'Daylight' returns to US-Israel ties
Remember the days when Israeli and US leaders routinely declared that there was “no daylight” between them? No longer can such a claim be made. On some of the most critical issues facing the United States — Iran, Palestine and even Ukraine — not only is there “daylight” between respective Israeli and American policies, the gap separating them is increasing.
Anyone listening to the news cannot help but hear the discord in the relationship between the Obama administration and the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As usual, Israeli ministers have been most outspoken on the administration’s shortcomings. US officials are mostly content to mutter disparagingly sotto voce.
Perhaps these contretemps will prove to be easily overcome hiccups.
Possible … but unlikely.
The paths chosen by Washington and Jerusalem to address issues at the heart of regional developments are diverging at a fundamental strategic level, and as a consequence, the daylight between the two capitals on a range of critical regional issues is growing.
Narratives that each relies upon as a guide to the future differ in clear and discernible ways, making bilateral disputes over future policies a cause of concern in both capitals.
As it faces the future, Israel is the premier party supporting a brittle status quo ante. Given the opportunity, Israel prefers to stick its head in the sand and pretend that the tumultuous events — concerning Palestine, Egypt, Iran and Syria — would simply go away. The Netanyahu government has grown complacent about and comfortable with a stalemate in Palestine. It supports a “strong hand” in Cairo and Damascus — leaders who have hardly lifted a finger in anger at them for decades — and finds advantage in a regime in Tehran that prides itself on being its own worst enemy.
Washington’s response to the wayward Arab Spring has been more ambitious and ambiguous, and its attitude toward Israel-Palestine peace, for all of Secretary of State John Kerry’s energy, ambivalent. And on Iran there are clear signs that today’s policies are fundamentally different from those it has pursued with such vigor, and with energetic Israeli cheerleading, in the past.
Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman have led the Palestine negotiations with Kerry and his team. Their objective has been to use the talks as a "strategic event" that will enhance Israel’s relations with Washington. In fact, the opposite appears to have occurred.
Kerry’s activities these past months have been premised on the view that diplomacy between reasonable parties can produce a final status agreement. Washington’s role is merely to “facilitate” such an outcome between interested and committed parties — a description commonly used at the outset of talks last summer and one that is making a comeback in recent State Department briefings.
The sorry fact is that left to themselves, Israel and Palestine are demonstrably incapable of coming to an agreement. US good offices of the kind on display this last year, or indeed during the last two decades, add nothing decisive to this toxic reality.
What will Washington do when faced with failure? Obama is clearly fed up. Kerry is almost there. If he is able, Obama prefers to let both Israel and the Palestinians pay the price for their shortcomings. To paraphrase James Baker, Bibi and Mahmoud Abbas know the White House phone number and can call when they are ready to make a deal.
There is, however, another dynamic at work in the American policymaking system — representing a dramatic change in the historic American view of its role in the negotiating process. And it is one that should keep Netanyahu or any Israeli leader awake at night. The details of this new policymaking effort are centered in the Pentagon, but the policy guidance clearly originates in the White House.
The security plan for the Jordan Valley devised by Gen. John Allen at the end of last year is the best example of what may come next in the US policy arsenal. However important the details, the critical point about the Allen effort is that it indicates that the United States is taking the first hesitant steps to draw its own picture for solving issues at the heart of the conflict. It has long been a truism that Washington would never “dictate” to the parties, i.e., Israel, about the shape of an agreement. But what to do when the parties cannot come to an agreement, and the cost of failure is paid not only by the players but by the United States as well?
Allen’s predecessor Gen. James Jones, Condoleezza Rice’s “special envoy for Middle East Security” in 2007, stepped tentatively into the vacuum produced by the parties’ own shortcomings. He flew in to devise basic security principles. Israel was adamantly opposed to his efforts and they were quietly placed in Condi’s desk drawer.
If Jones looked at the big picture, Allen walked the Jordan River Valley border at eye level, devising a wide-ranging security system to enable an Israeli retreat behind “secure and recognized borders” and the creation of a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.
Allen broke new ground, not so much by devising a security system that would enable an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, but by devising a “Made in America” solution to a problem that the parties themselves (read Israel) would never formulate on their own. When looking to the future of US efforts to address the continuing conflict, there is no better place to look than the Allen effort.
Iran is the other pole of US policy in the region. On this front, the United States is not content to merely facilitate an agreement between antagonists, but rather to be the architect of its resolution. Israel continues to subvert Washington’s effort to bring Iran in from the cold. Unlike Palestine however, Israel will have a far more difficult time undermining a deal between the United States and Iran. Such a bargain, the elements of which are now being formulated, will not so easily go “poof.”
The Pentagon is actively engaged in preparing for two Iran-related scenarios — one if negotiations succeed, the other if they collapse.
Israel fears an American success more than a failure.
Israel’s minister in charge of the Iran file, Yuval Steinitz, has described as “unacceptable” remarks by Kerry suggesting a nuclear deal that would keep Iran six to 12 months away from bomb-making capability.
“Israel opposes any solution which leaves Iran as a nuclear threshold state. Kerry's statements before the Senate on the matter of Iran and the current American objective were worrying, surprising, and unacceptable. We watch the negotiations with concern. We are not opposed to a diplomatic solution but we are against a solution which is an entire surrender to Iran and which leaves it a threshold nuclear state.”
Lord Palmerston famously observed that “nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” For all the talk of eternal friendship, a sentiment not to be minimized to be sure — on key issues relating to the future of US national security, the United States and Israel increasingly find themselves reading from different scripts.
Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/kerry-israel-palestine-negotiations-daylight-policy-rifts.html##ixzz2zeBeCKeK
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