Thursday, October 29, 2015
A news report that highlights some of the strangeness of Israeli and Palestinian relations
A very strange story that I reprint as is:
The irony of a Haredi paper’s ‘Please don’t kill us’ plea
What an ultra-Orthodox columnist’s strange Arabic plea reveals about Israeli-Palestinian violence
A curious sight greeted the
readers of the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Mishpacha on Thursday: a message
printed by the editors in Arabic.
“Don’t
be startled,” deputy editor Aryeh Erlich wrote in Hebrew beneath the
Arabic script. “No Islamic hacker has taken over the newspaper’s
computers. The strange text that opens this column is not an act of
malice, or a misprint. You can relax. You hold in your hands the
Mishpacha newspaper, which publishes in Hebrew and will continue to do
so. This is simply an appeal to our cousins who live by the sword,
rooted in the hope (a frail one, to be sure) that this magazine may find
its way to some influential Arab. Here is a translation of our
admittedly slightly bizarre appeal.”
The translation of the Arabic appeal follows:
“We, the Haredi public, have no interest in going up to the Temple Mount
at this time. We vehemently oppose doing so. Even more: Jewish law
severely proscribes such an act — on penalty of spiritual
excommunication. Therefore you will never see Haredim ascending the
mount, with the exception of one single family, acting on its own, which
is condemned for the practice. So even if you have in your hand solid
information about an Israeli desire to change the status quo at the Dome
of the Rock — which is not true, as far as we know — this has nothing
to do with the Haredi public. So please, stop murdering us.”
There is much to unpack in this strange
editorial. For one thing, it sparkles with irony. It mocks its own
“slightly bizarre” premise that printing such an appeal in Arabic might
have an effect.
And despite the pretense that it is begging
Palestinians to spare Haredi lives, it is not actually respectful of
Palestinians, calling them “our cousins who live by the sword,” both
stereotyping them as violent and painting them with a cultural
vocabulary reminiscent of the Biblical Esau or the czarist Cossaks.
The final juxtaposition of politeness (“so
please”) and morbid supplication (“stop murdering us”) ties together all
of the odd appeal’s disparate elements, bringing the underlying irony
to the fever pitch of sarcasm.
And yet, interviewed on Army Radio Thursday
morning, Erlich explained that there was a very real problem he was
trying to address.
“In their propaganda, the Islamists show [a Jew] in religious garb as seeking to build the Third Temple,” he explained.
Asked who “us” was in his request to “stop murdering us,” he said, “’us’ is anyone with a religious appearance.”
Israeli
police stand guard at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa compound on the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015. (AP
Photo/Mahmoud Illean)
The response on Thursday morning was immediate
and indignant. Erlich was accused by some of urging Palestinian
terrorists to attack non-Haredi Jews.
Yossi Elituv, Mishpacha’s editor and Erlich’s
boss, both defended and distanced himself from the column on Twitter.
“Aryeh Erlich tried in his way to emphasize the lie in the Palestinian
cry of ‘Temple Mount,’ when in practice they murder any Jew, regardless
of their view [on visiting the mount].”
Erlich “tried,” Elituv noted, “but I’m not sure he succeeded.”
The column “requires an unambiguous
clarification,” Elituv continued. “There are no ‘Haredim,’ there are
only ‘Jews.’ Islamic hatred does not distinguish between Jews of all
types – Haredim, knit-kippa wearers and secularists.”
But Erlich himself, speaking in his own
defense Thursday, pointed to a deeper impulse for what he now calls the
“gimmick” that opens his column.
“The wearers of kippot have become the symbols
of the current jihad,” he said. “The Islamic Movement tries to paint
the struggle as a religious war and calls for violence against those
with a religious appearance.”
That sense of special endangerment rooted in
their religiously identifying garb lies at the root of his strange
column, he explained.
And he’s right. The Haredi sense that they are
more threatened by the terror than secular Israelis is very real, and
it is rooted in one of the most interesting and least acknowledged facts
of this violence: that it is surprisingly hard to tell Jews and
Palestinians apart.
