Friday, 30 July 2010
SHABBAT SHALOM!
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Israel's Ruling Class
by Caroline Glick,
July 29th, 2010
In a much discussed article in the current issue of the American
Spectator titled “America's Ruling Class,” Prof. Angelo Codevilla
describes the divide between those who run the US the politicians,
bureaucrats and policy establishment and the rest of the country.
He laments, “Never has there been so little diversity within America's
upper crust.”
In his view, the American ruling class “was formed by an educational
system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably
uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a
social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular
sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and
saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when
referring to such matters speaking the 'in' language serves as a
badge of identity.”
The main unifying characteristic of the American “ruling class” as
Codevilla describes it is inexhaustible contempt for the majority of
their countrymen who are not part of their clique. In his words, “our
ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it
dislikes that so many Americans think America is substantially
different from the rest of the world and like it that way.”
Codevilla's article focuses on US domestic policy. He accuses the
ruling class of purposely spending the US into insolvency. He claims
that their goal is to aggregate power. The more Americans depend on
governmental largesse for their livelihoods, the greater the power of
the government to dictate norms of social and political behavior and
the greater the governing class's hold on power.
Codevilla claims that the Republicans are the permanent minority in
the ruling class which is naturally aligned with the Democrats. When
they are in power, the Republicans, he claims repress populist and
conservative voices within their ranks calling for small government
and do so to maintain their good relations with their colleagues in
Democratic ruling circles. His prime example of a ruling class
Republican is the first president George Bush.
Codevilla quotes former Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev's retelling of
a conversation he reportedly had with the vice president Bush about
then president Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev claimed that Bush told him not
to take Reagan seriously because, “Reagan is a conservative, an
extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him.”
THERE IS A clear foreign policy corollary to Codevilla's discussion.
Just as US bureaucrats, journalists, politicians and domestic policy
wonks tend to combine forces to perpetuate and expand the sclerotic
and increasingly bankrupt welfare state, so their foreign policy
counterparts tend to collaborate to perpetuate failed foreign policy
paradigms that have become writs of faith for American and Western
elites.
A prime example of this is US Middle East policy. Regardless of its
repeated failure over the course of four decades, since 1970, and with
ever-increasing urgency since 1988, the consensus view of the US
foreign policy elite has been that Israel's size is the cause of
violence and instability in the Middle East. If Israel would just
contract into the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, everything would
be wonderful. The so-called “extremists” in the Arab and Islamic
worlds will become moderates. Iran, Syria, the Saudis, the
Palestinians, al Qaida, Hizbullah and the rest would abandon terror
and beat their suicide belts and ballistic missiles into ploughshares.
An outstanding example of this sort of cross-partisan nonsense was the
2006 bipartisan Iraq Study Group's recommendations to then president
George W. Bush. The war in Iraq was going nowhere and the considered
view of esteemed Republican and Democratic policy hands was to stick
it to Israel.
In the considered view of these wise men, for the US to emerge from
Iraq with honor, it didn't actually have to defeat its enemies.
Instead, according to Republicans like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft
and Democrats like Lee Hamilton and Zbigniew Brzezinski all Bush
needed to do was force Israel to cough up the Golan Heights, Judea,
Samaria and Jerusalem. Then al Qaida in Iraq, the Shiite militias and
all the rest would shrivel up or at a minimum allow the US to
withdraw its military forces from the country without being
humiliated.
The likes of Baker, Scowcroft, Brzezinski and Hamilton and their
students comprise a permanent Middle East policy ruling class that
endures regardless of who is in power and what their actual views
about Middle Eastern realities happen to be.
But they couldn't survive if they didn't receive help from Israel.
Given that most Americans support a strong Israel and view Israel as a
vital US ally in the Middle East, they would be hard-pressed to
maintain their failed and unpopular policies if they weren't amply
assisted by their counterparts in the Israeli ruling class.
This week Ha'aretz the trumpet of Israel's ruling class gave us
all a primer in how this sort of thing works. In an article titled,
“Obama has ways and means to check on Netanyahu,” military commentator
Amir Oren disclosed the close collaboration between the Obama
administration and a handful of hard-left retired IDF officers against
the Netanyahu government.
Oren reported that ahead of Obama's meeting this month with Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, retired IDF brigadier generals Shlomo
Brom, Udi Dekel and Baruch Spiegel met secretly in Rome with retired
US rear admiral John Sigler who heads the Middle East research
institute at the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The purpose of their
meeting was twofold.
First, as Oren put it, they were asked to “clarify whether in the
dispute between [the Obama administration and the Netanyahu
government] Netanyahu truly represent the majority in Israel.” That
is, they were supposed to tell Sigler how to drive a wedge between the
democratically elected government and the Israel voters who elected
it.
And second, they were supposed to furnish Obama with arguments to
reject Netanyahu's arguments for why Israel cannot retreat to the 1949
armistice lines. As Oren put it, “When Netanyahu tells Obama there is
something he can't do because it would be the death of him, experts
like the three brigadiers general can map out Israel's ranges of
flexibility to Sigler, and through him pass them along… to Obama.”
Activities like those Oren reports are a permanent feature in
Israelpolicy circles. Regardless of who is in office, the likes of
Brom, Dekel and Spiegel and their leader Yossi Beilin are always
working with the Americans and Europeans to force Israel to maintain
allegiance to the failed land for peace paradigm. Year in and year
out, these anti-democratic and strategically demented but well paid
former officials maintain what they euphemistically refer to as “track
two,” contacts with their counterparts in the European and American
ruling class to force the majority of Israelis who don't share their
derangement to accept their policy dictates.
Codevilla predicts that a clash between the ruling class and the ruled
in the US is just a matter of time, although he makes scant
predictions or recommendations for how that clash will play itself
out. Just so, the time has come for Israelis to confront our own
ruling class and develop methods for weakening its chokehold on
Israel's domestic and foreign policy.
For too long and to our unmitigated detriment Israelis have allowed a
small unelected minority to dictate our national policies. The views
and loyalties of this minority like their counterparts in the US
are opposed to those of the majority of Israelis.
If our democracy is to have meaning and if our lives and country are
to be defended, we need to empower our elected leaders to stand up to
those like Brom, Speigel and Dekel -who work actively to subvert the
principle of government by consent of the governed.
Originally published in The Jewish Press
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