The Cold and the Dark
Considering my political priors – fiercely anti-occupation, anti-Likud, anti-Lebanon war – I’m surprisingly sanguine about Israeli security policies like assassination of Hamas leaders and the wall. As far as I see it, any policy that leads to a net-reduction in suicide bombings is both wise and justifiable, it’s certainly unreasonable to expect any society to put up with random killings of teenagers in pizza parlors etc etc.
It’s this commitment and basic love of Israel that makes me so horrified at the freezing and locking off of Gaza that is only recently being let up. The Times reports that Ehud Barak is “lifting some of the restrictions imposed on Gaza and that on Tuesday morning he would allow delivery of a week’s supply of industrial diesel for the local power station, as well as 50 trucks of food and medical supplies. ” The logic of collectively punishing Gaza escapes me. This is the territory that picked Hamas in their elections, knowing full well that economic and political isolation would result. Moreover, Hamas feeds of the suffering and resentment of the Palestinian people, meaning that the only beneficiary from the policy of collective punishment is the very people we’re trying to punish — assuming, as I do, that the center-point of Israeli defense policy isn’t ensuring the misery of the Palestinians.
The larger problem is that whenever Israel crosses the proverbial line, they face a torrent of criticism from Arab governments and NGOs. But those same groups throw up waves of opprobrium every time Israel lifts a finger to deal with its terrorist problem, so you get a situation where the Israeli government doesn’t take international criticism very seriously and sometimes has knee-jerk reaction against it. This is where the US ought to step in. The US has plenty of credibility to criticize Israeli behavior and is generally seen by the Israelis as a fair broker. We’ve earned our stripes by constantly being the lone voice of support for Israel and the UN and they know that they don’t have any other steady, powerful ally. So we should be the ones nudging them away from these destructive, disproportionate and counter-productive actions. But usually, when it comes to policies we on-face oppose, like the expansion of settlements, we do nothing concrete or we simply support bad policy, like the invasion of Lebanon.
I don’t know which presidential candidate could best play this nuanced, productive role in the Middle East. Certainly not Giuliani, and probably not Romney. McCain mostly just hates terrorists and it’s hard to imagine him being to the left of Senator Lieberman. Clinton has largely signed on with the AIPAC say jump, she says “how high” paradigm of US middle east policy. I guess, as always, on a question of foreign policy, I just feel that Obama could deal with Israel best, but this is a biased conjecture. As usual, after spending more than five minutes thinking or writing about Israel, I feel bewildered, conflicted and depressed.