That is, when they are stripped of context and
religious identifiers, when they meet in plain, Western garb on the
street or in the workplace, the supposedly “Western” Jew is often
darker-skinned than the “Eastern” Arab. Half of Israel’s Jews, after
all, come from the Arab and Muslim world, while Palestinian Arabs are
likewise a people of many skin tones, from dark Bedouin in the south to
blue-eyed Christians in the north.
This challenge of physical similarity has been a recurring theme in the violence of the past month.
On the Jewish side, the dark skin of the
Beersheba central bus station attacker, who was a Negev Bedouin, likely
contributed to the mistaken assault by a Jewish mob on an innocent
Eritrean asylum seeker at the scene. Similarly, a Jew in the northern
town of Kiryat Ata stabbed an Arab man outside an Ikea furniture store –
only to discover his victim was a Yemenite Jew.
On the Palestinian side, the problem of
distinguishing Jew from Arab drives the basic behavior of the
terrorists, who have taken care to direct their attacks at discernibly
Jewish victims – either striking at uniformed members of the security
services or at those whose religion-specific clothing leaves no doubt
about their Jewishness.
Some Israeli commentators have taken this
telling peculiarity of this ethnic clash even further, noting that the
terrorists often strike the very Jews who support the cause they claim
to be fighting for.
“A terrorist’s life is hard,” television anchor Linoy Bar Geffen wrote on Facebook in response to Erlich’s column.
“What does he want, after all? To arrive at
the center of town with a sharpened blade and liquidate a few Jews. But
in the moment before the blade finds its place, he has to start with the
selection: that brownish fellow – maybe he isn’t even a Jew? That
elderly religious man – maybe he only looks like a Bennett supporter but
is actually a leftist whose death will make The Shadow happy? That wrapped woman – maybe she’s Haredi and opposes changing the status quo and ascending the Temple Mount?”
happy? That wrapped woman – maybe she’s Haredi and opposes changing the status quo and ascending the Temple Mount?”
Erlich’s critics are wrong. He did not
seriously call for terrorists to refocus their efforts on non-Haredi
Jews. The evidence for that is as straightforward as one might hope: the
Arabic text he printed at the top of his editorial is fake. Or, rather,
it is the Google Translate translation of his appeal, which was only
actually published in Hebrew.
The Arabic is, as one Arabic reader informed
Erlich on Twitter Thursday morning, “atrocious.” It is not meant to
convince any Palestinian would-be attacker; it is not really meant to be
read at all.
Yet it conveyed a tension that is all too real
in this conflict. It is not merely foreigners who cannot always tell
the difference between “Middle Easterners”; Arabs and Jews in this land
often struggle to tell each other apart. This fact pervades the
fighting, and gently, persistently points to the tragic irony in its
continuation.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
A short history of the violence around Temple Mount - Al Aqsa - with a prescriptive/descriptive solution
In response to my earlier blog regarding practice and the current violence between Palestinians and Israelis,the following article was sent to me - and I pass it on.
"In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench
in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of
elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to
separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the
introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a
provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the
entire Temple Mount.
Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory
(the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers
as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of
Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the
holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall
from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy.
The spiritual leader of Palestine’s Muslims, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, incited Arabs in Palestine against their Jewish neighbors by arguing that Islam itself was under threat. (Husseini would later become one of Hitler’s
most important Muslim allies.) Jews in British-occupied Palestine
responded to Muslim invective by demanding more access to the Wall,
sometimes holding demonstrations at the holy site. By the next year, violence
directed against Jews by their neighbors had become more common: Arab
rioters took the lives of 133 Jews that summer; British forces killed
116 Arabs in their attempt to subdue the riots. In Hebron, a devastating pogrom was launched against the city’s ancient Jewish community after Muslim officials distributed fabricated photographs of a damaged Dome of the Rock, and spread the rumor that Jews had attacked the shrine.
The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews."
For the rest of this article see;
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/the-roots-of-the-palestinian-uprising-against-israel/410944/?utm_source=nl__link6_101615
The concluding paragraph:
"The violence of the past two weeks, encouraged by purveyors of rumors who now have both Israeli and Palestinian blood on their hands, is rooted not in Israeli settlement policy, but in a worldview that dismisses the national and religious rights of Jews. There will not be peace between Israelis and Palestinians so long as parties on both sides of the conflict continue to deny the national and religious rights of the other."
