Narrative Isn't Everything
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post, Yated Ne'eman
February 4, 2011
Revelations and events of recent weeks have done much to buttress
Israel's narrative of the Middle East. First came the Wikileaks
revelations that laid bare the emptiness of the American claim that
resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict is the key to preventing
Iran from going nuclear. The revelations showed one Middle East
potentate after another conveying the explicit message to American
diplomats to forget about peacemaking and concentrate all American
efforts on denying the Iranians an offensive nuclear capacity. "Cut
off the head of the snake," was the pithy advice of the Saudi
ambassador to the United States to General David Petraeus.
Cables from American ambassadors to Washington all carried the same
message. Wikileaks thus confirmed what Israel had been saying along:
Arab governments are far more leery of Iran than of Israel. Inasmuch
as the released documents were all internal U.S. diplomatic messages,
they also revealed that the Obama administration knew that the
argument it had been pressing since day one in order to pressure
Israel was bogus.
SECRETARY OF STATE HILARY CLINTON'S unusually frank speech in Qatar in
mid-January also constituted a sotto voce retreat from one of the
pillars of the Obama administration's foreign policy. In words that
would prove prophetic, Clinton warned that without respect for human
rights, improved business climates, and an end to pervasive
corruption, the Middle East's Arab regimes will "increasingly turn
towards radicalism and violence that will bleed outside of the region
[and threaten] the rest of the world."
Those words constituted an implicit repudiation of the linkage
doctrine that has been repeatedly articulated by every top Obama
administration official, from the president down, according to which
resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict holds the key to solving
all the region's pathologies. At most, Israel is a means by which Arab
rulers distract their peoples from their own failures, not the source
of those failures and the attendant instability.
Not once during her speech did Clinton veer from her focus on the
internal failures of Arab regimes and the connection between those
failures and the attraction of radical Islam. She did not throw out
any bromides to her largely Arab audience about the necessity of
creating a Palestinian state before Arab states could possibly be
expected to undertake internal reform.
Fouad Ajami noted in the Wall Street Journal that the speech
represented a second sharp policy reversal. Everywhere that she
visited in the Gulf States, Clinton met with representatives of civil
society groups, in order to drive home her message that the creation
of a democratic, civil society is the precondition for the emergence
of Arab states from their current backwardness.
In doing so, she effectively adopted President George W. Bush's vision
of a "new Middle East," which had been so ridiculed by the Obama
foreign policy team and blamed for much of the animosity towards the
United States in the Muslim world. Until recently, according to Ajami,
the Obama administration had effectively accepted a doctrine of Arab
exceptionalism, which posited the inevitability of tyranny in Islamic
countries. That approach was reflected most notably in the "moral and
strategic failure" of refusing to strongly condemn the Ahmadinejad
regime's brutal suppression of popular protests over its election
chicanery, and in the Obama administration's passivity in the face of
the Syrian regime's systematic reversal of the Cedar Revolution in
Lebanon. Rather than confront the Syrians over their reentry into
Lebanon via Hizbullah, the United States has returned its ambassador
and been engaged in constant efforts to repair ties with Syria.
In this context, Clinton's Qatar Speech suggests a retreat from two
failed aspects of the Obama administration's Middle East diplomacy, as
welcome as it is surprising.
LAST WEEK'S RELEASE of alleged Palestinian Authority internal
documents by Al Jazeera and the Guardian provided another teachable
moment. The accuracy of the documents, which purport to show that
Palestinian negotiators were prepared to cede Jewish neighborhoods
built since 1967 to Israel, is questioned. Some on the Left argued
that the documents demonstrated that there is a Palestinian peace
partner, though the Guardian was a bit schizoid on this point, as it
simultaneously denounced the Palestinian negotiators for signing away
their patrimony.
The supposed Palestinian concessions are highly questionable. Yasir
Arafat refused to even acknowledge any Jewish connection to the Temple
Mount at Camp David in 2000. Doing so, he told President Clinton,
would be tantamount to signing his own death warrant. And PA Chairman
Abbas has publicly acknowledged that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
offered the Palestinians virtually the entire West Bank, recklessly
agreed to international peacekeepers on the Jordan River, and
renounced Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. Abbas never even
responded to the proposal or offered a counter-proposal.
What ultimately matters, however, is not what Palestinian negotiators
acknowledged as the parameters of any possible peace agreement in
private discussions, but what they were prepared to present to their
own people. In that regard, the only thing relevant last week was the
Palestinian Authority's fervent denunciations of the Al Jazeera "plot"
to bring it down through the publication of the alleged concessions.
With those denunciations the Palestinian leadership tacitly admitted
what their behavior has consistently demonstrated: the Palestinian
public is not prepared to accept even the most minimal concessions
upon which all Middle East negotiators have assumed a peace agreement
would be built.
In short, the Palestinian leadership has utterly failed to prepare its
people for peace in any form. As a consequence, the two goals
enunciated by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton for a peace agreement
an end to the "occupation" for the Palestinians and safe and secure
borders for the Israelis remain irreconcilable. There can be no safe
and secure borders for Israel, as long as the Palestinians have not
reconciled themselves to the existence of a Jewish state and renounced
forever the resort to arms to remove that state. The unrest currently
roiling the entire Arab world only demonstrates further how precarious
is any agreement contracted with non-democratic leaders and which does
not command overwhelming popular support. In that context, what the
Palestinians broadcast in their media and teach in their schools is
far more important that what their leaders tell American
interlocutors.
ALAS, EVENTS IN EGYPT have trumped any victories Israel might have
claimed in the narrative wars. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is no
friend of Israel. He prevented a warm peace from developing between
Egypt and Israel, has fostered open anti-Semitism in Egypt's arts and
media, has always imperiously insisted that Israeli leaders come to
Egypt for discussions. And Egypt has used every international forum to
undermine Israel's nuclear ambiguity. But under his rule, the peace
treaty signed by President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Begin at
Camp David has held.
Street demonstrations in Egypt will not bring about a stable,
parliamentary democracy. The necessary civil society does not exist,
and the grinding poverty in which most Egyptians live makes long-range
stability unlikely. Either the army will retain control, with or
without Mubarak at the helm, or rule will pass to the Moslem
Brotherhood, by far the best organized opposition force, and Egypt
will experience its own version of Iran's Islamic Revolution.
The latter outcome terrifies (or should) both Israel and the United
States. The Moslem Brotherhood spawned both Al Qaeda and Hamas, and
has always held the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty anathema. It it took
over, the Arab world's largest army, armed with tens of billions of
dollars of the most sophisticated American arms over the last 33
years, would fall under Islamist control. The IDF, which already faces
threats of great magnitude on multiple fronts, would have to increase
its troop strength and once again deploy in anticipation of a possible
attack from Egypt. In addition, Israel would either have to confront
the Egyptian army and retake control of the Philadelphi Corridor or
watch armaments flow into Gaza unimpeded. And finally, Israel could
expect the abrogation of the contract under which Egypt supplies half
of its natural gas needs today.
If there is any ray of hope in massive demonstrations in Egypt, which
are doubtless causing the rulers of many Arab states some sleepless
nights worrying about their own restive populations, it is that the
same thing could as easily happen to the hated rulers of Iran and
bring about the Middle East's first anti-Islam revolution since
Ataturk. Hopefully, if millions of Iranians take to the streets,
President Obama will show at least as much support for them as he has
for protesters in Egypt and not remain neutral under the quest that it
is "improper for America to meddle," as he did in response to
widespread protests after the stolen Iranian elections of summer 2009.
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