Ron Radosh: A Poor Historian Tries to Make a Case for the U.S. Breaking with Israel: Where He Goes Wrong
[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College.
Writing today at The Daily Beast, historian Thaddeus Russell tries to make the case for the United States breaking its special relationship with Israel, which until Barack Obama, has been maintained by all the American presidents since the days of Harry S. Truman and Israel’s creation. Under various administrations, differences over policy have occurred, and some administrations were more responsive to Israel’s needs than others. But no American president dared try to break completely with Israel, and move U.S. policy into the orbit of the Arab states.
On the eve of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House, the Obama administration seems to be on the verge of casting Israel off to the hinterlands, or at least, upping the pressure upon it. On what was first heralded as a kiss and make up session with the President and Netanyahu, in which unlike the previous visit in which President Obama left the Israeli PM waiting while he had dinner with the family and put the kids to bed, this one was supposed to be different. But now, as David Frum points out, Obama is about set to bail out on Israel.
By deciding to pressure Israel to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, while easing up pressure on Iran at the same time, the United States is making its new priorities quite clear. Over one year ago, the first rate correspondent Eli Lake wrote over one year ago, “President Obama’s efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons threaten to expose and derail a 40-year-old secret U.S. agreement to shield Israel’s nuclear weapons from international scrutiny, former and current U.S. and Israeli officials and nuclear specialists say.”
Today, Lake reports that “the White House has declined to publicly affirm commitments made by President Bush to Israel in 2004 on the final borders of the Jewish state.” So that tomorrow, when PM Netanyahu finally gets to what was supposed to be a more cordial and productive meeting, he will face a president who is determined to do all he can to put the screws on Israel. The heart of the dispute is over land in Jerusalem. Lake explains: “The Arab League peace proposal says the border should be along the 1949 armistice lines and include the complete withdrawal of Israeli settlements in the territory that the Jewish state won in the 1967 war. The 2004 letter from Mr. Bush directly contradicts the Arab League position.” In that letter, President Bush assured Israel that “a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians should reflect ‘new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers,’ and that ‘it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’”...