And here are reasons it is difficult to move towards peace:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-new-terror-war-palestinians-deny-even-best-documented-attacks-on-jews/
http://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-mufti-denies-temple-mount-ever-housed-jewish-shrine/
"In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench
in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of
elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to
separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the
introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a
provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the
entire Temple Mount.Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory
(the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers
as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of
Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the
holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall
from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy.The spiritual leader of Palestine’s Muslims, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, incited Arabs in Palestine against their Jewish neighbors by arguing that Islam itself was under threat. (Husseini would later become one of Hitler’s
most important Muslim allies.) Jews in British-occupied Palestine
responded to Muslim invective by demanding more access to the Wall,
sometimes holding demonstrations at the holy site. By the next year, violence
directed against Jews by their neighbors had become more common: Arab
rioters took the lives of 133 Jews that summer; British forces killed
116 Arabs in their attempt to subdue the riots. In Hebron, a devastating pogrom was launched against the city’s ancient Jewish community after Muslim officials distributed fabricated photographs of a damaged Dome of the Rock, and spread the rumor that Jews had attacked the shrine.The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews."
For the rest of this article see;
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/the-roots-of-the-palestinian-uprising-against-israel/410944/?utm_source=nl__link6_101615
The concluding paragraph:
"The violence of the past two weeks, encouraged by purveyors of rumors who now have both Israeli and Palestinian blood on their hands, is rooted not in Israeli settlement policy, but in a worldview that dismisses the national and religious rights of Jews. There will not be peace between Israelis and Palestinians so long as parties on both sides of the conflict continue to deny the national and religious rights of the other."
And here are reasons it is difficult to move towards peace:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-new-terror-war-palestinians-deny-even-best-documented-attacks-on-jews/
http://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-mufti-denies-temple-mount-ever-housed-jewish-shrine/
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Practice in the midst of violence: Media analysis of Palestinian attacks against Jews.
Our practice realm is the cause-effect violence in Jerusalem and nearby which manifests in the suffering, unsatisfactoriness and pain that is intertwined with fear, anger, sadness and more.
Our reactions to events, beliefs about them and about what we can/should or can not/should not do, what is and is not ours, are this practice - experiencing this; and when noticing reacting looking, "who" is reacting ?
This week, my nephew, my brother's son, left for Jerusalem for a year of study. For some of the time he will be staying with family that lives there. The turmoil and violence there, as well as the media reportage and role in this, now has this additional dimension for me.
The following, which was sent to me this morning, are the opening paragraphs of a sad and interesting analysis of the events in Jerusalem and elsewhere and the media reporting of it:
"If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”
Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.
Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back."
The full article is,
"Palestine: The Psychotic Stage :
The truth about why Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/palestine-the-psychotic-stage-1444692875
For more on this matter see:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/gruesome-facebook-posts-not-leaders-set-agenda-for-new-palestinian-terrorism/
http://www.timesofisrael.com/videos-teach-would-be-palestinian-attackers-how-to-stab/
http://www.meforum.org/5564/palestinian-stabbings
Monday, October 12, 2015
Palestinians, Israelis and the United States - A new book: reviews and interview
With the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis heating up in violent attacks, there is a new book "Doomed to Succeed" by US negotiator and diplomat Dennis Ross on the subject. Below are extended excerpts from and links to two reviews from different perspectives, the first in the Wall Street Journal by Elliott Abrams, the second in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg.
"Mr. Ross’s portrait reinforces the recent account by Israel’s former ambassador, Michael Oren, in his book “Ally.” Six years of Mr. Obama get more pages here than eight years of Messrs. Clinton or Bush, and the author writes that “the president’s distancing from Israel was deliberate.” Though he credits Mr. Obama with deep sympathy for the Jewish state, the incidents he recounts contradict him.
For example, in 2009 the administration pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undertake a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the hope of getting negotiations started, at considerable political cost to the Israeli leader. The moratorium brought the Israelis nothing from the Palestinians, so they refused to extend it. As Mr. Ross writes, “though [Palestinian leader] Abu Mazen had shown little flexibility and squandered the moratorium, President Obama . . . put the onus on Israel.”
