Partnership in the Trap: The United States, Israel and Global Terror

Every act of terror in the United States could change public sentiment, from a strong partnership with Israel to blaming it for the American blood that has been spilled due to the conflict in the Middle East.

At 10:45 p.m., President Obama was interrupted by John Brennan, deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counter-terrorism. This was a moment of reality in a evening of fun and games. The president was the main host for the traditional White House correspondents dinner party. That is to say, he was busy telling jokes. But the update that he received dealt with a booby-trapped car that was letting off smoke but had not exploded in Times Square in New York.

He praised the “excellent” police work, but as the mayor of New York himself admitted, more than the police being excellent, the booby-trappers were amateurs. In Brennan’s office, in the immediate hours after the event, experts evaluated that it was not a planned al-Qaida attack, but rather a local organization of home-bred terrorists. Untrained and unskilled.

Since they have not yet been caught, there is no way of knowing what their motivations were, and if they were influenced by the fact that within days there would be proximity talks between Israel and the Palestinians with American arbitration. But if we are dealing with Islamic terror — and that was the assumption as of Sunday (May 2) — we can already expect a renewal of the discussion regarding the American interest in solving the conflict in the Middle East. This is a discussion about which Israel is concerned, and with good cause.

This is the discussion that, in the words of General David Petraeus, concerns the conflict’s influence over other American arenas (Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the necessary situation possibly the local sphere, inside the United States). This is the discussion that also concerns Obama’s approach to the cost in “money” and “blood” that the United States pays for the conflict.

From allies to partners

The acts of terror in New York will provide a comfortable platform for the coefficient of this equation: The group of men that planned to attack the Kennedy Airport in New York in 2007 did it, among other reasons, in order to “avenge U.S-Israeli relations.” Two terrorists who wanted to plant a bomb in the New York subway in 2004 claimed that they did it “to display solidarity with the Palestinians.” At the basis of conspiracies and acts of terror in recent years throughout the United States — in Fort Dix in 2007, in Rockford, IL in 2996, in Seattle in 2006, in Los Angeles in 2005 — it was necessary to find an antisemitic motive that links the “Jewish” identity with “Israel.”

This was true in 1973, when Chalid Al-Jvari planned to blow up booby-trapped cars in New York while Prime Minister Golda Meir was visiting, and it was true 20 years later, when Ramzi Yousef decided to send his car bomb not to a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, as he originally intended, but to the twin towers, in which “the majority of workers are Jews.”

The attacks of September 2001 have transformed Israel from a close ally to a country that the Americans identify as a partner of fate. The public, while actively encouraging some of the senior politicians in Jerusalem and Washington, divided its attention between the Israeli battle against Palestinian terror that became stronger in those days, and the American war, which had just begun, against the network of global terror.

Maybe this analogy is just one possible result out of two. Its opposite would present a challenging equation for the Israeli decision-maker: According to this scenario, those who opine that the obstacles that Israel presents to the peace process do indeed cost the Americans in blood are correct — terror is not what connects the United States and Israel, but rather what separates the American interests from the Israeli. If the American public is convinced that such is the situation, sympathy toward Israel will quickly be eroded — without regard to the question of which equation describes the reality more precisely.