Shlomo Ben-Ami
Does Israel's Former Foreign Minister Regard the U.S. Lobby as a Pillar of His Country's Foreign Policy?
The talks ended disastrously. Israeli P.M. Ehud Barak made major concessions re the status of Jerusalem. But his offers on the West Bank fell short of Palestinian demands. And indeed the Jerusalem discussions led to Ariel Sharon's famous symbolic visit to the Temple Mount, and the Palestinians' bloody intifadah. read more »
This Thursday night, Ben-Ami, Ross and Indyk will take the side that there is no Israel lobby, or that its powers are vastly overstated by Walt and Mearsheimer. But their presence at the 2000 summit raises an important issue.
In the middle of the talks, Barak "called important allies in the American Jewish community, urging them to mobilize pressure against the Palestinians through the Clinton Administration." That is according to John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff, who is quoted in Clayton Swisher's great book on the talks, The Truth About Camp David.What Will Shlomo Ben-Ami Say at Cooper Union Next Week?
The wild card in the debate is Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Foreign Minister (one of the cool things about Israel is that being a young country, people get to have manifold roles—generals like Moshe Dayan and Yigael Yadin also get to be archaeologists). Ben-Ami will be arguing against the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. Presumably he will take them on over the alleged role of the Israel lobby in such political events as the Camp David negotiations of 2000, in which he participated.
Because on one of the more controversial assertions of the paper, Ben-Ami is in agreement. Here is Walt and Mearsheimer's discussion of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948:
[T]he creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel's subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority.
This statement angered many supporters of Israel. Some said W-M were anti-Israel. Like historian Benny Morris, per Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books:
Benny Morris, whom Mearsheimer and Walt frequently cite, dismissed their work in The New Republic as "a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades." He faulted them, among other things, for...falsely accusing Israel of adopting a policy of expelling Arabs in 1948...
But Ben-Ami sides with Walt and Mearsheimer on this issue. Earlier this year he published a book called Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. I've not finished the book, but it's stunning, layering a restrained manner and careful scholarship over a moral backbeat. Because Israel has "lived by the sword," Ben-Ami asserts, the military has taken "too central a function in defining both Israel's war aims and her peace policies." (cf, Lebanon 2006)
On 1948, Ben-Ami is emphatic. The historical record shows that once the Palestinians violently sought to oppose the '47 U.N. partition plan, the Zionists adopted a policy of pushing them out of their homes, and never letting them return.
The reality on the ground... was that of an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community. A panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of masacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred... Benny Morris['s] thesis about the birth of the refugee problem being not by design but by the natural logic and evolution of the war is not always sustained by the very evidence he himself provides...Ben-Gurion...also instructed that abandoned Arab villages needed to be settled by Jews even before the end of hostilities.... Israel's formal rejection of the refugees' claim for return — a position that remains intact to this day — rather than the expulsion and dispossession, is the real defining moment of the conflict..Wow. Strong stuff. And now let's be clear (and not emotional) about something: Walt and Mearsheimer cite ethnic cleansing not to deprive Israel of its right to exist, but because they are political scientists, who wish to see a more evenhanded American policy in a powderkeg region that has experienced a cycle of violence for more than 60 years, a cycle that persists because both sides have sought to valorize their actions on moral grounds, and outside powers have indulged these moral delusions. It will be interesting to see whether the issue comes up next week...Israel as a society also suppressed the memory of its war against the local Palestinians because it could not really come to terms ith the fact that its finest Sabras, the heroes of its war for independence and the role models of the new nation, expelled Arabs, committed atrocities against them, and dispossessed them.
Siegman on the U.S.-Israel Alliance, Published in England, Of Course
If Israel indeed rejects this opportunity for dialogue with a Hamas prepared to end violence and accept Israel's pre-1967 borders, its problem is not finding a Palestinian peace partner, but its rejection of any such partner in favour of reliance on the IDF to impose Israel's will by force on its Arab neighbours. Such a decision, and Israel's continued identification with Mr Bush's misguided crusade against "Islamo-fascism", will allow the hatred that surrounds Israel to undermine its existence in a part of the world that for the Jewish state would turn - sooner or later - into "the heart of darkness".
Siegman's argument is that Israel's close affinity to the United States has hurt its own interests in the region. As our implication in the apartheid policies of the occupied West Bank have damaged our interests in the Arab world.
This is hardly a new point. I've been reading the history of Zionism, and one of the main points that Hannah Arendt made more than 50 years ago, or Avi Shlaim 15 years back, or Simha Flapan 20 years ago (read Prophets Outcast, the marvelous collection edited by the Nation's Adam Shatz) is that Israel's strategic decision to ally itself with a superpower in defiance of local opinion was a recipe for local disaster. Hey, all politics is local. The point is made in former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami's recent book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace:
What was to become a pillar of Ben-Gurion's strategic thinking as the prime minister of the future state of Israel [was] never to operate without the support of a Western superpower... Most of the leaders of the Yishuv [Zionist settlement in Palestine] knew very little of Arab civilisation and despised what they saw.... The future Jewish state was to be for all of them an offshoot of Western civilization in the stagnant and despotic East.
Ben-Ami's book was published earlier this year by Oxford University, by the way. Thus, civilisation.
The spelling speaks to the larger problem. Israel has become so dependent upon American power that it cares little about the opinion of its neighbors and everything about our opinion; and the organized Jewish community here has done all it can to limit questioning in this country of that policy, lest Israel is cast to the dogs—its neighbors. In a sense the Israel lobby here was born of Israeli policy: we must grapple the U.S. to us with hoops of steel. Thankfully for all, those hoops seem at last to be losing their grip. In the wake of the Iraq and Lebanon debacles, which have demonstrated the folly of militarism as a way of healing the Arab world, and of the continued overtures for peace from Israel's Arab neighbors, Americans are beginning to question the wisdom of the alliance. For now they are expressing themselves in England. Soon that will change.