Mr. Obama kept calling on Israel to take risks for peace. “But,” Mr. Ross adds, “he said nothing about what Abu Mazen had to do; the responsibility for acting was exclusively Netanyahu’s.” Even when Mr. Netanyahu accepted difficult American terms for a new negotiation in 2014 and then Abu Mazen rejected them, the administration “gave him a pass,” instead blaming the continuing construction of Israeli settlements. Mr. Obama believed that as the stronger party Israel could and should do more for peace. “But what if the Palestinians were not prepared to move? . . . He never seemed to ask that question,” Mr. Ross writes.
In Mr. Ross’s view, Mr. Obama fell for the oldest preconceptions about the Middle East, views that the State Department had been putting forward since 1948. There were principally three: “the need to distance from Israel to gain Arab responsiveness, concern about the high costs of cooperating with the Israelis, and the belief that resolving the Palestinian problem is the key to improving the U.S. position in the region.”
In chapter after chapter, Mr. Ross documents how these arguments affected policy over decades and failed to predict Arab behavior—yet were very rarely challenged. The reason they failed is simple, he says: “the hard truth is that [the Palestinians] are not a priority for Arab leaders. . . . The priorities of Arab leaders revolve around survival and security”—not Israeli-Palestinian relations or U.S. policy toward Israel.
What’s striking in this account, and in the history of U.S. Mideast policy, is why these three canards keep reappearing and gaining such wide support. When we move away from Israel, Mr. Ross observes, “our influence does not increase; our ties to the conservative Arab monarchies do not materially improve."
For the rest of this review see:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/best-of-frenemies-1444600776
Here is the Ross - Goldberg interview/review:
"Ross spends a good deal of time refuting (successfully, in my opinion) the notion, advanced by the so-called realist camp of foreign policymakers, that Israel has consistently been a drag on America’s reputation and standing in the Middle East. Among other things, Ross expertly dismantles the “linkage” argument, advanced by generations of diplomats and analysts, which holds that an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty is a prerequisite for solving the Middle East’s many other problems. Reality, as Ross told me, has debunked this idea....
The most cataclysmic moment in their relationship may have occurred during a 90-minute phone call between the two men shortly before the interim agreement was announced. Ross writes that the call was so tense and uncomfortable that Susan Rice, the U.S. national-security advisor, told Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, that Netanyahu did everything but use the “n-word” in addressing Obama. Here is Ross describing the incident:
(I’ve asked Rice, through her spokesman, for comment, and will update this post when I get an answer. UPDATE:
A senior administration official e-mailed me the following statement
Friday morning: “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s opposition to the
negotiations to prevent Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon long
predated any conversation with the President. And Dennis Ross’ attempts
to characterize Ambassador Rice’s ring hollow given that Ross had left
the Administration by the time Ambassador Rice took on her current role.
To be clear, they’ve never worked closely together in this
Administration, and he’s making accusations from afar without firsthand
knowledge. Finally, the whole issue of accusations of racism is,
frankly, mystifying. We have legitimate policy disagreements with the
Netanyahu government over the Iran deal, but those differences have
nothing to do with the color of anyone’s skin. The alleged quote from
Amb. Rice speaks to those differences after an especially frank phone
call.”)
Ross went out of his way to praise Rice for vigorously defending Israel while serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but he told me that he places her in the camp of foreign-policy experts who see Israel as a burden: “Susan represents a mindset and a constituency that has existed in every administration ... every administration has had within the national-security apparatus a constituency that looked at Israel as a problem.” Rice, he said, has been unwaveringly suspicious of Netanyahu’s intentions, and feels Netanyahu and his ministers tried to undermine Obama numerous times.
For
what it’s worth, I disagree with Ross on his understanding of Rice’s
suspicions in the following way: While I take his point that constant
communication would help resolve most diplomatic misunderstandings
between friends, it is hard for me to dismiss Rice’s suspicions that
Netanyahu was out to damage Obama as the paranoid fantasy of an official
organically hostile to Israel....
Goldberg: There is a belief on the part of some people around Obama that Netanyahu is very condescending toward the president—that he treats him as a naive, not very intelligent person. Do you agree that Netanyahu is condescending to Obama?
