Steering a Middle Course in the Middle East

In his Farewell Address, George Washington urged his fellow Americans not to be too fond of one country at the expense of another. Rather, he urged his compatriots to steer a middle course between adversaries. This has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy ever since.

Today, Americans forget that their country was divided between those who sided with France (the Jeffersonian Democrats) and those who sided with Great Britain (the Federalists) during the Napoleonic wars. When the War of 1812 started between the U.S. and Great Britain, many Americans in the Northeast urged secession. The real enemy, these people believed, was France under Napoleon Bonaparte. How times have changed.

When the State of Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, U.S. President Harry S. Truman waited only eleven minutes to be the first world leader to recognize Israel’s existence. Americans overwhelmingly approved of Truman’s gesture towards the fledgling Jewish state. With revelations of Nazi death camps during World War II only a few years before, it seemed like the thing to do. Except for the Arab World, the world’s sympathy was with Israel.

Oil aside, Americans still have many valid reasons for supporting the State of Israel. For starters, Israel remains the only functional democracy in the Middle East. Though the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf still refuse to sell their petroleum to Israel openly, Israel still has the most robust economy in the region. It hasn’t hurt that Turkey, through which three major pipelines run, has always been willing to deal with Israel. But it says something about the entrepreneural spirit of the Israeli people that the State of Israel has always found a way to meet its petroleum needs, whether through Iran before the Ayatollahs or South Africa’s coal-to-petroleum technology under apartheid. Capitalism has thrived better in Israel than anywhere else in the Middle East.

What unites Israelis and Americans the most is probably a common Judeo-Christian heritage. Moses is esteemed as a prophet by both Christians and Jews, and many Jews hold Jesus in high regard, though they don’t consider him to be the Messiah. What’s more, the Old Testament, the “Hebrew Bible,” is an indispensible part of the Christian Bible; Christians believe that you can’t have the New Testament without the Old Testament.

Before the Six Day War of 1967, the United States and Western Europe overwhelmingly supported Israel in its struggle against the Arabs. Not one Arab nation recognized Israel’s existence. Whenever the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations spoke, the Arab delegations often walked out. Then, after the disaster of the Six Day War, Israel occupied the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Since then, the Arab “street” has begun to see that the goal of annihilating Israel was just a fantasy; Israel has emerged as the Goliath of the region.

Since the Arab oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War, the West has been offered the alternative of putting aside its post-Holocaust sympathy for Israel in exchange for the expedient of Arab oil. Certainly, Western Europe and Japan have had to temper their support for the “Zionist Entity,” since they are almost entirely dependent on foreign oil, whereas the United States and Canada produce much of their oil domestically. However, no country can give into blackmail. President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Clark Clifford stated very eloquently back in the 1970s, any attempt to cut off the Middle Eastern oil supply would lead to war. Yet the Nobel Committee has yet to ask Carter to give back his Peace Prize.

Particularly since the end of the Cold War, it has been the policy of the United States and its allies to steer a middle course between their fondness for Israel and their antipathy for the Arabs. What’s more, Arab countries that border Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, have found it more prudent to temper their hostility towards the Jewish state rather than threaten its annihilation. Syria, on the other hand, either seems to have given up hope of getting back the Golan Heights or is secretly positioning itself to make war on Israel sometime in the future, since it still maintains a rejectionist front.

Militarily, Damascus is probably the biggest threat to Israel’s security in the long run. By invading Lebanon during its civil war in the 1970s and 1970s, it stood to gain by being able to open up a second front against Israel, if it could avoid being bogged down in the quagmire. If Syria could open up a second front in Lebanon, it would be a much more dangerous enemy for Israel than Hamas or Al-Fatah. While Egypt has always had more people than Syria, Syria historically has always been the greater threat. Armies that conquered Israel (with the exception of those of Alexander the Great and the Roman general Pompey) have generally come from the northeast: Damascus. Probably, George W. Bush’s biggest foreign policy accomplishment was to force Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon after the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri by Christian militias friendly to Damascus.

The challenge of every U.S. president since the Camp David Accord has been how to start up the peace process again without having it get bogged down by either one or both of the principal parties involved. Since Jimmy Carter, U.S. presidents have ended up having to put the peace process on a back burner. Ronald Reagan, for instance, had to deal with the aftermath of the bombing of a compound of U.S. Marines in Lebanon. George H.W. Bush had to solicit Arab cooperation for Desert Storm. It was left to Bill Clinton to enforce the “No Fly Zone” over Iraq without losing the Arab support that Bush 41 had worked so hard to achieve. After 9/11, George W. Bush had to focus on Osama Bin Ladin and Iraq.

It would be a fine feather in current President Barack Obama’s cap if he was the U.S. president that brought about a lasting peace in the Middle East. However, his primary responsibility is to pursue the interests of the United States. With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still raging, Obama will probably have to put the conflict between Israel and Hamas on a back burner too. While Obama would like for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Nettanyahu to put a stop to all settlement activity in the West Bank, there is probably very little that he will do about the Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands. Unlike, say, the National Guardsmen who fired on students at Kent State University in 1970, members of the Israeli Defence Force don’t seem to have the stomach to evict Israeli settles from the West Bank. No Israeli prime minister so far has wanted to deal with the possibility of rioting Israeli settlers; they seem to be afraid of an intifada from Israeli extremists.

In the end, the United States will probably have to steer a middle course between two sides who seem to want to maintain the status quo. The Israelis seem to feel safe behind the wall started by Ariel Sharon, while the “Two State Solution” for Hamas and Al-Fatah seems to be a Palestine ruled by Hamas (Gaza) and a Palestine ruled by Al-Fatah (the West Bank). The Israelis and the Palestinians seem to have a situation that they can live with.

It would be better for Americans not to be too fond of one side (Israel) and too inimical towards the other (the Palestinians). The U.S. is involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.