Some topics are so inflammatory that they are never discussed without first inserting a number of caveats. And so, when Anthony Cordesman, a foreign policy dignitary in this town’s think tank circuit, dropped an article on Wednesday headlined “Israel as a Strategic Liability,” he made sure to open with a plethora of qualifications.
First, he noted, America’s commitment to Israel is motivated by morality and ethics — a reaction to the Holocaust, to Western anti-Semitism and to American foot-dragging before and during World War II that left European Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. Second, Israel is a democracy with the same values as the United States. Third, the United States will never abandon Israel, and will help it keep its military edge over its neighbors. And America will guard Israel against an Iranian nuclear threat.
But once Mr. Cordesman had dispensed with what in the newspaper world is called the “to-be-sure” paragraphs, he laid out a dispassionate argument that has gained increased traction in Washington — both inside the Obama administration (including the Pentagon, White House and State Department) and outside, during forums, policy breakfasts, even a seder in Bethesda. Recent Israeli governments, particularly the one led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Cordesman argued, have ignored the national security concerns of its biggest benefactor, the United States, and instead have taken steps that damage American interests abroad.
“The depth of America’s moral commitment does not justify or excuse actions by an Israeli government that unnecessarily make Israel a strategic liability when it should remain an asset,” Mr. Cordesman wrote, in commentary for the centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in strategy. “It is time Israel realized that it has obligations to the United States, as well as the United States to Israel, and that it become far more careful about the extent to which it tests the limits of U.S. patience and exploits the support of American Jews.”
The list of recent moves by the Netanyahu government that potentially threaten American interests has grown steadily, many foreign policy experts argue. The violence that broke out when Israeli commandos stormed aboard a Gaza flotilla last week chilled American relations with a key Muslim ally, Turkey. The Gaza fight also makes it more difficult for America to rally a coalition that includes Arab and Muslim states against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal to stop Jewish housing construction in Arab East Jerusalem also strains American ties with Arab allies. It also makes reaching an eventual peace deal, which many administration officials believe is critical to America’s broader interests in the Muslim world, even more difficult.
Both President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have made the link in recent months between the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict and American security interests. During a press conference in April, Mr. Obama declared that conflicts like the one in the Middle East ended up “costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure”; he drew an explicit tie between the Israeli-Palestinian strife and the safety of American soldiers as they battle Islamic extremism in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
General Petraeus sounded a similar theme in Congressional testimony earlier this year, when he said that the lack of progress in the Middle East created a hostile environment for America. After a furor erupted, he said he wasn’t suggesting that soldiers were being put in harm’s way by American support for Israel, and he went to great lengths to point out the importance of America’s strategic partnership with Israel.
“But the status quo is unsustainable,” he said in an interview Friday. “If you don’t achieve progress in a just and lasting Mideast peace, the extremists are given a stick to beat us with.”
And in March, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, that new construction in East Jerusalem or the West Bank “exposes daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region hope to exploit.”
All of this has led to deep soul-searching in parts of the American Jewish community, alongside a fierce debate among officials from past and present administrations. Mr. Obama’s mere characterization of the acts that led to the deaths in the Gaza flotilla as “tragic” unleashed a withering response from Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president. “There is no middle ground here,” she said in a statement. “Either the United States stands with the people of Israel in the war against radical Islamic terrorism or we are providing encouragement to Israel’s enemies — and our own.”
Ms. Cheney’s remarks reflect some of the alarm among Israeli officials and some American Jewish leaders, who preferred the Bush administration’s steadfast support, no matter which Israeli government was in office and no matter what actions that government took.
Some Democrats are alarmed about the shift in thinking too. Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, said he spent two hours at the White House with Mr. Obama and a group of other Jewish lawmakers two weeks ago, “expressing my concerns repeatedly and emphatically.” Questioning Israel as a strategic asset, he said, “seeks to blame Israel for difficulties in the Middle East, but it’s not Israel’s fault that you have an ineffective Palestinian leadership incapable of striking a deal. It’s not Israel’s fault that you have intransigent Arab regimes unwilling to push the Palestinians into negotiations. Those are the ugly truths.”
Some foreign policy experts say the new willingness to suggest that the Israeli government’s actions may become an American national security liability marks a backlash against the Bush-era neoconservative agenda, which posited that America and Israel were fighting together to promote democracy in an unstable region.
The new concern is also, paradoxically, a consequence of commitments made during the Bush years, when the lives of American soldiers, fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, became tied to the state of Arab and Muslim public opinion.
Mr. Obama has de-emphasized democracy promotion. He is pulling American troops out of Iraq, and has promised to begin doing so in Afghanistan next year. Meanwhile, he has reached out to the Muslim world and emphasized, in his new national security strategy, that the United States needs to act in concert with other nations.
“The prior administration’s worldview lined up more with the Israeli government,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of J Street, a liberal Jewish lobbying group. “Now we’re seeing a reflection of a different worldview, that gives you a completely different set of policies and priorities.”
Mr. Ben-Ami says he represents Jews who support Israel, but not all of its policies. Some of them are raising the issue of Israeli government actions as a strategic liability for the United States, and that question animated a seder held in April by influential officials and advisers in Bethesda, Md. A debate broke out there over where to draw the line when considering American support for Israel’s government.
Within the Obama administration, there are gradations of how to even talk about that issue. At the seder, one Jewish adviser to the administration invoked concerns that ordinary Americans might get so frustrated with Israeli government actions that they will begin to question America’s support for that government. He asked that his name not be used because of the sensitivities surrounding the issue.
More recently, Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and a member of J Street, said in an interview: “America has three choices. Either say, it’s politically too hot a potato to touch, and just pay the consequences in the rest of the world. Or try to force through a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, so that the Palestinian grievance issue is no longer a driving force or problem.” The third choice, he said, “is for America to say, we can’t solve it, but we can’t pay the consequences, so we will distance ourselves from Israel. That way America would no longer be seen, as it has been this week, as the enabler of excesses of Israeli misbehavior.”
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Levy advocates the second choice. But he warns that the third may become more palatable to Americans if Mr. Netanyahu’s government stays on its present course.
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, author of one of the most well-read blogs in the American Jewish community, put it this way: “I don’t necessarily believe you solve all of America’s problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen by freezing settlement growth. On the other hand, there’s no particular reason for Israel to make itself a pain in the tush either.”
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