to the deaths of some one thousand Lebanese and the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure.

This was not the end of Hezbollah’s violent meddling in Lebanese politics. Since its inception in the early 1980s, the Party of God—armed and equipped by Syria and Iran—has maintained what is essentially a shadow state in Lebanon’s south. A trip there, like the one I took last year, entails a series of Lebanese army checkpoints—as if one were crossing a border between neighboring countries. While Syria’s withdrawal in 2005 was a symbolic victory for Lebanese sovereignty, Damascus and Tehran have continued to wield power in Lebanon through Hezbollah, their proxy army and a major factor in the rogue states’ bid for regional hegemony. In May 2008, after the Lebanese government attempted to investigate the group’s communications network, which included secret cameras installed in Beirut’s international airport, Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah declared the government effort a “declaration of war” and ordered his troops to seize the eastern half of the capital. What followed was a series of armed clashes between the Lebanese army and a foreign-backed militia that brought the country to the brink of civil war. To this day, Hezbollah (and its Syrian and Iranian financers) remains in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559, which, since its adoption in September of 2004, has called for “all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon” as well as for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias.”

(Read full article)

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The core of the conflict

Fresnozionism.org
11 May '10

Some recent discussions have convinced me that I should take up this question again.

What is the core issue of the conflict that surrounds Israel?

Most people that I argue with tell me that it has to do with the Palestinian Arabs. Because of the 1967 occupation, because their rights are being violated, because they don’t have a state, because the security barrier impinges on their land, because of an unending list of grievances, there can’t be peace. If Israel will fix these problems, they say, there can be peace — between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab nations.

In the past I’ve always responded that the problem is not the occupation, but the fact that the Arabs do not accept the presence of a Jewish state of any size in the Mideast. It’s easy to prove this: all you need to do is to show that violent opposition to Israel started before 1967 — the PLO, for example, was founded in 1964 — and that the Palestinians have refused to accept very fair offers from Israel, in 2000 and 2008, to create an Arab state from the occupied territories.

The real issue, I argue, has been that the Palestinians — with support from the other Arab nations — will not be satisfied with less than a reversal of the 1948 occupation — the replacement of Israel by an Arab state.

Lately some of my opponents have started to agree. The problem is the 1948 occupation, they admit, and there should not be an Israel at all. The very existence of a Jewish state, they say, is incompatible with Palestinian rights. This is a harder argument to have, because you have to bring up lots of historical facts, and there is a whole mythology to refute. But at least they are being more honest about their goal.

But now there is an additional factor, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Palestinian Arabs, and it has come to be the overriding issue that prevents Israel from living at peace.

(Read full post)

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Clinton Seeks to 'Slim Fast' Israel

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
16 April '10
Posted for Shabbat

From Remarks made by Hillary Clinton at the Dedication of the S. Daniel ("Slim Fast") Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, Washington, DC, on April 15, 2010:-

...Now, for President Obama...I know how rock solid and unwavering his commitment is to Israel’s security and Israel’s future. And from our first day in office, we have made the pursuit of a comprehensive peace a top priority because we are convinced that Israel’s long-term future as a secure and democratic Jewish state depends upon it.

The lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinians threatens that future, holds back the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and destabilizes the region and beyond.

...this conflict has assumed a role in the global geostrategic environment that carries great weight. And it also means that there is a yearning on the part of people who have never been to Israel and never met a Palestinian that somehow, some way, we create the circumstances for this to finally be resolved.

...make no mistake about it: Those in the region most hostile to peace, those in the region most opposed to compromise and coexistence, are those who do not have Israel’s best interests at heart and do not have the Palestinians’ best interests at heart.

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Refuting the ‘Linkage Theory’

Linking anti-Iran efforts to Palestinian issue radicalizes Arab expectations


Yoram Ettinger
Israel Opinion/Ynet
15 April '10

In the wake of the Washington Nuclear Summit, it is incumbent upon Prime Minister Netanyahu to refute the notion that a linkage exists, supposedly, between the campaign to deny Iran nuclear capabilities on one hand and the Palestinian issue on the other hand.

Some Israeli politicians and commentators accord legitimacy to the “Linkage Theory.” They contend that further Israeli concessions on the Palestinian front would facilitate President Obama’s efforts to establish an anti-Iran coalition and to toughen his policy on Iran.

President Obama’s advisors promote the linkage/conditionality between progress on the Iranian and the Palestinian fronts. They consider such a linkage – and the April 12, 2010 Nuclear Summit – effective instruments to intensify psychological pressure on Netanyahu to depart sharply from his world view and to be transformed into a locomotive of Palestinian aspirations.

However, the “Linkage Theory” is detached from the Middle East context, plays into Iran’s hands, radicalizes Arab expectations, policy and terrorism, undermines US national security concerns and erodes the prospects of peace.

The idea that Israel’s policy-making could transform the cohesive worldview of President Obama inflates dramatically the significance of Israel and the Palestinian issue. It undermines the depth of Obama’s ideological conviction. Thus, no additional Israeli concession would change Obama’s position on Iran from engagement to confrontation. No extra Israeli gesture would change Obama’s position that the US is a power-in-retreat, devoid of moral, economic and military exceptionalism, adopting multilateral and not unilateral initiatives.

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