Ross: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s condescending, and I don’t think he’s condescending towards Obama. Look, many of their meetings were characterized by a very high-level discussion—serious, intellectual, thoughtful. Oftentimes, each of them would walk out of meetings feeling that that was a serious meeting, and then one or the other would do something afterwards that would be perceived as, “Oh, there they go again.”
Goldberg: Do you think that Obama believes that Netanyahu has racist feelings toward him?
Ross: I don’t think so.
Goldberg: You’ve talked to the president about Bibi quite a bit—
Ross: Here’s the way I think he reads Bibi—he looks at Bibi and he thinks, “This is a guy who sees no possibilities in ever changing anything, and is kind of down in the bunker.”
Goldberg: They admire each other’s intelligence?
Ross: Yes.
Goldberg: Why did you report this in the book, if you don’t think that Rice is correct to interpret Bibi’s interactions with the president as insulting and condescending?
Ross: I did it for one reason only, because I was trying to encapsulate the anger that describes their reaction to Bibi’s view of the deal. In my mind, there were few ways to better encapsulate how angry they were over his reaction. And of course, he was angry, because he felt that Israel has been largely blindsided by this. I know this not just from Bibi, because I happened to be over there at the time. I know it from the security people on their side, including the intelligence people on their side, who were saying they were being briefed, but that there was no indication that the kind of deal that suddenly emerged with the Joint Plan of Action was about to emerge."
For the rest of this see:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/dennis-ross-iran-obama-netanyahu/409420/
And here is an additional review:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/dennis-ross-book-portrays-an-obama-administration-bitterly-divided-on-israel/
"Mr. Ross’s portrait reinforces the recent account by Israel’s former ambassador, Michael Oren, in his book “Ally.” Six years of Mr. Obama get more pages here than eight years of Messrs. Clinton or Bush, and the author writes that “the president’s distancing from Israel was deliberate.” Though he credits Mr. Obama with deep sympathy for the Jewish state, the incidents he recounts contradict him.
For example, in 2009 the administration pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undertake a 10-month moratorium on settlement construction in the hope of getting negotiations started, at considerable political cost to the Israeli leader. The moratorium brought the Israelis nothing from the Palestinians, so they refused to extend it. As Mr. Ross writes, “though [Palestinian leader] Abu Mazen had shown little flexibility and squandered the moratorium, President Obama . . . put the onus on Israel.”
Mr. Obama kept calling on Israel to take risks for peace. “But,” Mr. Ross adds, “he said nothing about what Abu Mazen had to do; the responsibility for acting was exclusively Netanyahu’s.” Even when Mr. Netanyahu accepted difficult American terms for a new negotiation in 2014 and then Abu Mazen rejected them, the administration “gave him a pass,” instead blaming the continuing construction of Israeli settlements. Mr. Obama believed that as the stronger party Israel could and should do more for peace. “But what if the Palestinians were not prepared to move? . . . He never seemed to ask that question,” Mr. Ross writes.
In Mr. Ross’s view, Mr. Obama fell for the oldest preconceptions about the Middle East, views that the State Department had been putting forward since 1948. There were principally three: “the need to distance from Israel to gain Arab responsiveness, concern about the high costs of cooperating with the Israelis, and the belief that resolving the Palestinian problem is the key to improving the U.S. position in the region.”
In chapter after chapter, Mr. Ross documents how these arguments affected policy over decades and failed to predict Arab behavior—yet were very rarely challenged. The reason they failed is simple, he says: “the hard truth is that [the Palestinians] are not a priority for Arab leaders. . . . The priorities of Arab leaders revolve around survival and security”—not Israeli-Palestinian relations or U.S. policy toward Israel.
What’s striking in this account, and in the history of U.S. Mideast policy, is why these three canards keep reappearing and gaining such wide support. When we move away from Israel, Mr. Ross observes, “our influence does not increase; our ties to the conservative Arab monarchies do not materially improve."
