How to Stop Israel

The serious error — murders and other crimes for many — of Israel in their raid of the humanitarian flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31 may be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the United States regarding the Israeli government.

Inside and outside the Obama administration, there has been an intensified debate over the strategic relationship that the United States and Israel have maintained since World War II. Anthony Cordesman, one of the principal American experts on the Middle East, put his finger on the pulse with a commentary published by the Center of Strategic and International Studies in Washington on June 2.

His position, shared by many senior administration officials, is summarized in three ideas. First: the guilty conscience over the Holocaust and Western anti-Semitism (over the Cold War and petroleum, I would add), which allowed the United States to be the principal bastion of Israel since the second Arab–Israeli war for the Suez Canal (1956).

Second: in order to assure the survival of the Jewish state, the only democracy in the zone (limited, as we all know, but light years ahead of any other country in the region), the United States has promised to defend it against any threat.

Third: the continued construction of settlements, the Gaza blockade and the excess use of force (the attack on the flotilla was a lot less serious, of course, than the Gaza attack in December 2008 and January 2009). These complicate the anti-Iranian alliance in which Washington has invested so much, weaken the West’s strategic link with Israel and Turkey, undermine the authority of Obama’s mediation by means of former Sen. Mitchell, torpedo the new strategy toward the Muslim world announced last year by Obama in Turkey and in Egypt and give ammunition to al-Qaida and all of the violent groups under the Islamist rainbow to legitimize their attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the world.

General David Petraeus, who commands the U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, acknowledged this on June 4 and was quoted two days later by Helene Cooper in The New York Times: “[T]he status quo is unsustainable. If you don’t achieve progress in a just and lasting Mideast peace, the extremists are given a stick to beat us with.”

In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned the AIPAC, the main Jewish lobbying group in the United States, that new construction in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank “exposes daylight between Israel and the United States that others in the region hope to exploit.”

Daniel Levy, co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, only sees three options for the United States: pay the price and look the other way, bet with all of their means for an Israeli–Palestinian peace accord or distance themselves from Israel so that their leaders would crash alone from the consequences of their errors. It seems obvious that the most sensible option is the second, but the Israeli government does not help at all to move in that direction.

After four years, the Gaza blockade makes the transport of arms difficult but increases the anti-Israel and anti-Western sentiment of an impoverished population. Neither has Hamas weakened nor has the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit been freed. The blockade should be lifted as soon as possible, preferably before negotiating the conditions.

Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and assistant secretary of state for the region, presented in the last weekly edition of Time magazine (June 14–21) a road map in three phases to do it. First, hold negotiations with Arabic and/or European mediation between Hamas and Israel in order to lift the blockade, exchange prisoners, free the soldier Shalit and guarantee the security in Gaza.

The second step would be to accelerate the “proximity talks” on the West Bank to withdraw from the territories by all of the Israeli security forces in exchange for firm guarantees from the Palestinian forces that there will be no more attacks against Israel.

Finally, he proposes a new dialogue table at the highest level between Israel and Turkey in order to straighten out some diplomatic relations that have survived since 1949 through five wars and through two intifadas and to reach a time of peace with Syria.