Bibi
Netanyahu, Ingrate
His appeal to Israeli anti-Americanism is
contemptible
By Justin Raimondo
February 23, 2015 "ICH"
- "Anti
War" - With
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
tanking in the polls, and the election
fast approaching, he and his right-wing
Likud party are taking
desperate measures to shore up their
flagging support.
Their campaign is
imperiled by Bibi’s underhanded tactics in
inveigling an invitation to speak to the
US Congress on the eve of the Obama
administration’s
delicate negotiations with Iran – an
event sure to turn into a heavy-handed
denunciation of the peace talks and a direct
appeal to the Republican-controlled Congress
to sabotage them. The whole arrangement was
done behind the President’s back, and it has
sunk US-Israeli relations to a new low.
Meanwhile, in Israel,
alarm rather than support for Netanyahu
is the dominant reaction: the fear is that
Bibi’s willfulness is
endangering the "special relationship"
with the US, which has been a vital lifeline
for the Jewish state lo these many years.
Bibi, it seems to many
Israelis, is the one who needs a "Bibi-sitter."
The opposition is scoring
points and making gains – but the
intransigent Netanyahu, characteristically,
is digging in, and even going on the
offensive. His campaign has released
a new ad showing an image of David Ben
Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister,
and text that reads:
"In 1948, Ben-Gurion stood
before a fateful moment: The creation of the
State of Israel. The U.S. secretary of state
firmly objected [to the establishment of
Israel]. Ben-Gurion – contrary to the State
Department’s position – announced the
establishment of the state… Would we be here
today had Ben-Gurion not done the right
thing?"
The ad ends with this
exhortation: "Only Likud. Only Netanyahu" –
and, I might add, only lies.
Aside from being a blatant
appeal to growing Israeli anti-Americanism –
a disturbing trend
I pointed out long ago – the ad
represents a considerable distortion of the
historical record.
It is true that, in 1948,
the year of Israel’s founding, then US
Secretary of State George C. Marshall was
opposed to US recognition of the Jewish
state. He wanted to delay it until the
United Nations General Assembly could deal
with the matter. Virtually the entire US
foreign policy Establishment of the time –
the so-called "Wise Men" who ushered the US
into the postwar world – supported this
view, which was summed up by then Defense
Secretary James V. Forrestal, who
told Clark Clifford: "There are thirty
million Arabs on one side and about 600,000
Jews on the other. Why don’t you face up to
the realities?"
What Netanyahu leaves out
of this narrative, however, is the
countervailing role played by President
Harry Truman, who supported recognizing
Israel against the advice of nearly all his
advisors. Truman encouraged the Jewish
Agency, the predecessor to the Israeli
state, to declare independence when the
British mandate ended, and promised his
support. When the US representative to the
United Nations voted to refer the Palestine
question to a commission, the President was
enraged, writing in a note:
"The State Dept. pulled
the rug from under me today. The first I
know about it is what I read in the
newspapers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the
position of a liar and double-crosser. I’ve
never felt so low in my life."
Truman took considerable
political risks in opposing Marshall, who
was presciently convinced recognition of
Israel would be nothing but trouble for the
US. General Marshall, former US chief of
staff, enjoyed enormous prestige, and if he
had resigned over this, or split with the
President publicly, the political
consequences for the increasingly unpopular
Truman would have been costly. Yet Truman
took on the State Department for two
reasons, neither of which fit neatly into
the Netanyahu narrative of American
treachery on the eve of Israel’s birth.
One reason
was moral: the horrors of the Holocaust
were just being revealed in all their grisly
details. Truman felt that the Jewish people
not only deserved a homeland but were owed
one: whatever one’s view of that stance, it
stands in stark contrast to the portrait of
American obstructionism painted by Likud’s
historical revisionism.
The other reason was
political. Truman was facing a challenge
from the left-wing of his party, represented
by the candidacy of former Vice President
Henry Wallace, who was running under the
banner of the Progressive party. Backed by
the Communists, who were still a significant
if waning force in American politics,
Wallace closely followed the Kremlin line on
the Palestine question, which was at that
time militantly pro-Israel. Indeed, as the
US administration was debating whether or
not to recognize the Jewish state, Soviet
envoy Andrei Gromyko was declaring in the UN
his fulsome support for Israeli
independence. Zionism was a pet left-wing
cause at the time: it was the conservatives
in both parties who opposed it.
Fearful of losing the
largely left-wing Jewish vote to Wallace,
Truman made a blatantly political move in
coming out for Israel. After listening to
the objections of his foreign policy
advisors, Truman bluntly
stated: "I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I
have to answer to hundreds of thousands who
are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do
not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs
among my constituents."
This doesn’t fit into
Netanyahu’s narrative either, which is yet
another reason why the Likud ad focuses on
Marshall and completely erases Truman, the
decisive figure in this history. According
to Bibi, Ben Gurion’s unilateralism was
undertaken in total defiance of the United
States, which was intent on sabotaging
Israel from the very beginning. However, the
truth is that Truman had promised his
support early on, and took considerable
risks in following through. Indeed, without
US support, it is highly doubtful the
nascent Israeli state would have survived.
The US was the very first government to
recognize Israel, and this was followed up
with substantial loans on favorable terms.
The Netanyahu narrative
also elides Truman’s key role because the
political considerations underlying Truman’s
actions underscore the classic methodology
of Israel’s supporters in the US, which is
today being played out in the drama around
Bibi’s upcoming speech. Their strategy has
always been to mobilize their supporters to
exert maximum pressure on Washington, to
manipulate both public opinion and the
politicians,
regardless of the harm done to American
interests. The Israel lobby puts Israel’s
interests first, and America’s last – if
they come in for consideration at all.
After nearly 70 years of
faithful American support –
financial,
diplomatic, and
military – to the state of Israel, this
is how the Israeli Prime Minister repays us
– with naked appeals to anti-Americanism in
a desperate bid to rescue his failing
reelection campaign. Ingrate is far too mild
a term to apply to the faithless Bibi, but
since this is a family-friendly web site, I
shall refrain from choosing a more fitting
epithet.
The backlash in response
to Netanyahu’s machinations is well
underway, and not just in Washington’s
Democratic precincts. Recent polls show the
American people are
shifting away from their traditional
pro-Israel stance: a majority now want the
US government to take a more evenhanded
stance in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. A more radical rejection of
Israeli policies is underway among younger
people: the
Boycott and Divest movement is making
considerable progress on the nation’s
campuses, much to the consternation of the
Israel lobby, and young people in general
are increasingly repulsed by the
ruthlessness and intransigence of the
current regime in Tel Aviv.
The US relationship with
Israel has changed, in part, because Israel
has
changed – and not for the better. The
growth of ultra-nationalist extremism, the
openly racist policies toward
Palestinians and African immigrants, the
ruthlessness of Israeli military policy with
its
brazen disregard for innocent civilians,
and the braying posturing arrogance of
Netanyahu himself have all contributed to
the growing unease with which Americans view
their longtime ally-turned-frenemy.
What this means is that
the pressure for the US to intervene on
Israel’s behalf – a major motivating factor
in the War Party’s success – is considerably
weakened. And that is good news for those of
us who are working for a more peaceful and
more rational foreign policy.
Justin Raimondo is the
editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a
senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne
Institute. He is a contributing editor at
The American
Conservative, and writes a monthly
column for Chronicles. He is
the author of Reclaiming the
American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement [Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 2000], and An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N.
Rothbard
[Prometheus Books, 2000].