For the rest of this review see:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/best-of-frenemies-1444600776
Here is the Ross - Goldberg interview/review:
"Ross spends a good deal of time refuting (successfully, in my opinion) the notion, advanced by the so-called realist camp of foreign policymakers, that Israel has consistently been a drag on America’s reputation and standing in the Middle East. Among other things, Ross expertly dismantles the “linkage” argument, advanced by generations of diplomats and analysts, which holds that an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty is a prerequisite for solving the Middle East’s many other problems. Reality, as Ross told me, has debunked this idea....
The most cataclysmic moment in their relationship may have occurred during a 90-minute phone call between the two men shortly before the interim agreement was announced. Ross writes that the call was so tense and uncomfortable that Susan Rice, the U.S. national-security advisor, told Abe Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, that Netanyahu did everything but use the “n-word” in addressing Obama. Here is Ross describing the incident:
I was certain two leaders speaking the same language had talked past each other. I contacted Secretary [of State John] Kerry to let him know that the prime minister had formed an impression about the U.S. position that needed to be corrected. Kerry quickly followed up with a call. But the problem was a White House problem—and not one Kerry could easily correct. Had Tom Donilon still been the national security adviser, he surely would have understood from the call that there was a problem and he would have immediately spoken to his counterpart. If the misimpression was not corrected, he would have had President Obama make another call.Ross, in our conversation, said he does not believe Netanyahu is racist, and he also said that Rice doesn’t believe that Netanyahu is racist.
He had done precisely this in September 2012 when Prime Minister Netanyahu had made public comments challenging our position on the Iranian nuclear issue. Donilon arranged the call and the air was not only cleared but there was a meeting of the minds. By contrast, now there was no call from Rice, there was no follow-up from the president, and the prime minister did not soften his public criticism two weeks later when the actual Joint Plan of Action was concluded. Instead, Rice, reflecting her generally more combative mind-set, would say to Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, that in reacting to the Joint Plan of Action, Netanyahu’s posture was outrageous. In her view, the Israeli leader did everything but “use ‘the n-word’ in describing the president.”
Ross went out of his way to praise Rice for vigorously defending Israel while serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but he told me that he places her in the camp of foreign-policy experts who see Israel as a burden: “Susan represents a mindset and a constituency that has existed in every administration ... every administration has had within the national-security apparatus a constituency that looked at Israel as a problem.” Rice, he said, has been unwaveringly suspicious of Netanyahu’s intentions, and feels Netanyahu and his ministers tried to undermine Obama numerous times.
Goldberg: There is a belief on the part of some people around Obama that Netanyahu is very condescending toward the president—that he treats him as a naive, not very intelligent person. Do you agree that Netanyahu is condescending to Obama?
Ross: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s condescending, and I don’t think he’s condescending towards Obama. Look, many of their meetings were characterized by a very high-level discussion—serious, intellectual, thoughtful. Oftentimes, each of them would walk out of meetings feeling that that was a serious meeting, and then one or the other would do something afterwards that would be perceived as, “Oh, there they go again.”
Goldberg: Do you think that Obama believes that Netanyahu has racist feelings toward him?
Ross: I don’t think so.
Goldberg: You’ve talked to the president about Bibi quite a bit—
Ross: Here’s the way I think he reads Bibi—he looks at Bibi and he thinks, “This is a guy who sees no possibilities in ever changing anything, and is kind of down in the bunker.”
Goldberg: They admire each other’s intelligence?
Ross: Yes.
Goldberg: Why did you report this in the book, if you don’t think that Rice is correct to interpret Bibi’s interactions with the president as insulting and condescending?
Ross: I did it for one reason only, because I was trying to encapsulate the anger that describes their reaction to Bibi’s view of the deal. In my mind, there were few ways to better encapsulate how angry they were over his reaction. And of course, he was angry, because he felt that Israel has been largely blindsided by this. I know this not just from Bibi, because I happened to be over there at the time. I know it from the security people on their side, including the intelligence people on their side, who were saying they were being briefed, but that there was no indication that the kind of deal that suddenly emerged with the Joint Plan of Action was about to emerge."
For the rest of this see:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/dennis-ross-iran-obama-netanyahu/409420/
And here is an additional review:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/dennis-ross-book-portrays-an-obama-administration-bitterly-divided-on-israel/
Sunday, October 11, 2015
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