Martin Peretz is editor in chief of the New (Jewish) Republic.
October 17, 2004
Like many American Jews, I was brought up to believe that if I pulled the
Republican lever on the election machine my right hand would wither and, as the
Psalmist says, my tongue would cleave to the roof of my mouth.
According to the Bible, of course, these are the feared consequences of
forgetting Jerusalem. Now although there are many reasons one might want to
vote for John F. Kerry, remembering Jerusalem — remembering to stand up
for the state of Israel — is not among them.
It is true that
Kerry's campaign pronouncements have been unexceptionable from the pro-Zionist
point of view. Yes, he flip-flopped on the miles of trenches and fences Israel
is building to defend itself from the plague of terrorism, first attacking the
structure as "another barrier to peace," then accepting it as "a legitimate act
of self-defense."
He has also floundered concerning what can be
expected of Yasser Arafat. Just as Arafat was launching the second intifada in
2000, Kerry asserted optimi stically that we must "look to Chairman Arafat to
exert much greater leadership." Three days later, he portentously declared the
obvious on CBS' "Face the Nation," calling the Israel-Palestinian conflict "an
extraordinarily complicated, incredibly deep-rooted problem." What made this
problem so extraordinary and incredible? "Arafat has forces around him,
underneath him, close by him that don't want peace, that are working against
what he is doing," Kerry said by way of exoneration. (And, to sustain the moral
equivalence of the parties in his head, he added, "The same is true of Prime
Minister [Ehud] Barak" — which was nonsense, as there wasn't a
single such person in Barak's circle.)
By now, to be sure,
Kerry thinks that Arafat's "support" for terrorism has already rendered him
unfit as a partner for peace. And his votes in the Senate (like all but a
handful of senators) have been routinely friendly to Israel.
So why am
I still exercised about John Kerry?
It's the ramifications of his
foreign policy in general, especially his fixation on the United Nations as the
arbiter of international legitimacy, proctor of that "global test."
Save for the U.S. veto in the Security Council, Israel loses every struggle at
the U.N. against lopsided majorities. In the General Assembly and the Human
Rights Commission, Muslim states trade their votes to protect aggressors and
tyrannies from censure in exchange for libels against the Jewish state. The
body's bloated and dishonest bureaucracies are no better, as evidenced most
recently by the head of the U.N. Palestine refugee organization, who defended
having Hamas militants on his staff.
I've searched to find one time
when Kerry — even candidate Kerry — criticized a U.N. action or
statement against Israel. I've come up empty. Nor has he defended Israel
against the European Union's continuous hectoring. Another thing that bothers
me about Kerry is the deus ex machina he has up his sleeve: the appoi
ntment of a presidential envoy. It's hard to count how many special emissaries
have been dispatched from Washington to the Middle East to solve the
Arab-Israeli conflict. What's easy to see is that none of them has gotten to
"yes."
In recent years, both former CIA Director George Tenet and
former Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, once the chief of the U.S. Central
Command, have served in this meaningless position. And who would Kerry
designate? He first suggested the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter and James Baker,
Bush 41's secretary of state.
Then he found out — why he didn't
know this is another matter — that both Carter and Baker are deeply
distrusted by the Israelis, and by American Jews. There was no mystery as to
why. Carter (well, how does one say this?) is not exactly a friend to the
Jewish nation and, besides, his favorite politician in the Middle East was the
mass murderer Hafez Assad, the late president of Syria. A huge beneficiary of
Saudi business, Baker was adept at pooh-po ohing concerns about Israeli
security. So we are left with Kerry's other putative designee, Bill Clinton,
whose national security staff was so mesmerized by the mirage of a quickie
Israel-Palestinian peace at the end of his term that, according to the Sept. 11
commission report, it couldn't be bothered take out Osama bin Laden after the
attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole. Clinton succeeded in squeezing Israel into
the extravagant Camp David and Taba formulas but failed to get Arafat to go
along. At least for Israel, these proposals are now toast.
For his
part, Kerry grabs at any showy idea to demonstrate his sense of urgency. As a
response to militant Islam and to encourage moderate Muslims, the presidential
aspirant proposed that "the great religious figures of the planet" — he
mentioned the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama — hold
a summit.
To do exactly … what?
"To begin to
help the world to see the ways in which Islam is not, in fact, a threat," Kerry
said, "and to isolate those who are, and to give people the strength to be able
to come together in a global effort to take away their financing, their freedom
to move, their sanctuary and so forth."
This muddled foolishness
reflects Kerry's sense of politics as desperate theater. Another simply showy
idea he proposed (to Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press") was to insert U.S.
troops between Israel and the territories, as part "of some kind of very neutral
international effort that began to allow Israel itself to disengage and
withdraw."
Now, if anything would put U.S. soldiers in harm's way it is
such a move, exposing our men and women to fiercely competing gangs of suicide
bombers and other killers.
Kerry asserted on "Meet the Press" that it
is "Israel's presence [in the territories that] puts Israel in difficult
circumstances and obviously creates an enormous handle for Osama bin Laden for
all the radicals and extremists to hang on to." But this stands hi story on its
head. It is not the occupation that caused the conflict. It is the very
existence of Israel — even within the unbearably narrow 1949 cease-fire
lines.
To project his Middle East bona fides, Kerry has bashed
President Bush dozens of times for supposedly showing no interest in
Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, for breaking a continuum going back at least 30
years.
"Some cliches," wrote the dovish Israeli journalist Aluf Benn
in the even more dovish Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "become permanent features in
public until someone takes the trouble to check out their validity."
Which is what Benn did. And what did he find? The Bush administration "has
been far more involved than any previous administrations in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has courageously presented the two sides with
practical objectives and demands."
Kerry seems to have nostalgia for
the peacemaking ways of Clinton. But what Clinton actually bequeathed to George
W., says Benn, was "an Isr aeli-Palestinian war and a total collapse of the
hopes that flourished in the 1990s…. The height of the peace process
during the Clinton era, the Camp David summit in July 2000, was a classic
example of inept diplomacy, an arrogant and rash move whose initiators failed to
take into account the realpolitik, misunderstood Arafat and brought upon both
Israelis and Palestinians the disaster of the intifada."
By contrast,
Bush has committed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to a Palestinian state
and to a withdrawal from some, though certainly not all, of the settlements. In
return, the president has recognized that the most populous and strategically
pivotal settlements would remain in Israeli hands and has also ruled out what
would be suicide for Israel, the return of Palestinian refugees after 56 years.
The Palestinians have not yet signed on to these particulars. But they are the
future details of any peace.
Bush's empathy for the government in
Israel is particularly remarkable, becaus e empathy was altogether foreign to
both Bush pere and his secretary of State. One can only imagine the
horror of George H.W. and Baker (to whom the current president may actually owe
his office) in seeing the inheritor become a true ally of Israel. Yet there it
is. And with his understanding of — and sympathy for — the Israeli
predicament, Bush has coaxed from Sharon an agreement to withdraw unilaterally
from all the Gaza settlements and from four in the West Bank — something
even left-wing governments, as Benn puts it, "were afraid to do."
Kerry, meanwhile, appears ready to formulaically follow the failed precepts of
the past, complete with photo ops and multiple interlocutors. This is a road
map to nowhere.